When I was very young there was once a charity drive on our local radio station. (It was BFBS, which will get too confusing, but anyway.) Someone paid to have “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, HaHa” [just the soundtrack on that link] played something like every 15 minutes, and challenged people to top his payment for charity to get it taken off. Then he would come back and pay even more. And so on. It was rather profitable.
Maybe they could have tried something similar at Children In Need when Jordan (aka Katie Price) er, “sang” her duet with Peter Andre, her husband, who actually can sing.(*: see update below: I’m starting to think it isn’t her in this first one.) So thank you YouTube for giving us, first, the Katie Price er, “duet” with Peter Andre (he’s the one who can sing):
and then the one where, if I’m not much mistaken, the feed from her microphone has been directed to /dev/null (it’s a technical studio term meaning “the bin”) and someone who can sing without scaring cats and peeling paint off walls takes over… or else, someone has dubbed their own caterwaul on, and uploaded it to YT as the fake (IOW, I was much mistaken):
I mean that must be it. Not even an autotuner could manage that – could it?
Anyway, why didn’t they play the real thing and then tell people that unless they coughed up, they’d put them on, unadulterated, again?
Update: Chris’s comment below suggests that it’s not Jordan in the *fake*, and just some random person having a laff who has overdubbed their own yowling. This has a ring of truth to it; pranksters abound, and mixing software is cheap, not to say free. Plus even if you had the chutzpah of KP, would you really get up on stage and do such a high-profile duet knowing you can’t hack it?
No, I’ll do a total reverse ferret (do a search on ‘ferret’ in the copy to find it) on this, and say now that I think she’s the one singing in tune. But we’ll await a definitive answer, just as we do for that mythical tape of Linda McCartney singing along in the mixing room to Hey Jude. If you’ve got that one, drop it by..
Monday 4 December 2006 at 11:06 am
Now look what you made me do. Not only did I have to endure one of the blandest songs ever put to tape – assembled from the offcuts of the guff that gets played at weddings – I ended up playing bits of Jordan interviews trying to work out whether it’s her or not.
And, I’m not convinced it is. Unless she’s suddenly acquired the estuary puffa-girl lisp (“a dathslin’ plaiths”), this is someone else. At the end, it sounds as though there are two girls singing her part. And, the lip sync is completely off (it looks right in the ‘official’ version), but that could be down to the encoding for YouTube.
Fake Jordan’s bad singing? Who would do such a dastardly thing? Form an orderly queue, please.
Tuesday 5 December 2006 at 7:04 pm
Damn…I wasn’t quick enough and the video has been taken off of YouTube now!
Tuesday 12 December 2006 at 10:36 pm
OK, just heard the Katie Price/Peter Andre duet on the Royal Variety performance and I’m not so sure the top video was faked. Sounded quite a lot like the RV performance to me.
Wednesday 13 December 2006 at 10:45 pm
gan – you mean, she sings like turpentine? Aww, it’s getting too complicated to reverse ferret the reversed ferret. Pity that they couldn’t make it to Jonathan Ross’s studio on Saturday. They could have solved it all by doing a live chunk.
Perhaps Friday’s chat show?
Sunday 28 January 2007 at 10:54 am
“…just as we do for that mythical tape of Linda McCartney singing along in the mixing room to Hey Jude.”
sorry to burst your bubble, whomever you are (i stumbled across your blog), but i used to have that sound clip and it was far from mythical. linda wasn’t in a “mixing room” – she was onstage with wings. a snarky engineer isolated her voice on “hey jude” because a lot of fans resented that paul put linda in his band, both singing, playing, and writing songs. there was a lot of gossip as to her not doing any of that. i assume one of their sound engineers had had enough and isolated her voice, on the sly, during concert.
so, unfortunately, the rumors proved to be true. linda simply was tone deaf. once the internet became capable of sending wav files, linda’s tape eventually made the email rounds (most likely around the world several times). i used to have it saved – probably still do somewhere on disk. god knows, i sent the damn thing to everyone in my address book, too.
nothing mythical about that tape. but if linda helped paul do what he did best – sing, perform, write, then that was fine with me.