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[Mairi]

I think we all can agree that anything by William Shatner or the Kidz Bop kids is awful. But aside from that, are there any other cover songs that stuck out as being really terrible in your mind? Here are some that I thought were pretty bad:

Imagine (John Lennon)- A Perfect Circle
Behind Blue Eyes (The Who)- Limp Bizkit
Sweet Child Of Mine (Guns N Roses)- Sheryl Crow
I'll Stand by You (The Pretenders)- Girls Aloud or The Cheeky Girls or whoever the f*** it was who covered that... that is not even my favorite Pretenders song, but ugh.
American Pie (Don McLean)- Madonna
Satisfaction (Rolling Stones)- Britney Spears
These Boots Are Made For Walkin' (Nancy Sinatra)- Jessica Simpson. AaaaarrGH!

[Sondra]

Imagine-Madonna...ick
Sweet Child O' Mine-Sheryl Crowe...ick again
Enter Sandman-Pat Boone...
Across the Universe-Fiona Apple
Another Brick in the Wall part II-Korn
Something-Frank Sinatra??
You Shook Me All Night Long-Celine Dion!

[Mairi]

BTW, has anyone heard Paul Anka's covers of It's My Life (Bon Jovi) and Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)?

He remade a bunch of '80s and '90s rock songs in swingy Sinatra style. Gag me.

paul ankas version of smells like teen spirit is hilarious

[Taxgirl]

Most cover songs are f***ed up... I hate "Let the sunshine in" from Hair the most, an awful cover of a brilliant song.

[Indica]

Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds - William Shatner.





oh




dear.

[Crazy Diamond]

Avril Lavigne - Chop Suey

[lennonlemon]

My Generation covered by Hilary Duff takes the cake for worst cover song EVER!!!

She even took the liberty of changing the lyrics from "hope I die before I get old" to "hope I don't die before I get old" which derogates the message of the song completely.

[Joost]

Across the Universe-Fiona Apple

That's actually hands down my favorite Beatles cover ever...

[Joost]

Worst cover is probably Everlasting Love by Jamie Cullom (sp?).

[lennonlemon]

That's actually hands down my favorite Beatles cover ever...

My favorite would have to be Jeff Beck's cover of She's A Woman. I always liked the guitar on She's a Woman and Beck's style I thought really added an interesting spin on it and made the guitar flow smoother.

The best part is the fact that it's an instrumental which means you don't have to listen to those silly lyrics for once.

Most horrible batch of covers has to be Rod Stewart's interpretations of the old Standards.

[Mairi]

I didn't like his cover of Smile at all... he totally missed the underlying sadness of the lyrics.

[Sondra]

My Generation covered by Hilary Duff takes the cake for worst cover song EVER!!!

She even took the liberty of changing the lyrics from "hope I die before I get old" to "hope I don't die before I get old" which derogates the message of the song completely.

Pete Townshend should take one of his heaviest guitars and smash it right over her annoying no-talent head. Changing the words to hope i DON'T die! That's so typical of a vapid, self indulged, shallow litttle twit who has no clue about what he was trying to say. Of course she wants to 'live forever', she has no teenaged angst or any sort of real life experience at all. Ugh.

[Sondra]

That's actually hands down my favorite Beatles cover ever...

Really? She sounds like she's half asleep. It just comes off so effected to me. I don't know what she was going for.

In the movie "The Freshman" with Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick, Bert Parks (former Miss America pageant host) does part of Bob Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" that is so bad, its awesome. One of my favorite movie bits.

[john.k.walker]

About 25 years ago a cool (though, I believe, now defunct) music magazine called Transatlantic Trouser Press had just this same readers poll, with Van Halen sweeping the awards with their putrid covers of "Oh Pretty Woman," "Dancing In the Street," "You Really Got Me," etc.

[Sondra]

I love the Van Halen covers! Especially Pretty Woman! Oh well.

[Brynjar]

Atomic Kitten - Eternal Flame
Westlife and Mariah Carey - Against All Odds
All Saints - Under The Bridge
Sean Connery's spoken word version of the Beatles 'In My Life'
Britney's "I Love Rock 'n Roll" was a tragic event.
Jessica Simpson - Angels

Also from The Obsever:

The ten worst cover songs

Call it hubris or a lack of imagination: some bands feel compelled to cover other artists' songs. Regrettably, the results are, more often than not, appalling. Here are the worst reworkings in living memory

Graeme Thomson
Sunday October 17, 2004
The Observer


1. Duran Duran '911 Is A Joke'

Do you applaud the ambition or mock the utterly misplaced audacity? Well, the latter, naturally. Duran Duran's mid-Nineties covers album Thank You turned out to be a backhanded compliment: acknowledging their influences (Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan) while simultaneously massacring them. Their tilt at Public Enemy in particular ticked all the required boxes. Pale, middle-class art-school ponces from Brum tackle a rap about the tardiness of US ambulance drivers responding to emergency calls in black ghettos, with predictably ludicrous results: 'Every day they don't never come correct,' whines Le Bon. 'You can ask my man right here with the broken neck' (who's that, Simon, yo' bro' Nick Rhodes?). Shockingly misconceived in both theory and execution.

2. Ronan Keating 'Fairytale Of New York'

King Karaoke is welcome to auto-emote his way through the songbook of Bryan Adams, but Keating shamefully reduced Shane MacGowan's epic Broadway tussle to the aural equivalent of a trip round Asda with his gran. He changed the line: 'You cheap, lousy f**got' to 'you're cheap and you're haggard' because he 'wouldn't want to offend anyone'. He failed.

3. Frank Sinatra 'Something'

Not just because Sinatra would introduce George Harrison's classic as the work of 'two kids called Lennon and McCartney'; or that he was always oddly unconvincing handling material that held any kind of contemporary resonance. It's simply that in the bridge, he's singing to someone called Jack. 'You stick around, Jack, she might show,' he roars. What on earth is going on? And who is Jack? We will never know.

4. UB40 &Amp; Robert Palmer 'I'll Be Your Baby Tonight'

Not Dylan's greatest song by any means, but it didn't deserve this. Above a tinny synthesised beat which displays all the roots reggae warmth of Terminal A at Luton Airport, Ali Campbell's piggy whine meshes with the distracted mutter of Robert Palmer - who sings as if he were double parked, patting his pockets for his car keys - in the most horrific fashion. Nauseating.

5. David Bowie 'God Only Knows'

Bowie rarely excels on other people's material; his talent is too singular, too angular. Here, he takes the most exquisitely crafted meditation on the marriage of spiritual and earthly love and proceeds to sleepwalk through it as though he were reading out telegrams at a wedding. As a pointer to how detached Bowie was from his instincts back in 1984, look no further.

6. M People 'Itchycoo Park'

Never has the claim that 'it's all too beautiful' been quite so misguided. Listening to this is like looking for a distant beauty spot while a sheep repeatedly farts in your face, the rowdy grandeur of the original replaced with M People's antiseptic faux soul. Then there's that horrible foghorn voice which some equate with passion rather than poor technique.

7. Johnny Cash 'Danny Boy'

Criticising Cash these days is akin to dissing Gandhi, but truthfully, the Man in Black only ever had two songs: the fast one and the slow one. Towards the end, producer Rick Rubin would shamelessly prop Cash in front of material which explicitly referenced his desperately failing health. His tuneless stab at 'Danny Boy' is awful: as saccharine and cynical as any Westlife Christmas single.

8. Atomic Kitten 'The Tide Is High'

Deciding that Blondie's version was OK, but not quite up to the punishing standards the Kitten set themselves, a new section entitled 'Get the Feeling' was added: 'Every time that I get the feeling/ You give me something to believe in/ Every time that I got you near me/ I know the way that I want it to be,' they trilled, evoking three Tesco shop girls making a Tannoy announcement.

9. Candy Flip 'Strawberry Fields Forever'

Ric Peet and Danny Spencer believed that one of the most sublime pieces of music ever made could be improved by a semi-simian scally whining over a cheap cymbal-and-snare racket. That it went top five at the height of the 'Madchester' cash-in craze in 1990 is evidence enough that the drugs really didn't work.

10. Kevin Rowland 'The Greatest Love Of All'

It begins with a voice in the darkness: 'It's over, no more. Mum, mum?' Oh dear. 'f***ing heavy, innit? Let it go. It's OK.' Actually, it's not. This cry for help is truly disturbing, setting pointedly rejigged lyrics and spoken self-laceration against a sickly sweet AOR backing. A caring record label would have left it in the vaults.

Making the law

After a long, dark night of the soul, much of it spent listening to Elaine Paige attacking 'Radio Ga Ga' with gusto, I reluctantly decided to ditch the kitsch stuff: Barbara Streisand's singular reading of 'Life on Mars', anything by William Shatner, Richard Harris, Mike Flowers or Gareth Gates - it all went. Because once you go down that road, there's no turning back.

Instead, I wanted artists who genuinely thought they were doing nothing wrong, who may even have believed that they were making significant improvements to the originals ('Hey, betcha Blondie wished they'd come up with our 'Get The Feeling' bridge, eh girls?'), or at least felt they were paying their respects in an appropriate manner, mano a mano.

I suspect Duran Duran applauded themselves for smashing musical boundaries after they'd cut '911 is a Joke' back in 1995, little realising that such boundaries exist precisely to prevent washed up new romantics having a pop at hip hop. Likewise, Keating surely thought his stab at the Pogues would earn him a little gravitas, instead of draining the last remaining drops of dignity from his cup.

So none of those clever covers dripping with irony and winking bad taste. Instead, I've made elbow room for the monumental cock-up made in earnest. We're talking good old-fashioned arrogance; opportunistic cynicism; bad advice; downright awful artistic judgment. It's all here. Sorry Elaine.

[Taxgirl]

Worst cover is probably Everlasting Love by Jamie Cullom (sp?).

True, really cheesy cover... :X :X