Malcolm Middleton

I’m always wary of posting covers where I’m entirely unfamiliar with the original version. Given I couldn’t identify one song from any other, or that of any other girl “band” for that matter, I was going to give it a miss. I always enjoy new material though, even if I tend to end up having a love-hate relationship with many of his songs.

What threw me about Call The Shots is that if I didn’t know it was cover, I probably wouldn’t think it was. I even had to go to Youtube to make sure there really was an original version, and although I could stomach no more than thirty seconds of it, it did establish that this was indeed a Girls Aloud song. All of which entirely undermines my hatred of mainstream pop. Now, the production is certainly different, but the underlying song remains the same. Yet I enjoy this and can’t stand the original.

Maybe Middleton is just suited to this kind of song (previous covers of The Saturdays and Madonna suggest this could be true), but it’s still a bit weird. How does stripping a pop song down to it’s most basic level, leaving only a vocal and an acoustic guitar, suddenly give it value? Ultimately it probably doesn’t, and it’s likely I’m just being elitist about this things.

Given the difference, it’s likely that fans of the original will probably dislike this, although I doubt very many of them are reading this anyway. If you do happen to know both versions, which one holds up better of the two?