Music to Make Me a Mad Man

Meanwhile, back in the real world, not one currently being invaded by aliens (see last post for details), I've had my tolerance for it shortened by hearing an abomination of a cover version the INXS classic Never Tear Us Apart by someone called Paloma Faith.

I'd never heard of the lady in question before, and I'm sure she's a nice enough lady who loves her mam, but her reading of the song is (to these ears) a complete fucking disaster. For one thing, you're onto a loser by going up against Michael Hutchence: the guy was complete sex on legs and the best rock icon of the 1980s, so Faith has no chance of getting close in those stakes. Secondly, the arrangement of the song is tired arse gravy and she even seems to struggle to hit the notes from the original.

But what really stoked up my wish for Immediate Nuclear Holocaust was the whole bag o' shite was put out due to an advert campaign by British department store chain John Lewis. This is part of a trend of adverts using "contemporary" versions of 80s classics, usually in some acoustic fashion. I'm not saying it's a bad thing in the scale of human suffering, but the people behind it need to be tracked down and stopped.

I think the whole mess began, oddly enough, with an actual indie popster. Fyfe Dangerfield, best known as singer from Guillemots, did a version of Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman that got picked up for a particularly gruesome John Lewis Christmas campaign ad. Given I hate the works of Joel, this didn't bother me too much.

However, when it was Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want being sacrificed at the alter of Don Draper wannabes everywhere, something needed to be done. I know it isn't illegal, and it isn't really doing any harm, but I still find my blood boiling whenever I hear these songs anywhere.

Perhaps the problem is that all these young stage-school trained singers don't have anyone writing songs for them anymore. In the first days of pop, you had the whole Brill Building teams knocking out songs by the hour. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman churned out loads of hits for the glam rock bands, Stock, Aitken and Waterman did the whole production line approach in the 1980s.

But I can't think of any modern equivalent. This is the age of the Simon Cowell-type figure, who has the talent brought to them live on TV, before moulding them in the fashion of the day and binning them off when the next thing comes along - wither Shayne Ward? And while Cowell might have many talents, writing songs is not one. So they naturally just run through rock and pops back pages, offering slightly modernised versions of the classics.

Then when you need something with a bit of edge for a more serious project such as selling Christmas presents, luckily all those old alternative classics will do a good job. The way things are, I expect Dead Souls to be used in life insurance ads within the end of the decade.