Girls Aloud: they're not covering Tiffany, ok?
The following sentence, pertaining to news that Girl Aloud's Christmas single will be the song I Think We're Alone Now, appeared in last Saturday's Guardian Weekend magazine: "Hosanna is indeed in excelsis: Girls Aloud are covering Tiffany."
Ahem. Girls Aloud are not covering Tiffany. As any pop anorak will know, they're covering Tommy James & The Shondells, the Michigan band who first had a hit with I Think We're Alone Now in 1967. Teen chirper Tiffany covered it in 1988, and landed her only UK number one with that utterly characterless version (listen here to appreciate the trash-rock superiority of the Shondells' original). So, please, credit where it's due - Tiffers had nothing to do with it.
Granted, it was an easy mistake - despite 15 American hits, Tommy James never once troubled the British charts, so Tiffany's is the only version most people here would know. Nonetheless, it's nigglesome. To have a favourite song of mine attributed to someone who sang it only because it was an easy route to a number one record defiles it. Knowing that many people believe Tiffany's to be the definitive version offends the proprietary feeling I have toward it.
It's natural to have a sense of ownership about best-loved singles, so I do not like confusion about lineage. It upsets me to know there are people who think that Girls Aloud's covers of the Pretenders' I'll Stand By You and the Pointer Sisters' Jump are their own work. By the same token, I've spent the past decade trying to forget that thousands of 1990s kids grew up under the misapprehension that two of the Bee Gees' most brilliant tunes, Tragedy and How Deep is Your Love, were written by Steps and Take That.
And as for Westlife putting their hideous "This song is the property of..." stamp on Billy Joel's blameless Uptown Girl - well, I won't get into that. How many of you have similar outrages to share?
