16 October 2008
While swooning over Leona Lewis’s marvellous ‘Bleeding Love’ I mentioned the ’00s trend for rock bands to leech attention and relevancy through ironic or condescending covers of contemporary chart pop hits. Here’s one that became a chart hit itself. (We’ll also soon see reprisals, where X Factor alumni cover indie favourites to similar chart-topping success.)
This cover of the Sugababes’ ‘About You Now’ originated with a live performance on RTÉ’s Podge and Rodge Show earlier the same year. As a single release it had the wind of charity in its sales, being in aid of cystic fibrosis support. The chosen filter is three-chord pub rock meets geriatric punk. Oh, and it’s by The Saw Doctors. Davy Carton struggles to reach the higher notes in the chorus and the middle notes elsewhere. As a collective they just thrash and flail around like they’ve been dunked in sewage. It may be a bit unfair to pick middle-aged stage-culchies The Saw Doctors as avatars for the ’00s rockist cover of pop hits, but no one asked them to do this except their inner voice of vanity and desperation, or perhaps their accountant. They can’t muster an nth of the wit, talent or musicality of anyone involved in originally making ‘About You Now’, which isn’t even the best Sugababes track.
The supremacy of rock music—white men playing electric guitars—died in the ’90s with Britpop and grunge. It’s not coming back. You can wallow in nostalgia at summer festivals or on classic-rock radio, both forever playing songs from thirty or forty years ago, in a heritage scene propped up by indie journos and DJs from thirty or forty years ago who desperately overpraise any new guitar band however ordinary, and you can sneer insecurely at pop, rap, electronica and everything else that’s current and innovative. I grant that’s a more bearable alternative for rock fans than to look up and face the truth: rock is now as anachronistic and uncool as The Saw Doctors ineptly performing a Sugababes song for our charity.
