Guilty Pleasures has become a monster. Two years after London DJ Sean Rowley founded a club night spinning only terminally uncool old records, tonight sees a host of music stars gather to perform cheesy classics to the strains of the 50-piece BBC Concert Orchestra.

Rowley's concept is "songs that you like but shouldn't", and it's no real surprise that most offerings date from the 1970s, before punk and new wave imposed their rigid purist aesthetic on pop. Clad in a white trilby, Ed Harcourt gives an arch take on My Life, Billy Joel's 1978 MOR temper tantrum.

Bay City Rollers singer and icon of naff Les McKeown dispatches Build Me Up Buttercup like a superior cruise ship crooner. Elbow's Guy Garvey is more affecting, locating the profound sadness at the heart of the epic pomp of Chicago's 1976 number one If You Leave Me Now.

Rowley scores easy kitsch points by having Chas & Dave do their own Ain't No Pleasing You. By the same token, it is no great stretch for the Magic Numbers, masters of upbeat soft rock, to revisit the upbeat soft rock of Andrew Gold's 1978 hit Never Let Her Slip Away.

Terry Hall, Sarah Cracknell and Suggs are adequate karaoke turns, but the best interpreters show defiant love for their songs. The asbestos-larynxed Cerys Matthews is colossal, revelling in the magnificent bombast of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart.

The entire company assembles for a We Are The World-style assault on John Miles' cornball 1978 number three Music ("Music was my first love, and it will be my last"). It's a fitting coda: beneath tonight's ironic smirk lies a fierce respect for pop's most arcane follies that is bizarrely laudable.