Alexandra Burke – ‘Hallelujah’ (original) (raw)
18 December 2008
Has any song seen its stock rise so high and fall so hard as Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’? (Sorry, Leonard Cohen fans, but that’s how the world thinks of it now.) Buckley’s 1994 debut album Grace was fresh, thrilling, and the hit of ’90s student-bedsit Dublin – I was there; I can even show you the house on the Appian Way in Ranelagh where I heard it first: that was its impact. The sparse, hushed ‘Hallelujah’ wasn’t typical of the album’s sweeping, amped-up alt-folk-rock soundscape but soon became its breakout song – and then its albatross. A day didn’t go by on Grafton Street, a night in Temple Bar or a party in bedsit-land without someone wailing and bashing it out in acoustic, overwrought fashion. Other versions, including perfectly serviceable piano-led ones by John Cale and Rufus Wainwright, also found success. No song can survive such over-exposure without becoming deeply uncool and cliched; by the ’00s you’d roll your eyes at the mere mention of ‘Hallelujah’.
Ironically, the ’00s were the heyday of post-Buckley singer-songers like Damien Rice and David Gray, followed by the even bigger commercial success of mainstream iterations such as the acoustic soft rock of James Blunt’s ‘You’re Beautiful’ and the performative authenticity of Sandi Thom’s ‘I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker With Flowers In My Hair’. Like it or not, you can walk those two reviled ’00s hits back to the cult of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’. So, ‘Hallelujah’ is already damaged goods before we meet it here, pressed into further service as the winner’s single for the 2008 series of The X Factor.
This may be a result of me being jaded by Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’ for far longer than I was ever thrilled by it, but I have no problem with Alexandra Burke’s version. For one thing, what’s a more rock n’ roll thing to do with a Leonard Cohen song about tying a guy to a kitchen chair than to get unsuspecting punters to make it the Christmas number one? Also, Burke is a good singer who doesn’t wildly showboat or over-emote here. The electric guitar picking spares us the worst of gloopy Westlife balladry, and while the gospel-tinged setting is fairly literal, it’s still a choice that fits the song. And the big-choir-plus-money-note finale is just the realpolitik of these singles – but here without a climactic key change!
In fact, Alexandra Burke’s ‘Hallelujah’ is quite similar to its immediate predecessor at number one, Leona Lewis’s ‘Run’, also a cover version of an indie track by an X Factor winner. I can amuse myself here by wondering if these two Syco-released tracks were a concerted clapback at rock acts doing condescending cover versions of chart-pop hits, not to mention a trolling of humourless rock fans and their precious authenticity, in which case we may have misjudged Simon Cowell all these years. At the very least, if on some point of principle you get huffy about a pop act’s successful cover version of Jeff Buckley’s successful cover version of ‘Hallelujah’, then you don’t really care for music, do ya?
Published July 13, 2023July 16, 2023