here was a time when everyone seemed to just know that pop was cheap, prefab crap and that real music was done by artists who were cleverer, nicer and more articulate. If you didn’t write the song you sang then you were nothing but a puppet; a rancid, needle-pocked pig marked with the abscesses of fame and champagne. The living room during Top of the Pops became a football terrace brimming with abuse and counter chants.

Then one day, it seemed to change without me noticing, I no longer gave a flying whoopsie who penned a song. Was it good? Yes. This seemed to be enough, and it appeared to be enough for my friends too. Mixtapes would soon have early Madonna and Duran Duran next to Aguilera and Jim O’Rourke, and lo the people were happy as the lines blurred like traffic signs after four or five pints. I believed that we were all drifting along with this cultural shift; that the barriers between music had fallen. Those people who use music only as a background to washing the dishes or driving to the shops and buy just three cds a year from supermarkets were right all along; there was now socialism of the art (that’s a Billy Bragg pun).

Pop acts didn’t and don’t generally give a toss about credibility, so what had changed for them? Getting write-ups in Q or a block of BS in NME? Big deal. But the artists who lived on their 4-realness and their artistry had to show their true colours as genres merged. Some I’m sure were harbouring resentment on a massive murder-with-hammers scale, and many chose the cover version as a statement or a weapon in this war. But which of the big pop covers were heartfelt and which were using them as guerrilla warfare?

Sincere but Shit

Flaming Lips – Can’t Get You Out of My Head

The Flaming Lips are a complete mystery to me. It was bad enough that Mercury Rev thinned out their music of Baker’s bad LSD for someone else to come along sounding even more like a bucket of multi-coloured egg white. I’m not really swayed by the nice gimmick with the animals or bubbles either; I bet if Busted had done this people would be flinging bottles of piss at them. The Lips went to great pains to let everyone know that this cover was a tribute; a reinvented perspective of the original. It sounds to me like a shit version of the original, an original that makes me and others hum, sing, nod and dance. What is this good for?

The spirit-of-our-age "la la las" come off as tacked on, as an “oh shit, what can we do with these?” afterthought, while the verse attempts to reveal some deep desperation and obsession which was buried at the song’s core, hidden from us dim folk by a shiny, sugary coating. It was perfectly fine as it was, Coyne. We don’t need your fascist depth thing. Invested with a Sergio Leone OST ambience and a supposed seriousness, their version of "Can’t Get You Out of My Head" is like dulled stretched copper. If you’re going to reinvent something, make it worthwhile.

Sincere and Brilliant

Cake – I Will Survive

The clichéd camp classic, imitated on a thousand TV sitcoms and by pissheads in nightclubs across the world. Here welded to an erect and prominent bass, it fronts with an attitude of aggressive indifference as opposed to a celebration of independence, casually mulling over the notion of putting your foot up your ex’s arse and slamming the door on their fingers as you stride into the single world of alcohol and an overabundance of genitalia.

Sarcastic and Shit

Travis – Baby One More Time

There is definitely a raised eyebrow to this cover, a barely disguised smug look on Fran Healy’s face as he interpolates this into their set of sincerity and heartfelt melancholy. It’s like a joke between the singer and audience: he thinks that by knocking it out on the old acoustic he has the power to grant a musical pardon, and give us permission to enjoy it. But his disdain for the song (and the genre) is given away by his smirking shouting and the girly falsetto howling of the chorus; it’s purposefully comedic. They think it’s only worthy of a bit of a piss take, it’s only a pop song, y’see. Ironic pseudo-appreciation in a cover song, how incredibly boring and passe – much like Travis!

Shit, Shit, Self-Aggrandising Shit

Daniel Bedingfield – In Da Club

The man who ate all of Robbie Williams’ pies attempts to show that he, Daniel Winston Bedingfield, is an artist of the people, and he can flip the script. A man who felt he could turn his hand to ballads, garage, pop and rock decided to perform one of the biggest hip-hop "I’m Real" songs of the year live throughout the summer of 2003. He dropped a fat hairy bollock on this one. Backed by a band of session players styled from the teen section of my local Asda store, they attempted to approximate a twice-removed impression of Dre’s imperial groove. Considering the omnipresent nature of the song, and the fact he must’ve got his band to rehearse it for this sole purpose, how the fuck he only ever managed to remember the chorus is frightening. My theory is that backstage he felt like he could rock the crowd with this anthem, than as the adrenaline burnt away the coke buzz, his arse fell out.