Jamie Cullum – High And Dry
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.
RELATED POSTS:
Hi. I respect your right to your opinion. But you state it as fact. As it happens, I HATE the original of ‘High and Dry’. It was only when Jamie Cullum covered the song that I thought ‘this is a fantastic song, RadioHead just never realised its potential, even though they composed it’. Jamie Cullum’s version is now my number one favourite song. Now, that is just my opinion. I appreciate that you like the actual original, and so do other people, but equally, there are a huge number of people who prefer Jamie Cullum’s version. I think that you should be more open minded as the one problem with music currently is that people aren’t. If you wrote this article as a piece describing your opinion but also referencing other people’s opinions, it would be a much better article. Though I also don’t agree with the concept, no offense. I don’t think anyone has the right to publicly declare a cover or a song as terrible or ‘ruined’. But I doubt that will stop you doing it in future! Oh well! Hope I haven’t caused any offence.
Hi Davina!
No offence taken – I know plenty of people like Jamie Cullum. I don’t, as is robustly stated above, but then in fairness you won’t find many glowing endorsements of the bands that feature on a site called ‘Bad Cover Versions’.
Happily, BCV provides the negative Ying to all the positive Yang I pour into http://www.anewbandaday.com, so if you want positivity, hop over there and find some every day.
Thanks for reading anyway!
Joe
PS – you are not only the first person I have found who prefers Cullum’s version, but also the first who actively hates Radiohead’s original. I’m actually quite impressed.
The first comment… Just wow
You know a person is beyond help when they type “RadioHead”
My skin is crawling
This song most certainly does intrude like a wet fart, Joe, much agreed. It’s agonizingly awful. I would like to say thanks for sharing but that would be utterly disingenuous.
Davina – I’m very glad we live in a world where people have the right to declare how awful they think certain things are and to be able to present their own argument for its awfulness without having to reference “other people’s opinions”. If Joe had written a polite, balanced piece, it would kind of defy the entire point of the blog, don’t you think?
For some reason I like Jamie, listening to his voice makes me feel good (and is what music should be about, right?). Ok, I have to admit, this song is fantastic, but when I listen to radiohead, it doens’t get to me.
Honestly, I don’t like the way his voice sound on “high”and “dry”, I think he should have found a different solution. But for the rest, the cover is very nice.
this cover is awful, but wait till you hear Jamie’s cover of “the Love Cats” by The Cure…
oh well…
Hi, I’ve been researching this topic for awhile and I must say the information is great. Thanks!
I think Jamie Cullum’s Cover is as good as the original in my opinion. In fact i think he actually did the song a lot of Justice. The cool thing about music is it allows us to be creative. When somebody writes a song you have a melody and a set of lyrics to work with. There are millions of possibilities to do to those things. You can put different chord progressions under them, change the tempo, experiment with the instrumentation, the list goes on and on. We must ask why do we think this rendition is a bad one? Jamie made this song a completely different cup of tea. Obviously art is subjective, but we cannot be going around saying that somebody ruined a song we we personally don’t like it.
The author obviously doesn’t appreciate Jazz or anything close to Jazz. That makes me have to ask, why do they feel the need to give their opinion when they don’t have anything close to constructive to say about it? All I really read in this review was that it smells and just isn’t good because it just it stinks. Tell me why you think its a bad cover!
I love radioheads version aswell. Jamie just turned a apple into a orange. So you can’t really compare the two too much.