There's a phrase that needs to be chucked on the back of a lorry and driven up and down Kensington High Street, the UK music industry's very own 'Golden Mile', and that phrase is: IT MIGHT BE BRANDED CONTENT BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT NEEDS TO BE TOTAL SHIT.
In theory, an Exciting New Partnership between Paloma Faith and Skoda shouldn't really be anything other than arse-clenchingly awful but actually, do you know what, they've come up with something quite good.
In short:
- Paloma's covered Make Your Own Kind Of Music, a song that's half a century old this year and is probably as good as Dancing Queen would be if Dancing Queen hadn't been played so much in so many awful situations that the very sound of it makes you want to sit in a corner and cry, and not in the good Dancing On My Own way, in the very bad 'why am I hearing this song again' way.
- So anyway she's covered Make Your Own Kind Of Music, in partnership with Skoda. The song was released a week or two ago.
- IT'S ACTUALLY A GOOD COVER VERSION. Fairly elegant where it needs to be, slightly banging where it needs to be, in and out in 2:44.
- There were probably all sorts of terrible meetings about how, like, Skoda is a great choice of car these days, and if people only followed their own intuition and didn't worry about what other people thought, they'd all buy Skodas. And in a way that's a bit like making your own kind of music and singing your own special song, isn't it? Even if the song in question is called Yes I Am Driving A Skoda, I Know What You're Thinking But I Don't Care Because It Was (Very Reasonably Priced).
- Look the point is that the song was probably chosen for reasons it's best not to think about but IT'S A REALLY GOOD SONG and PALOMA FAITH HAS DONE A PRETTY GOOD JOB ON IT ACTUALLY.
- Because car companies have more money than record companies, Paloma's also shot a video, which turned up online yesterday.
- Amazingly, the video isn't shit either! It opens with a sequence reminiscent of the legendary-if-not-for-quite-the-right-reasons Lady Gaga Is Over promo clip from 2013; this time round, you hear people talking about Paloma Faith. "Why on earth would she go out like that?" "She sounds like a three-year-old." "She really does need some singing lessons." "She's just a bit desperate." "She can't sing." And then Paloma sings a song about doing things your own way, and there are shots of a young Paloma trying to hand out flyers and performing for a bored music industry 'exec', and you think, actually Paloma, too fucking right, you just carry on doing what you're doing because actually you're better at it than most of the other wankers out there and if it takes a car ad to bring all that into total focus then so be it.