Sonic Youth. May have plagiarised elements of a Jimmy Saville show. (But not really.) Photograph: PR
Revisiting Dirty by Sonic Youth on a recent lazy Sunday, a routine classic album re-acquaintance suddenly took a strange turn, when, as the needle hit track 12, the opening bars of the Jim'll Fix It theme tune started to blare out.
Well, not really. In reality it was a track on the album that I've listened to numerous times over the years, Chapel Hill, but my epiphanic realisation of the similarity - despite being limited to the opening bars of the track - is enough that the song's dark, astonishingly brooding chorus has, juxtaposed with a children's TV theme tune, been rendered comically bathetic.
And just the other day it occurred to me that the bit in Sound and Vision by David Bowie just before he starts singing sounds like that old Asda supermarket advert in which people slapped their arses at the end to make their loose change jingle - and now one of my favourite Bowie tunes is irredeemably ruined.
Thankfully, it's not often that I simply have to stop listening to a track as a result of this - but I have had some close shaves. Recently I was listening to The Greatest by Cat Power, and I was suddenly hit by the striking similarity it shares with Trouble by Coldplay. I panicked - my enjoyment of a favourite song of 2006 was suddenly in serious danger of being compromised. But whereas the Jim'll Fix It theme was just too annoying, I rationalised that Trouble isn't such a bad song really - indeed, it could have been a lot worse (Keane, Starsailor etc). So I've been brave and accepted that I'll just have to live with that annoying thought that jumps into my head when the piano intro starts up.
Luckily, for most of the time, songs in which I hear the echoes of others I don't really like anyway - and in these cases it adds another dimension to an otherwise aurally offensive track. Take Suddenly I See by KT Tunstall. I defy anyone to deny that the bit where she sings, "And everything around her is a silver pool of light ... " sounds EXACTLY the same as the Rainbow theme tune (all together now: "Up above the streets and houses / Rainbow flying high") - I've YouTubed this on more than one occasion because it amuses me so. Or how about the theme tune from the 1978 TV version of The Famous Five, the chorus to which sounds uncannily like Hold Me Now by The Polyphonic Spree (actually, pretty much any of their songs)? Or Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis' resemblance to various parts of the Minder theme tune (albeit speeded up)?
Strangely, then, in these cases, the coincidences actually give completely undeserved artistic merit to the pop songs, as it allows them to bask in the reflected glory of the theme tunes' genius.
Perhaps I have, by selfishly sharing my vexation about the aforementioned Sonic Youth and Bowie tracks, also ruined those songs for some; or maybe, even after repeated listens, people would find it hard to know what I'm talking about. If you are in the former camp, I would like to say that I apologise.
Unfortunately, this would be slightly disingenuous of me, as I am curious to see if people are affected by this in the same way. So I actively encourage you to seek vengeance and make known any songs that, once loved, have now been irrevocably ruined by the machinations of advertising executives, TV theme tune writers and lesser songsmiths. If only to let me know I'm not suffering alone.
