Have you ever been listen­ing to the radio in the car and had that feel­ing of sheer exultance when a song you love, but haven’t heard for ages, comes on? You grin like a per­form­ing chimp and after a quick check to make sure that no one in any of the adja­cent cars can see you, you gear your­self up to belt out that first line. Except it turns out that it’s not the song you though it was, and in a per­fect imit­a­tion of that clas­sic Steven Tyler/Run DMC moment, the breath catches in your throat, the words hit a brick wall, and you sit there with a con­fused look on your face won­der­ing what the hell happened.

Well maybe it’s just me then, but between work, work, social­ising and extra work, my little Fiesta and I cover quite a lot of miles, which means I listen to a lot of radio and there­fore this sort of thing seems to be hap­pen­ing to me more and more. Up until recently I was quite happy to put this down to a simple coin­cid­ence and move on with my life, but some­thing I heard recently gave me such a shock I very nearly slammed on the brakes. It was the Sug­ababes. Singing Right Said Fred.

Now if the Sug­ababes wrote their own songs I may have been pre­pared to ignore this; easy on the eyes they may be, but they don’t seem like a par­tic­u­larly cre­at­ive bunch, espe­cially as they have none of their ori­ginal mem­bers left but still insist on keep­ing the name (any­one else reminded of the “this old broom has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles” gag?) But come on, they actu­ally have people who write these songs for them, people who make a liv­ing from churn­ing this stuff out. Has it really got to the point where this is the kind of thing the record com­pan­ies will accept? If I was the boss of Flash-in-the-pan Records and some song-writer came to me with such a thinly veiled re-hashing of a song that frankly, was crap 17 years ago, I would have found the biggest puddle out­side the build­ing, and flung him out into it.

Of course the whole charade com­pletely ruined it for me, and from then on I began uncon­sciously scru­tin­ising every song I heard. The thing is, I appre­ci­ate how dif­fi­cult it is to come up with some­thing ori­ginal these days, and then turn it into a song that sounds noth­ing like everything that was in the charts six months earlier. But some of it is so blatant that it makes my eye­lids hurt. For example, someone (and des­pite my best internet-scouring I cant find out who) has cut-and-pasted Eif­fel 65s “Blue” into the intro of their song, and if you’re think­ing Debbie Harry is sound­ing a bit rough nowadays, it’s prob­ably because you’re listen­ing to Muse’s new single “Upris­ing” and not Blondie’s “Call Me”. Arc­tic Mon­keys have pinched lyr­ics from The Police and Duran Duran (twice) and I’m fairly sure that Rhi­anna has no idea what a ma-coo-sa is, but that didn’t stop her nick­ing one off Michael Jack­son. A bit of dig­ging around and it turns out this sort of thing has been going on for a while. The Killers’ “Mr Bright­side” reeks of Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” and if you listen to The Smiths – “Panic” you can almost hear Marc Bolan in the back­ground singing “Metal guru, is it you?” Even Kurt Cobain claimed to have half-inched the main riff for “Smells like Teen Spirit” off of the Kinks.

The point is, if you want to write a song that’s truly mem­or­able, you need to at least try and make it sound a bit dif­fer­ent and listen­ing to a lot of the music that’s out at the moment it’s hard to spot where one song ends and the next begins. Artists are too eager to play it safe by stick­ing to what they know (other people’s music mostly) and keep­ing innov­a­tion to a min­imum; it’s almost tra­gic in a way because it feels like the musical world is about to head into a dead end. When the very tal­en­ted Alex­an­dra Burke won the X Factor and burst onto the music scene, was her first num­ber one an edgy, dynamic intro­duct­ory reflec­tion of the new voice of pop? Nope. It was a soggy rendi­tion of Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­le­lu­jah” which, by the way, was almost beaten to the top spot by Jeff Buckley’s ver­sion. And this is exactly why in ten years from now, we’ll prob­ably still be plagued by whatever poison it is that the Black Eyed Peas hap­pen to be churn­ing out. Not Muse though, they’ll have run out of Blon­die tunes by then.