Hilary Duff and Lauren Spencer-Smith

If Hilary Duff achieved nothing else with her reasonably brief foray into the pop world, she at least provided us with retrospective evidence that not all former Disney child stars wind up making career moves quite as dubious as Miley Cyrus has been the past couple of years. When her TV show, Lizzie Maguire, inevitably ran its course, she moved through the usual pop levels, beginning with the clean-cut fare that characterised her self-titled album - ‘Fly’, ‘Someone’s Watching Over Me’, and apparently concluding - on her most recent album, 2007’s Dignity, with what at the time probably seem liked controversial fare; the mildly-sexualised video for the surprisingly half-decent ‘With Love’, though, is positively puritanical by way of comparison to Cyrus’ recent output. Just last week, though, she re-emerged, with a new single - ‘Chasing the Sun’ - that unsurprisingly sounds about five years behind the current zeitgeist; remember that guy Jack Johnson? It sounds like a cover of one of his songs. Still, a deal with RCA Records for a new album means we should expect heavyweight promotion, and that might include international touring; she won’t be hitting the big venues - not to begin with, anyway - but it’d be daft not to expect a high-budget affair, with a full live band and complex stage show likely to come as standard.