Ronson: "it's so easy to hate; it takes guts to be gentle and kind'

Mark Ronson's pointless cover of The Smiths' Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before is still enraging both indie purists and music lovers up and down the country. Despite having taken a reading of a song that so lacks any passion or understanding of the words it makes that rave version of Smells Like Teen Spirit sound like Olivier doing the Agincourt speech, and then dumped the dull, shapeless vocal on top of a flaccid backing track which seems to have escaped from an elevator in an especially cruel bank building, Mark Ronson hasn't gone to ground, requesting a change of name and planning face-altering surgery that would not only save him from being pointed at in the street by angry children, but also spare him from having to look in the mirror and see the gormless, gawking visage which had been on the front of the head that allowed the idea of this beast to fester within its depths.

Oh no, he's defending it.

Good lord, Ronson, there came a point when even Dr Frankenstein had to admit he'd made a bit of a blunder and the world would have been better off if the discarded corpse parts had been left alone.

Ronson's defence is that Morrissey and Marr like it:

"When I recorded the original demo of 'Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before' ...the first thing I did was send it to Morrissey and Marr immediately," he wrote on his MySpace. "I needed to know if they would be alright with it, basically like a kid showing his parents his finger painting for their approval!"

"It took a long time to hear back from them, but when I found out that Morrissey liked it, and especially liked Daniel's (Merriweather) vocal, you can imagine how I felt when (Johnny) Marr approved it as well - but I don't know his exact thoughts. The man who co-wrote my favourite song of all time gave (his) blessing to this new interpretation."

We wonder what Marr's exact thoughts were - probably something along the lines of "Dorothy, could you have a quick look and see how much the Tears For Fears boys made from that Gary Jules cover version?"

And getting Morrissey's blessing might be nice, but having heard the mid-career solo stuff, we wouldn't have him pegged as the world's greatest critic when it comes to the stuff he wrote.