No Rock And Roll Fun

GET ME A HAMMER... GET ME A GUN... GET ME SOMETHING: I was going to never mention again the horrible, horrible, horrible remake of The Tide Is High by Atomic Kitten, but I really feel I need to. First (there's always a first, isn't there?) the lame-assed little rap bit in the middle took not one bored person with a rhyming dictionary and a copy of "Write the Val Doonican Way", but four people - four people to come up with a makeweight cod-rap, and not one of them noticed it made no sense.
Secondly, they're proud of themselves - Hugh Goldsmith, the head of Innocent, Atomic Kitten's label was crowing to Music Week "Doing covers can be a dangerous thing, but we added a really great twist to the song with the new middle eight." Now, let's just leave aside the unarguable fact that anyone who bought the Kitten version wouldn't have been born 22 years ago when the single last was in the chart, and as such were probably totally unaware it was a cover version; and that the middle eight only twisted the song in the way a gunsman twists a partridge's neck, lets just examine the claim that "doing covers can be a dangerous thing." Can it? In what way precisely is tromping out a new-ish version of a song that's already been proven to have the winning formula be passed off as being 'dangerous'? If its so dangerous, how come a fifth of the top selling singles of the year so far have been cover versions? How come Robbie Williams knocks off a CDs worth of covers in an lunchbreak from playing the goose and tramples everything in his wake? Why did the dreadful Simon PopIdol choose to not only get Gareth Gates to do a cover version, but chose to get him to do a cover of a song he'd previously had a number one with when he'd got the actor-gimps Robson and Jerome to cover it as well? Holly Vallance? That Eva Cassidy album? Covers are probably the safest thing you can do in the music industry, short of debuting the song at Princess Di's funeral. And that was even a bleedin' cover as well. Jesus Christ, Freak Like Me was a cover of a bloody mix.
I really ought to have a lie down.