Pop music
It isn't fair
Marcus Berkmann
6 Cover me,' sang Bruce Springsteen somewhere around 1984, 'Ooh baby, cover me.' If this was a plea to other pop per- formers to record dismal cover versions of his songs — as was much assumed at the time — it was not wholly successful. The charts remain blessedly free of rotten rereadings of 'Born In The USA' or 'Bad- lands', and long may they remain so. But sometimes it seems as though Bruce Springsteen is almost the only -prominent songwriter not to have his tunes regularly recycled in this manner. Indeed, the cover version has not so much fallen into disre- pute as set up home there. Nowadays any song is fair game, so long as it's old and no one has played it much for the past couple of years. What's vital is that you should never seek to improve on the original. Experience shows that a cover only sells if it is indistinguishable from previous record- ings, or far, far worse than any of them.
Last week, therefore, a redundant new interpretation of the Sundays' Here's Where The Story Ends' roared into the charts at number seven. The Sundays is one of those quiet, undemonstrative bands who inspire great loyalty among their fans, if only because there are not very many of them. I discovered the Sundays shamefully late — they have been recording since 1989 — but have recently become a full convert, playing their three albums with relation- ship-threatening frequency. Guitar-based indie rock has never sounded so subtle or delicate — just stop me before I use the word 'texture'. So perhaps we should praise the enterprise, if nothing else, of Tin Tin Out (whoever they are) for taking one of the Sundays' best tunes, reproducing it almost exactly and then slapping a thumpy dance beat all over it. Result: instant top ten single, which is one more than the Sun- days themselves have managed up to now.
Sometimes you don't need to change anything to sell lots of records. Shola Ama was voted Best Female Act in the Brit Awards this year on the basis of a promis- ing debut album and a hit single in the form of 'You Might Need Somebody'. Older readers may remember this song as performed by Randy Crawford in 1979. Shola Ama probably doesn't, as that was the year in which she was born. But some- one at her record company certainly did, for her version is a faithful copy of Miss Crawford's recording, if less well sung. Such blatant opportunism could probably be justified on the grounds that no one else thought of it first. Whether it merits an award is another matter.
Shola Ama got away with it; Natalie Imbruglia didn't. The former Neighbours poppet surprised listeners last year with the rumbustious tunefulness of her debut sin- gle 'Torn'. A glorious songwriting career was forecast. Then the villainous truth emerged: 'Torn' was not her song after all. A Norwegian singer had recorded it several years before, and enjoyed a modest hit with it in Scandinavian parts. Her hopes of an international career had come to nought, however: the song made no impression over here. Then Imbruglia turned up, gave the song another go and propelled it straight into the British top three. The Nor- wegian was incensed. The tabloids, sniffing ex-soap star blood, took her side, and Imbruglia was roundly condemned as a fraud and, worse, Australian. It wasn't entirely fair: Inabruglia had never claimed to write the song, and no one outside Oslo had ever heard it before. But then pop music isn't fair. Imbruglia's reputation has been tarnished and suddenly everyone has noticed that the rest of her album (much of which she did write) isn't actually much cop after all. It's a cruel business, which is, of course, at least half of its appeal.
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