Should have known better
Marcus Berkmann
people who hate pop music — such as 1 Michael Henderson, whose ears have been seen to billow with steam at the mere mention of the words — cannot believe that there can be any good pop music in amongst the vast, tinny, relentless thrum of bad pop music. People who love pop music obviously know otherwise, but they know something else just as important: that in amongst the vast, tinny, relentless thrum there is also music that is worse than just bad, music that is so agonisingly, jaw-droppingly horrible that it can make eyes water, throats tighten and fingers reach for computer keyboards to write columns about it.
It's actually quite rare, this music, and perhaps we should cherish it as keenly as we cherish the wondrous tunes we played at earth-shattering volume only this morning. For having heard true cack once, you find you want to hear it again, just to confirm that your ears didn't deceive you. Poor ears: what ever did they do to deserve this?
To give it some cultural context: we were on holiday in St Ives. In between eating ourselves to death and trying to stop the children drowning, my beloved and I passed valuable hours loitering pointlessly in shops, in the slightly snooty manner of people who have absolutely no intention of buying anything. In one such emporium, where you could buy 40,000 black bin-liners for under £1, they were playing an old Neil Diamond album. You couldn't mistake him for anyone else. The deep darkbrown voice. The gloopy arrangements. The Bob Monkhouse-like patina of sincerity. Critics have recently 'reassessed' Diamond and decided that he was quite good after all, but I suspect it may have been for a bet. For no one would dream of 'reassessing' the old fraud after hearing his version of 'He Ain't Heavy. He's My Brother'.
It starts innocently enough. As I say, I heard it only once, so I can't remember whether it was a piano or acoustic guitar backing, but it was simple, unadorned and, as far as Diamond's vocals were concerned, positively restrained. But within a verse or two, things began to build. Enter the strings — maybe three full orchestras, maybe four, it was hard to tell, but the overall effect would have had Mantovani offering a round of applause. And Diamond's vocals, well, got louder. The crack in his voice, to show emotion, became ever more pronounced; the pauses between syllables ever more portentous; and the sincerity would have to have been mopped up afterwards with a cloth. A simple and affecting pop ballad, most famously recorded by the Hollies, had been transformed into a riproaring Broadway showstopper. And in the shop, swaying perilously near a mountain of Bob The Builder beach balls, stood the mother of my children and I, astounded by what we had heard. Normal badness had nothing on this version. This was monstrously nasty.
How does such music get made? But that's the point: the genuinely evil cover version knows no boundaries of taste or decorum. I think we must discount cover versions by unknowns, by non-singers (such as William Shatner's timeless rendition of 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds'), or by useless boy bands, who over the past few years have steadily eaten up the songbooks of Abba and the Bee Gees like so many pop locusts. The real horrors are invariably perpetrated by real stars on an extended holiday from good sense. I think immediately of Annie Lennox's 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale', after which it was hard to take Lennox seriously for several years. It's notable that, on the cover of her new album, she wears unflattering make-up that is unquestionably a whiter shade of pale, possibly as self-inflicted punishment for the awful, pompous, plinloy, unintentionally amusing reading she gave of a song that was fine as it was and never needed to be recorded again. The same applies to Cockney Rebel's 'Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me)', which Erasure recently had a go at for no reason at all. Duran Duran did an entire album of covers that virtually sank their career, although lead weights had been tied to it several years previously.
But having contemplated it for a while, I believe this is an issue that deserves a wider airing. The very worst cover version of a decent song by people who should have known better. Can you think of something worse than Neil Diamond's 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother'? All nominations please cio The Spectator, or by email to marcus@berkmann 1 .demon.co.uk. There will be a small prize for someone, not necessarily recorded by Neil Diamond.
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