I think Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' must be one of the most covered songs ever. It's a great track, even if the arrangement is dead cheesy, and Cohen's subwoofer-murdering voice just makes it. However, the best version - universally acknowledged, this is - was Jeff Buckley's cover from Grace. Buckley took it to a different level, changed some of the verses and lyrics around, and transformed it to this work of perfect art, along the same lines as Hendrix did with Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower', and to a lesser extent, Slayer did with 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida'. Rufus Wainwright's version - as heard in SHREK - is alright, but nothing compared to Buckley's.

Why am I talking about this? You see, in England there's this TV show called The X-Factor. Basically, a bunch of singing hopefuls go on there and audition, and if they get through to the final and win, they get a £1m record contract. A bit like American Idol for the yanks out there. In any case, it's terrible viewing (although occasionally watchable in a car-crash kind of way), the smarmy judges are horribly mean to most of the contestants, and in the process, thousands of great songs are murdered by people "interpreting" them. Oh, and the public votes for the winner, which is never a good thing.

The latest winner is someone called Alexandra Burke, who I suppose has a perfectly decent voice, even if she does just sound like a knock-off Whitney. But her winning song was a cover of 'Hallelujah', which has now winged its way to being the fastest download ever. And here comes my point: this is a fairly decent singer making money - and the access to make more music on a regular basis - through a soulless rendition of a great, great song. If you ask the average person on the street, they'll go 'Jeff who?' but if you mention the song, they'll no doubt go into hysterics about how great a singer Alexandra is, already up there with the greats like Westlife, Girls Aloud and S Club 7. Grr. This just makes me a tad angry. Why can't they fuck up bad songs? Why can't the world's fastest selling download be a shit cover of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'?