"We fly out to the UK tomorrow to tour with Spiritualized, but I need this house-painting job. Tommy was told by three specialist doctors he would never sing again during 1997's disastrous world promotional tour, in the course of which guitarist Jamie Murphy had a mental breakdown and drummer Andy Parle suffered from nervous exhaustion.Yet out of all that they pulled out an album which has already spawned two top-10 hits; "The Ballad Of Tom Jones" even makes all the absurd stuff worthwhile, being spiked with intrigue and the perils of love, not to mention orginality.Space have been to the brink and pulled back just in time.Forum, Kentish Town, NW5 (0171-344 4444) 7 Apr. One minute they are wiggly disco kings, the next, as in the single "Avenging Angels", they've gone for bongo drums-and-theremin wooziness.But from another angle, it is a miracle that they managed to get an album together at all. Every song is treated like a different fancy-dress party, complete with a new false beard, weird accent and silly outfit. But funnily enough, seeing as their debut album Spiders sold more than 750,000 copies, maybe they are approaching Radiohead in terms of popularity.Space's new album, Tin Planet, is often unbelievably daft in the way it tosses around innumerable influences, revealing the band to be shameless musical magpies. It is easy to dismiss them as Scouse jesters made good - Tommy's mischievous storytelling about scary, otherworldly females and sinister neighbours, the splashes of reggae, the Sixties TV theme- tune undercurrents, and copious bursts of cheesy Seventies disco all don't help matters Radiohead they are not.

And it is just one way in which the wacky world of Space isn't all it may initially appear. Twelve heady years of playing to three punters and a dog passed, fame proving a particularly elusive lover, before, in 1996, the release of their spookoid novelty, "Female Of The Species", made them an overnight sensation, shifting nearly a million copies in Britain alone. Space, then, challenge Sheffield's Pulp for sheer bloody-minded longevity. And the sad irony is that even Space fall into that category, for it was way back in 1984 that Space vocalist Tommy Scott, now 32, teamed up with Franny Griffiths, the man responsible for all their bonkers keyboard noises. It is one of the great mysteries of the pop industry that has baffled great minds the length and breath of the country - what has happened to the Liverpool rock scene? If forced to name three reasonably contemporary acts from that city, chances are that the bands would belong to an era dating back almost 20 years - Echo & The Bunnymen, Julian Cope and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, for example.

Paul Smith, Katharine Hamnett, Burro and Helmut Lang are in agreement. This summer, trousers are short; if you don't want to catch a chill around your nether regions, you, too, might have to board a plane for Cuba, as did stylist James Sleaford and photographer Jeremy Maher Above right Pale blue striped polo shirt, pounds 105, light blue Bermuda shorts, pounds 99, both PS by Paul Smith, 43 Floral Street, London WC2 and Strand, 22 Queen Victoria Street, Leeds, enquiries 0171-379 7133; socks, pounds 12, by Paul Smith, as before; blue suede shoes, pounds 89, by Camper, 39 Floral Street, London WC2, enquiries: 0171-379 8678 Right Silver- blue jacket, pounds 85, and long shorts, pounds 95, both by Sharpeye, 2 Ganton Street, London W1; 0171-437 7916; socks by Paul Smith, as before; shoes, pounds 89, by Camper, as before Left White shirt, pounds 135, single-breasted fine pinstripe jacket, pounds 450, waistcoat, pounds 185, and shorts, pounds 175 all by Katharine Hamnett, 20 Sloane Street, London SW1, enquiries: 0171-823 1002; socks by Paul Smith and shoes by Camper, as before Above Denim shirt, pounds 75, by R Newbold, 7-8 Langley Court, London WC2, enquiries 0171-379 7133; stone needlecord fly-front sports jacket with drawstring, pounds 290, and matching knee-length shorts, pounds 110, both by Joe Casely Hayford, available from Liberty, Regent Street, London W1 and Jones, 13 Floral Street, London WC2, enquiries 0171-240 3572; socks, pounds 12, by Paul Smith, as before; cream lace-up boots, pounds 60, by Joe Casely Hayford, as before. Right Stone button-up jacket, pounds 89, and matching shorts, pounds 69 both by Burro, 19a Floral Street, London WC2, and A2, 9 Ethel Street, Birmingham, enquiries 0171-240 5120; navy Aertex T-shirt (just seen), pounds 17, by French Connection, stores nationwide, enquiries 0171-399 7200; rucksack, pounds 55, by Burro, as before; socks, pounds 12, by Paul Smith, as before; ponyskin `Brother' boots, pounds 109, by Camper, as before, and Aspecto, 85-87 Bridge Street, Manchester, enquiries 0171-379 7500White V-neck Aertex T-shirt, pounds 65, and cotton drill shorts, pounds 105, both by Helmut Lang Jeans, at Browns Focus, 38-39 South Molton Street, London W1, enquiries 0171-491 7833; socks by Paul Smith and boots by Joe Casely Hayford, as before Hair Nicole JaritzStylist's assistant Sarah GilfillanPrints by Darren at Protocol. Caught between brushes and belly (far right): Me and My Baby (1992), Gillian Melling's defiant expression the dilemma still alive in the 20th century. In the 16th century it was difficult for women to depict themselves as artists at all: Sofonisba Anguissola, in this 1554 self- portrait, holds up her signature to ensure that we know the painting is hersReal women (left to right): in early self-portraits women had to be careful to accentuate their femininity but in 1762 Anna Dorothea Therbusch dared to paint herself as she saw herself, a short-sighted middle-aged woman; even earlier, in Self-Portrait as La Pittura (c1630-37), Artemisia Gentileschi skirted the problem by combining her own features with the allegorical image of Painting in the throes of creation.Far right: the advent of photography opened up a playfulness in female self-portraiture and in the 1920s Claude Cahun anticipated the work of Cindy Sherman with her exploration of masks, roles, gender and perceptionRenata Rampazzi's Self-Portrait from Below (1975) was part of the Seventies feminist movement to reclaim the female body from centuries of depiction by men.

The fact that we can see something of ourselves in the way that women saw themselves hundreds of years ago is testament not only to the power of these images, but surely proof that self-images are still changing, still challenging, still worth looking at"Seeing Ourselves: Women's Self-Portraits", by Frances Borzello, is published by Thames & Hudson on 6 April, price pounds 28.Me, myself, I (left to right): with Branded (1992), part of a series of monumental nude self-portraits, Jenny Saville confronts notions of the perfect body; for her 1974 performance SOS - Starification Object Series, Hannah Wilke stuck chewing gum in labial folds all over her naked torso. But it is only now that we can begin to appreciate the contribution that the bravery of these women has made to our own self-image. Women have been asking them with ingenuity for hundreds of years. Who is the self in the self-portrait? What happens when a sexual object turns herself into a sexual subject and then deliberately objectifies herself? What happens when women look back instead of becoming preoccupied by what they look like? What does it mean for a woman, like Tracey Emin, unashamedly to proclaim her life a work of art?These are not new questions. Sarah Lucas has said of her own bolshy self-portraits, "I define myself by what I don't want to be, really."It is as if the female self-portrait has come full circle: from having to negotiate the restrictive codes of femininity by any means necessary, it is now permissible to play with these codes until they shatter not simply the notion of femininity but the very idea of ego itself. Yet now some of the most interesting female artists are working in a way that undermines the very idea of the self-portrait.