PLAY IT AGAIN SAM

The cover tune has been with us since the earliest days of rock 'n' roll. Brian Boyd looks at the sometimes cynical, sometimes sordid history of the practice, names the best - and demonstrates that imitation is rarely the sincerest form of flattery

This year, you've probably rightly forgotten, is the 50th anniversary of rock 'n' roll. Fifty years since Elvis sauntered into Sun studios to record what has speciously become known as the first ever rock single: That's All Right Mama, a cover version of the Arthur Crudup original.

Take a look at the charts this week and sitting pretty at number one is another cover version: Eric Prydz's Call On Me, a re-working of Steve Winwood's Valerie. The creative effort here was all used up in changing the title of the song.

The cover's the thing. Also troubling the charts this week is William Shatner's "interpretation" of Pulp's Common People, and The Beautiful South covering ELO's Livin' Thing, as well as countless other common or garden reworkings of other people's material.

It's a funny old rock 'n' roll world, where a journeyman indie musician can take a bleak existentialist drama to the top of the end-of-year charts (Gary Jules); where a talentless girlband can hit the top spot with a cover version of a cover version (Atomic Kitten's The Tide Is High); where Rolf Harris meets Led Zeppelin (the former's cover of Stairway to Heaven); where Wu-Tanger Ol' Dirty Bastard shakes hands with Phil Collins (that cover of Sussudio); and where Leningrad Cowboys join up with the Red Army Ensemble to cover the Beach Boys' California Girls (has to be heard to be believed).

It's a world where singers deliberately make mistakes in their vocal to see if the person covering the song slavishly makes the same mistakes (which is what Dionne Warwick used to do to Cilla Black); where the Scissor Sisters get death threats from Pink Floyd fans for having the temerity to cover Comfortably Numb - thereby putting The Floyd onto the dancefloor for the first time in their overlong career; where once snarly punk rockers now put their finger in their ear to cover olde Scottish folk songs (Paul Weller's Black Is the Colour); where people who know nothing about music practically wet themselves listening to Jeff Buckley covering a Leonard Cohen song (Hallelujiah); where Kylie, God love her, sings The Clash (Should I Stay or Should I Go - go please, Kylie); where the world laughs when a bunch of blokes from Birmingham wearing too much make-up cover a Public Enemy song (Duran Duran's 911 Is a Joke); and where people cover the cover version of their original song: Bob Dylan now plays Jimi Hendrix's version of his own All Along the Watchtower.

Whereas these days the cover version is inexorably linked with some witless Pop Idol tub of lard caterwauling some hoary ol' Bee Gees standard in the hope they can gatecrash the ever-widening gates of Celebrityville, the idea has an even more sinister past.

The cover version's despicable past goes back to the era of "Race Music". Rock 'n' roll was - and in many ways still is - a white man singing a black man's song. Black music was not playlisted on white radio in the US; invariably a white singer would be brought in to cover a black rock song. The white act would "cover up" the fact that the original was a black song. To put this in context, this all happened at a time (1950s and '60s) when a policy of segregation in education, transport, medicine and employment was operating in many American states.

Singer Pat Boone fashioned his whole career out of covering songs by black rock 'n' rollers, making them more palatable for middle America. Consider Little Richard's famous Tutti Frutti. A major hit, surely? No. A cover version by a white man (one Pat Boone) charted higher than the Little Richard original. As did Boone's cover of Fats Domino's Ain't That a Shame. And, while the early Beach Boys didn't technically cover Chuck Berry, their whitebread reworkings of Berry riffs were certainly "heavily influenced by ..."

Regionalism was the other huge factor in the growth of the cover. Radio in the US was such a local affair that a popular hit would be covered by different singers in different geographical areas - up to seven or eight times throughout the country. Such was the sheer amount of different covers that you can still come across old seven-inch singles with a sticker on the front which reads: "Original Cover Version".

This regional model, the exact antithesis of today's global music jukebox, was successfully transferred across the Atlantic. Burt Bacharach would give his songs to Dionne Warwick in the US, but the record company, figuring that Warwick had no profile in Britain, would get a locally recognised name (in this case, Cilla Black) to take the same song up the charts. Which is why Warwick would make deliberate mistakes on her vocal, just to see if Cilla made the same mistakes in the same place - which she did.

Such was the regional nature of music that a genre known as "swamp pop" flourished in Louisiana right up until music went global in the 1980s. All the hits of the day (whether pop, rock or country) would be re-recorded in a Cajun style for local audiences using traditional Cajun instruments, with the lyric translated into French. The contemporary version of swamp pop can be heard whenever some dance goon covers a rock/pop song using traditional breakbeats and translating the lyrics into gibberish.

The ubiquity of the cover is a reflection of its legal status. The law has it that anyone, anywhere can record any song by anybody at any time. The only thing you can't do is change any of the lyrics - but you can do what you like to the music. Record companies love them because they can break a (usually) pop act with a safe, guaranteed hit. Artists themselves don't like them too much because they don't make much money from them - all the PRS payments go to the initial songwriter.

As regionalism and race gradually disappeared from the world of the cover version, a more arty/offbeat approach was favoured. José Feliciano's flamenco-style cover of The Doors' Light My Fire is regarded as one of the first significantly radical reworkings - not, it should be noted Peter Sellers's spoken-word version of A Hard Day's Night or even Sheila B Devotion's hi-energy romp through Singin' in the Rain.

Two key recordings in the covers oeuvre are John Coltrane's startling jazz exposition of My Favourite Things and Joe Cocker's transformation of a workaday Beatles track into an impassioned screamalong With a Little Help from My Friends. The Beatles, incidentally, are the most covered band of all time, and Yesterday is the most covered song of all time.

There's no official chart for this, but the consensus seems to be that the top five most-covered songs would also include Richard Berry's Louie Louie, followed by Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird (there's more sad people out there than you think). Then you can permutate as you wish from the Bob Dylan and Abba songbooks.

Something soured with the cover in the 1970s, when various symphony orchestras had the "we're really hip to the new sound" idea of covering Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, which ushered in the dreaded Wacky! cover version: Rod Hull and Emu doing The Jesus and Mary Chain, that sort of thing.

We've tasted and tested too much: Rage Against the Machine being covered in a Las Vegas lounge-lizard style (by Lounge Against the Machine, in case you're looking for it); AC/DC being covered by a bluegrass band (Hayseed Dixie - they really exist and they're coming to Ireland); and quite possibly an Albanian mouth music cover of Mötörhead. At this rate, it can't be too long now before Radiohead record their cover of Dancing Queen.

THE BEST COVERS. . . EVER

Sonic Youth: Superstar

Art rockers meet The Carpenters and struggle for supremacy. On the original, Karen Carpenter sang sweetly about an unnamed musician; on the cover, Sonic Youth inject sleaze 'n' slime in equal measure. You can find this on the If I Were a Carpenter album, wherein a bunch of rockers take on the always underestimated Carpenters catalogue. American Music Club's cover of Say Goodbye to Love, also on the album, is a bit excellent too.

This Mortal Coil: Song to the Siren

Tim Buckley's original can never be listened to again once you've heard this stunning version. Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser now owns sole possession, courtesty of her utterly remarkable vocal performance here. From the This Mortal Coil album, It'll End in Tears, which also contains Candytalk vocalist Gordon Sharp with a sublime cover of Alex Chilton's Kangaroo.

Langley Schools Project: I Get Around

The original Beach Boys track was "fun in the sun" but, given to these rural Canadian schoolchildren, the song takes on a weirdly unsettling feeling. But in a good way. From the Outsider music album, Innocence and Despair.

Urge Overkill: Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon

This had been released a good two years before, to little notice, before Tarantino picked it up for Pulp Fiction. The only way to cover a Neil Diamond song. Pity they didn't put Red, Red Wine on the B-side.

The Beatles: Twist and Shout

First the Top Notes had a go at this, then the Isley Brothers, but it was only when the early Beatles got their mop tops around it that the song really, really soared.

Morrissey/Glenn Tilbrook: Nothing Rhymed

The Squeeze man was the first to recognise the beautiful poignancy in Gilbert O'Sullivan's song, but Morrissey soon muscled him out of the way with his own surprisingly straight-faced reworking. A live Moz staple but sadly remains unrecorded.