#22: Mark Ronson - Version (2007)

1. God Put A Smile Upon Your Face (Coldplay)
2. Oh My God (Kaiser Chiefs)
3. Stop Me (The Smiths)
4. Toxic (Britney Spears)
5. Valerie (The Zutons)
6. Apply Some Pressure (Maxïmo Park)
7. Inversion
8. Pretty Green (The Jam)
9. Just (Radiohead)
10. AMY (Ryan Adams)
11. The Only One I Know (The Charlatans)
12. Diversion
13. L.S.F. (Kasabian)
14. Outversion

(Note: All songs except tracks 7, 12 and 14 are cover versions: Original artists in brackets.)

STOP ME, OH OH OH STOP ME: STOP ME IF YOU THINK THAT YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE.

Honestly, I never thought I'd review this album in a million years: This is one of those that I just started writing in my head and then felt the need to get out of bed and commit it to the internet. Turn back now, Ronson fans...

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Producer du jour Mark Ronson has a lot to answer for in many people's minds, and I'd count myself among them. An album of covers is a little fishy to begin with, and the swathe of guest vocalists only adds to the suspicion. "But he was working with Lily Allen and Santogold before they were cool, and Amy Winehouse before she was a total fuckup!" I hear you cry. "So what?" would be my response: Regardless of when and where its celebrity collaborations came about, an album lives and dies on its songs, or in this case, what it does to other people's.

Some tracks sound fine initially but don't hold up so well after you've listened to them for a while: Taking Coldplay's 'God Put A Smile Upon Your Face' and rearranging it for a brass band is admittedly charming at first, but grows less so with repeated listens. Similarly, the now infamous Amy Winehouse-featuring cover of The Zutons' 'Valerie' gave the plodding, overplayed original a much-needed kick up the arse, but would eventually suffer the same fate as its source material, with overexposure breeding contempt.

On the other hand, some of Version's covers are almost offensive in their pointlessness, seemingly based on half-baked ideas: "I know, let's take Radiohead's 'Just', replace some of the guitars with horns and add some 'soulful' crooning to it!" or even worse "Let's take Maxïmo Park's 'Apply Some Pressure' and turn it into an aimless piece of lounge jazz!" Ronson mercilessly strips these songs of every last ounce of impact they have, leaving them bland and lifeless - clearly the Radiohead cover only happened because EMI likes money, and what Paul Smith was thinking allowing his name to feature on the back of the album sleeve I'll never know. Kasabian suffer a similar ignominy later on in the record, and while 'L.S.F.' at least manages to maintain a sense of pace by leaving Tom Meighan's vocal largely untouched, it still feels tempered slightly, reaching for the anthemic status of the original only to end up falling short.

The album is rife with such terrible decisions - 'Toxic' doesn't, and never needed to be twice as long as it was, especially when the lengthening of the song is achieved by playing the song at half speed and adding superfluous rap sections - it makes the song feel like it's on tranquillisers. Equally criminal is Ronson's treatment of 'AMY', which takes the affecting simplicity of Ryan Adams' original and turns it into something that can only be described as 'generic'.

Sometimes the album comes up with a semi-interesting idea that falls flat in its execution: 'The Only One I Know' sees Robbie Williams attempting his best Tim Burgess impression, but the cover as a whole fails to add anything more than the slightest injection of pace to the song. Elsewhere, the Santogold-featuring 'Pretty Green' takes the raw energy of The Jam's original and bizarrely transforms it into some sort of Caribbean playground chant, which doesn't quite work.

The three original tracks don't really add much to the record either, merely providing some brief filler as a respite from the other atrocities on offer, as well as possibly serving as handy instrumental beds for DJs all over the country. Even these sound slightly derivative though - in particular, 'Diversion' somewhat reminds me of Bill Wither's 'Lovely Day'.

It's not all horrible, and the album does actually feature a couple of tracks that do what a good cover should - actually add something to the original, or at least provide a different take on it. Lily Allen's southern sass on 'Oh My God' provides a worthwhile counterpoint to Ricky Wilson's original northern wit, but the album's greatest triumph (well, relatively speaking) is Ronson's take on 'Stop Me': While it had fans of The Smiths sharpening their knives, it provided a decent alternative take on the moody pace of the original, turning it into a dark and echoy slice of soul. (The silver lining for Smiths fans is that it soon became 100% more credible to play the original when DJing.)

As a whole though, Version comes off as a limp effort, with the covers it offers being at best watered down and at worst mercilessly butchered in cold blood. But the true tragedy of this album is that, because of its accessibility, it's all too likely that these are the versions that many people will associate the song names with: And the thought that this record contains the only versions of 'Apply Some Pressure' or 'Just' that some people may ever have heard breaks my heart.

(P.S: Wikipedia reveals that Ronson has also recorded versions of 'Pistol Of Fire' by Kings Of Leon and 'No One Knows' by Queens Of The Stone Age. And I'm quite sure that I never, ever want to hear either of them.)