Bad Cover Versions

It’s unfair to dislike someone simply because of their face, but Jamie Cullum, a man for whom the phrase ‘Housewive’s Favourite’ would cruelly besmirch the assumed mental capacity of a whole nation of housewives, has a fizzog of such a uniquely irritating munchkin nature that he manages to arouse such feelings with consummate ease.

Then again, by massacring Radiohead’s most lovely song, tripping that particular emotional switch is made just a little bit easier.

Money-phobic Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson claimed that jazz was the last refuge of the untalented. On today’s evidence Jamie Cullum has managed to poke filthily through even this lowest mantle, and emerges breathless, bewildered and with the intention to mangle vowels on a previously untenable scale.

This cover of High and Dry, possibly taken from his album ‘Will This Do?’, finds Cullum treading water in the shallowest waters of Faux-Jazz. In the long list of Faux-genres that regularly crop up on Bad Cover Versions, faux-jazz is by far the most heinous.

Why? Assuming that you have now removed your fingers from the back of your throat, peer through them upon the look he sports when singing the words ‘make love’, and witness your skin crawl straight out of the nearest window.

It’s the very-depths-of-hell smugness worn by a man who knows his inexplicable fame has allowed him to hook up with women of an endlessly more attractive calibre than nature would allow. This man is beating evolution‘s inbuilt system, all through the black magic power of lounge jazz.

The song itself barely exists – intruding like a wet fart, it would be barely noticeable at all if it wasn’t for the putrid smell. At times his voice reaches such agonising depths and contorts so many sounds at once that Jamie almost hits the fabled Brown note, the end result of which would be a blessed, sloppy distraction from the music.

Soiling oneself would certainly be preferable to reliving the moment when Jamie takes a Marinas-trench-deep breath and pronounces the line, “It’s the best thing that you’ve ever had,” as, “Eeeyuts theeeey beyyyyst thing thayyyyt you’ve ever Hhhaaaaiiiyyyeeeaaaaaaadddah.” If the whole song was written down phonetically, it would look like Welsh.

Funnily enough, this song is so jaw-droppingly poor that one listen is simply not enough – it is as if the ears simply cannot believe what has just been heard and are compelled to revisit the horror to complete the comprehension.

This eagerness to dive back into the sound-sewer is the equivalent of studying a giant machine, of the vast Victorian piston-and-flywheel type that you see in science museums, thinking “I wonder what would happen if I just popped my arm into that blur of hot metal and steam…?”‘, doing it, and then, after spending six agonising months in rehabilitation, on the very day that one leaves hospital, zipping straight back to the museum and sticking the other arm in, just to make sure it wasn’t all a terrible dream.

After it’s all over, Jamie Cullum actually emerges as almost likeable, simply because one has to admire the huge grapefruit-sized balls he must possess to even consider passing off this half-hearted musical swill-back as a finished product.

Finally: calculate the self-discipline required when presented with all this material and resisting even a single ‘little pianist’ joke. A nightmare of almost endless proportions.

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Quick – name two songs by late 80′s chart-toppers Candy Flip. You’ve got three paragraphs to come up with an answer.

During this twitchy pursuit of Bad Cover Versions it has occurred to me that all pertinent questions can swiftly be boiled down to one, simpler, one – albeit one uttered through agonised, ragged and contorted lips: but… why? Why do this to that song/yourself/my poor sullied ears that I was forced to attack with hot knitting needles?

The general pattern of answers is thus, and the reason behind the cover depends on the career arc of the participant:

• 1st album – surprise hit single follow-up album content-provider
• 2nd album – the materialisation of the ‘we could record ourselves farting and they’ll buy it!’ realisation-moment
• 3rd album – sheer, utter contempt for audience

But as a debut song? A non-album track? Like Sylvester Stallone’s face, such slack and incoherent madness deserves closer, tentative inspection.

The Beatles‘ songs are like Shakespeare in that they’re the definitive versions: you can re-write them, or re-appropriate them, but the original versions will always be the best. You know, unless you slow down that James Brown ‘Funky Drummer’ beat that’s been used on every half-arsed hip-hop track since time immemorial and slap it on top of one of everyone’s favourites.

Candy Flip dared to reveal the true extent of pop music’s progress since 1968. Despite decades of bold innovation and exploration – punk, funk, hip-hop, cod-reggae – Candy Flip simply went with their gut and realised that what people really want to hear are the songs they are already comfortable with, but with a briefly fashionable twist.

And so they simply condensed all of this musical derring-do, all of these giant strides into the terrifying rock wilderness, by spending 20 minutes mucking around with an Atari ST and welded a lumpen baggy beat onto a song that its intended audience could either remember from their childhood or heard in their dad’s car as they got driven to swimming class on Saturday.

Even the best efforts of the video’s director fails to deliver the desired payoff. Setting the singer loose to prance around like a loon in a smoke- and flame-filled studio, encouraging the smashing up of violins into dry, tempting tinder, and draping swathes of loose-fitting man-made fibrous clothes around their pasty frames: every viewer is left left praying for something to snag on a candle-holder and suddenly become engulfed in surprisingly huge flames. We are left unsated and any hopes of neat, analogous scenes akin to the demise of once-happy memories of Strawberry Fields Forever are sadly denied.

So be thankful that everyone’s favourite chestnut-haired, perma-thumbs-aloft, monoped-fancying Scouse bass-twanger hasn’t joined George and John in the great Cavern Club in the sky, because the combined centripetal force of their unified grave-spinning would jerk the Earth firmly out of orbit and send it lurching in one ungraceful, brutal arc into the centre of the sun. All the while soundtracked by Candy Flip. Fiery death would be a merciful blessing.

A final thought on the song’s conception. Candy Flip either realised that remaking Strawberry Fields was a clever route to a guaranteed smash, or realised that here was a vital opportunity for they, the young, pristine torch-bearers of  pop perfection, to improve on the original. I sincerely crave for the latter to be true with every thrusting sinew of my being.

Astonishingly, this song reached #1 in the UK and #11 in the USA.

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We’ve been here before.

What is it about Jimi Hendrix‘s Little Wing that induces such foolhardiness and drives bands to turn their minds inside out attempting to replicate the song?

After Sting, apparently overfed on ego and too much fois gras, performed an audio force-feeding and distended the song into a horrifying nine-minute aural catastrophe, the only grease-sodden crumb of comfort was that surely no human being could host the latent evil to spawn a more awful version of Little Wing.

That knee-weakening wave of nausea, that primal prickle of the arm hairs, that icy ripple of pure terror strumming the length of your spine: it’s announcing the realisation that the unthinkable has already happened.

The Corrs manage to make music so flaccid that they would give Cliff Richard’s wizened phallus a run for its money. Sneering contemptuously at Sting’s attempt, they correctly identify that the song could sound even more comprehensibly limp and pallid, if only someone could remove any last vestiges of rock extravagance from it.

And so they tooled up to meet such a challenge head on by grabbing their chosen implements of torture – the school-hall agony of the tin whistle; the faux-folk violin, scourge of a million Irish theme pubs; and a singer Andrea Corr’s vomitously cloying voice, sounding the closest a human being has ever managed to accurately portray the comatose vocal nuances of a gaily-painted rocking chair.

In doing so, The Corrs have unwittingly answered one of rock’s most tantalisingly unanswered questions: why does Little Wing fade out at the precise moment that every listener is urging it to continue with every straining fibre of their being?

The answer is that Jimi Hendrix – a man who could play the guitar so well that it sounded like two people were playing, remember – was too short sighted to realise that what the song really needed at that point was a generic diddley-dee Irish fiddle solo, coupled with even more generic woah-oh-woah vocal-sturbation. It seems so obvious in hindsight.

But becoming privy to such greedily-envied knowledge comes at a price. In the case of the Corrs, they not only lost their souls, but also their minds. For Jim Corr now spends his time jabbering about conspiracy theories on radio phone-ins, possibly whilst sporting a tin-foil hat to stop the Lizard-beings from reading his mind. A cautionary tale indeed.

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The true, dreadful nature of music in the 1980s is slowly being eroded from our memories. Some do-gooders are trying to accentuate the positive and claim that the decade which spawned hip-hop, the Smiths, Pixies et al was a rip-roaring success. Today, Bad Cover Versions presents the case for the opposition.

Greed, as we are now reminded at every tedious opportunity, was Good in the 80s. This greed extended its slithery green tentacles into the sights of Jazz-Funk catastrophes Fine Young Cannibals when they decided to comprehensibly offend the world with their cover of the classic Ever Fallen In Love by the Buzzcocks.

In the song’s vapid execution, the characteristically ravenous consumption of Greed is laid bare. Fine Young Cannibals chose not to celebrate the song, but to gleefully and daintily jack-hammer the song to smithereens with a fetid fusillade of hideously twangy bass, drumbeats wetter than a dying dog’s farts, and ludicrous tight-throat yodelling vocals.

Throughout the video, aptly-surnamed singer Roland Gift provides just that in the form of an unintentionally hilarious performance art piece entitled Strange Little Yelping Singer Mime-Fences With Invisible Man Whilst Balancing Hair-Coloured Brillo Pad On Head.

Gift embraces a unique style of singing that sounds as if he had learnt to speak English whilst trapped in a perpetually vibrating box with only a tape of Rick James B-sides for company.

In retrospect, we can blame the hapless Roland for T-Pain too: for he is a man with his own built-in Autotune, albeit one whose oscillation frequency is turned up to eleven. At times it sounds as if his whole body is jiggling at a high frequency, raising the intriguing possibility that he was operating a hydraulic drill whilst in the recording studio.

Fittingly for a decade that gave us Diet Coke, this eerily vague reworking is truly the most Lite of all the covers: Funk-Lite, Jazz-Lite, Soul-Lite, you-name-it-Lite. Fallen In Love proves for ever that cod-funk is not only the most hopeless of all the funks, but that Fine Young Cannibals have perfected the genre, and here they whip cubic tons of stale air into the song until it is as soft and appealing as a freshly deposited baby poo.

In fact, so wispy is Fallen In Love that once it has evaporated the residual feeling is one of absence. It is as if something has been forcibly removed from the listener – the aural equivalent of a bulimic’s visit to McDonald’s: all the horrible flavour, none of the fat, and a strange euphoria when it’s finally over.

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Flashing a permanently wide-eyed, mouth-breathing, minimum-brain-function gawp at every sight that slides uncontrollably before his freely-swivelling eyes, Mika’s demeanour suggests a man still impressed by the sudden excitement provided by a pop-up toaster.

And, dressed in the manner of a Synesthete who had just woken from a 25-year coma and subsequently refused all fashion assistance, Mika is here to unleash merry hell on the boundaries of outré behaviour. Pushing right past kooky with all the grace of a one-legged peacock, he arrives right back at the start, landing in a yellowing puddle miserably spelling out the words ‘Hellishly Bland’.

Yet Mika’s 10-second Primark trolley-dash mix ‘n’ match clothing style is merely an outward projection of his true calling – to render useless all he comes into contact with, via the medium of obtuse and tedious faux-weirdness.

As an assault on all that is good in the world, you have to admire the man’s gusto in his frankly inspired choice of Massive Attack’s heart-stoppingly beautiful Teardrop as his first victim.

Admiration too, for how he tears into his task with such fiendish relish. If I were to lock myself in a remote cabin with only a ream of A4 paper, a nursery-school sized box of Crayola and five quarts of whisky for company, I could not come up with an outline for destroying Teardrop with anything approaching the cunning, subtlety and outright unexpectedness of Mika’s.

His plan? Simple. Sing the song in the style of the bastard lovechild of Mickey Mouse and the paedophile off Family Guy. God help us, one and all.

If you were wondering what the usually concentrated look was on Mika’s face as the song fades, it is the same uncomfortable, yet strangely satisfying expression I too would pull if I was experiencing my own bloated sense of self-worth slippily disappearing up my fundament.

For this is a cover that is deliriously enjoyable in its filo pastry-like layers of delicious stupidity, and pumped full of woolly absurdity. A cover that time and again is made increasingly stupefying as Mika grins along at his own kooky daring, his own shimmering brilliance.

After the whole sorry spectacle finally ends, BBC DJ Jo Whiley digs deep and congratulates him with the sort of ‘well done’ that I reserve for the times when very young children proudly present me with a handful of their own faeces. And as a metaphor for the whole mindless, worthless catastrophe, I can think of no more apt parallel to draw.

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For several generations of men, Olivia Newton John has been defined almost exclusively by her bottom.

Wait – that’s not totally fair: her peachy bottom and luxurious thighs, as exquisitely framed by those delicious spray-on black trousers at the end of Grease.

Being remembered purely for your buttocks must play havoc with your self-worth. “I’m not just the owner of ridiculously pert glutes, you know – I’m an artist, yeah?”

Imagine the pain: you’ve worked for years on your technique – singing, dancing, acting, Alexander Technique – and all half the world’s population are interested in are all those tens of thousands of squats and lunges you’ve done.

So what better way to wrench back all that male attention than to cover the most famous song by that most masculine of men?

In hindsight (oh yes!) there were many better ways: ones that would have produced better-sounding results, too. Gargling nuts and bolts, or recording a tight-throat yodelling version of Lou Reed‘s Metal Machine Music, for example.

You might be fooled into thinking that this cover is merely a jaw-slackeningly insipid countrified mawk-a-thon, but then you’d have fallen into Newton John’s cunning trap.

Because she hates Ring Of Fire, irrevocably and unwaveringly. She hates all it stands for – men – but loves all that it represents – a man’s failure. All that pent-up anger from all that misplaced buttock-attention is unleashed in a daring attempt to wholly ruin one of the all-time great Man Songs.

That she failed is only because she soared to close too the evil, black sun in her heart and made a song that was so bad it simply couldn’t ruin the original. And so her selling point veered from below the hip to simply unhip.

She and her career never recovered. She now lives in a remote castle in a huge German forest, sticking pins into the pristine backside of a voodoo-doll in her own image. Sad, butt true.

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I met a man in California once. His name was Doctor Billy. He reminded me in appearance, demeanour and intensity, of an ageing Colonel Killgore from Apocalypse Now! I got the feeling he’d lived an exciting life. By ‘exciting’, I mean of course, ‘had taken a lot of acid in the 60′s.’

Eye-popping stories emerged about Doctor Billy’s life, but most interesting was his close association with The Who, his favourite band. All those stories are legally unrepeatable, but needless to say – they quash any lingering doubts you may have had about The Who‘s rock ‘n’ roll credentials.

The Who‘s early, thrilling, songs are the musical equivalent of dripping amphetamine directly into your ear canals. Hilary Duff, on the other hand, is the musical equivalent of a marshmallow.

Her songs were so bland and vapid that they simply dissolved into the thin air that they were ruining. But at the time this, astonishingly, was overlooked and no-one noticed the soporific evil lurking within.

Except Hilary herself. Wracked with guilt over the asinine damage her excruciatingly tepid music was having on a gormless world, she took a long, hard look at herself and vowed to change.

She would make amends. She would rescue her soul. She would rescue our souls. She would RAWK.

By covering The Who‘s My Generation, she allied herself with a song inexorably linked with youthful nihilism, self-destruction and non-conformity.

Hilary understands this. She believes in chaos, change and rebellion. So she changed the line, “I hope I die before I get old” – the most famously youthful, blasé line in 60′s rock – to “I hope I don’t die before I get old.”

Watch her sing that line. Just skip through the rest to 0m58s, and feel your blood curdle as she saps every last drop of rebellious sentiment with a flick of her 16-year old hair extensions and quasi-rock sneer. Watch it, and wonder where it all went wrong.

To listen to Hilary Duff’s version of this song is to drip saccharine directly into your ear canal. Somewhere, in the hills above San Francisco, Doctor Billy is weeping fat, acid-soaked tears.

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Let me introduce you to a cover version that provides final, irredeemable proof that the lifeless body of Rock has been drained to a point where the veins gurgle, spit and splutter.

And the liquid that sluices out? Pure molten cheese. This cover version shines the spotlight on all that is wrong with humankind, and illuminates the grimiest of nooks.

So, a question: what could be worse than a siren-lunged ‘Diva’ belting out AC/DC‘s You Shook Me All Night Long? Yes – two­ ­­siren-lunged Divas belting out AC/DC‘s You Shook Me All Night Long.

Remember the day: Anastacia and Celine have revealed themselves to be the true Axis Of Evil. It’s a genuine miracle that when the two of them were together in the same room, the world didn’t end, sucked into an infinite vortex of bland.

After you’ve peeked through your fingers at this monstrosity, you’ll wish the world had ended.

Anastacia contributes her usual lung-popping, vowel ‘n’ bowel-straining interpretation of the English language, while Celine, looking like an anorexic Basset hound, delves deep into her Big Bag of Middle-Ground Evil and strips any hint of humanity from the song, gurning faux-emotion throughout.

As always here in the gloomy netherworld of Bad Cover Versions, complication arises when deciding which is the worst part. Celine’s flappy-wristed rock-star lite stylings – presumably drawn from snuff-movie footage of a mentally inadequate trainspotter allowed one five-second glance at a video of Mick Jagger, then having a gun held to his head and told to re-enact what he’d seen – are bad enough. But Anastacia’s intermittent cries of “Come on girlfriend!”, providing a glimpse of what humanity will look like in the future, when Viacom takes over and everyone is MTV-cool, are borderline evil.

There is a subtext to all this horror – who would want these two to shake them all night long? The sad answer is that the vast audience, packing the auditorium like beige sardines in the world’s stupidest tin, would.

And as they lap it up with the kind of vacant, dewy-eyed, slow-clapping enthusiasm you’d expect from cows happily chewing the cud on the way to the slaughterhouse, breathe deeply, and realise that this is what awaits us all in purgatory.

The humanity, the humanity.

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There She Goes is one of those songs.

Whether soundtracking fond memories of hazy teenage summer crushes, haunting bitter-sweet laments or providing the audio for a number of falling-in-love montage sequences in cheap rom-coms, There She Goes will be the go-to song for decades to come.

It’s hard to overstate the song’s perfection. The La‘s wrote a song so economically brilliant that that simply, it couldn’t be bettered -or so they, us and the rest of the mentally capable humans on earth thought. Draw your own conclusions as to which bracket of humanity Sixpence None The Richer fall into.

There are a number of possible reasons why Sixpence None The Richer re-recorded There She Goes.

Let us consider the options:

• They were a drab, tuneless talent-vacuum that needed a hit to shift an album of otherwise unremitting tedium;
• The producers of a generic teen-romance movie couldn’t get the license for the original, so desperately called the only band with the necessary ‘will that do?’ attitude to pull off such an insipid cover;
• They didn’t realise that the song was really (i.e. very allegedly) about singer Lee Mavers’ (also very alleged) heroin addiction, and not about a pretty girl riding a bike or something;
• They had God on their side;
• All of the fucking above.

Horribly, inevitably, the last answer is correct, though the second to last one might give you the clearest insight into their motive. Sixpence None The Richer are a Christian Rock Band, and are defined by all the terrors that this entails.

But it suddenly makes sense – only a group of individuals on a Mission From God would even attempt to ‘add their own spin‘ on a song this perfect. And for ‘add their own spin‘, of course read, ‘record as safe, soulless and soppy a version as is possible’.

By recording a cover that barely deviates from the original, but with the notable, and surely deliberate, exclusion of emotion, care, humanity, and the deftness of touch that made the original so alluring, Sixpence None The Richer have, in fact, achieved greatness.

Harrowing, cruel and coldly calculated. Where is your God now?

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There aren’t many times when the words ‘Thank God Kurt Cobain is dead’ could be legitimately muttered. Today is one of those days.

Smells Like Teen Spirit is one of the very few heavy rock songs that everyone loves, and everyone knows.

Thus trying to reconstruct the thought process behind Take That, at their mid-90′s peak, covering Smells Like Teen Spirit is the simplest of tasks.

“Boys,” their cigar-chomping manager would have said, “we need a ‘rock’ bit in the next tour. Something a bit daring, but still safe enough not to threaten the grannies at the back. Which one of you wants to flush all of your self-esteem down the toilet?”

They all wanted to.

It’s hard to hate a bunch of thoroughly nice boys like Take That. But their frankly weird, loungey, faux-angry take on Kurt’s finest moment had me reaching for both my nailgun and my Bumper Book Of Boyband Home Addresses in an instinctive momentary desire for bloody vengeance.

Stretching the meaning of the word ‘asinine’ to its most ductile and insipid conclusion, this is a cover version that keeps on giving the longer it continues.

And by ‘giving’, of course, I mean ‘turning into an endurance test of unbridled horror’. For this is a cover version that accurately mirrors Kurt’s most morbid moments.

When Gary*-From-Take-That strut onto the stage, tears off his white vest and croons “Load up on guns..” in the style of a seven year old who’s been allowed to play with his dad’s tape recorder and mic, any lingering hope of redemption dies a pallid, sad death.

The agony of witnessing Howard**-From-Take-That’s tentatively-plucked guitar solo, complete with comedic, affected Dave Gilmour-esque facial contortions, drops like a white-hot stone into the pit of your stomach, cackling and spitting until the day you die.

To accurately recreate Nirvana’s explosive dénouement, the most exceptionally awful moment is saved for the end, when the whole band wind up the song in the same raised-eyebrow-eye-contact-with-every-band-member 3-2-1 derrrn-derrrr! ending that has blighted the work of wedding bands since time immemorial.

An epic folly performed on the biggest stage. Those boys have balls. Or maybe none whatsoever. And, yes, that high-pitched humming sound is Kurt spinning in his grave.

*or possibly Mark-From-Take-That

**or possibly Brian-From-Take-That (or whatever)

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