1998 All Saints: Under The Bridge/Lady Marmalade

A double A side of signature tunes from Labelle ('Lady Marmalade') and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers ('Under The Bridge') makes an odd choice of bedfellows for any act to cover in one bite without raising eyebrows and/or hackles, let alone a skinny all girl group from North London. Previously a counter culture, anti-anthem confessional of drug abuse for the lost and lonely, 'Under The Bridge' is neutered to an extent by the omission of the original last verse (that specifically deals with drug taking) which shifts emphasis slightly to cast the song in an everyman light of personal loss. Maybe, but whatever the intentions, it falls short; the harmonised "I don't ever wanna feel like I did that day" is broken on the wheel and cast as a requiem to a thousand bad hair days while the girls tut tut their way through the lyric at the inconvenience of it all. The recurring guitar riff tries to keep things scuzzy, but its nod to grimier origins is a halfway house too short. More misguided than brave in its ‘grown up Spice Girls’ attempt at street cred maybe, but trying to ‘pop’ this up was a bad mistake.

The party vibe of 'Lady Marmalade' should have made for a safer bet, but even en-masse these saints were never going to top Patti Labelle's sexy, sweat funk vocal (she wasn't the first to record it, but such was her performance that it's damn near definitive). So rather than try, the verses are simply re-written over a one louder groove to inject a more direct shot of the sort of sauce and raunch ("Do you fancy, ah, hitting the sack? That's my kitty cat") Patti could imply in this tale of New Orleans prostitutes by a simple growl. It almost does the job of compensating, but the girl's dead eyed vocals are formidably flat enough to not give an inch of a helping hand so the pot never comes to the boil - "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir"? No thanks ladies. It takes no small effort to spread yourself too thinly over just two songs, but this pairing is a triumph of ambition over talent that never pays off. The biggest surprise is that someone, somewhere must have imagined that it would.