As the age of popular music repetitively plays itself out, songwriters are forced into spirals of pastiche, dipping into the back catalogue to face ever-diminishing variations on the same old themes. Even from the once programmatically experimental jazz world, a new group of singer-songwriters has emerged - Jamie Cullum, Amy Winehouse and Gwyneth Herbert among them - who, subsumed by this regurgitative culture, are sacrificing themselves to cover versions. Having grown up surrounded by extensive record collections and remastered classics, their tastes are far reaching. Yet their choice of repertoire does little justice to the scope of their genuine musical ability.
Gwyneth Herbert's forthcoming album, Bittersweet and Blue, is a case in point. At 23, Herbert is a precocious talent. Signed to the Universal Classics and Jazz label, her influences defy traditional generic boundaries, passing through folk, rock, country and pop. That a record company can at last countenance such eclecticism has been credited to US vocalist Norah Jones, whose 17m-selling second album Feels Like Home combined nuances from all the major singer-songwriter genres into a single, cozy mood.
Herbert, too, flirts with intimacy, but she can play cabaret dominatrix just as well. From the orchestral urgency of her Portishead cover "Glory Box" to the cocktail drama of "Fever," her vocal textures conjure any number of predecessors - from Helen Reddy to Randy Crawford. Her own compositions, meanwhile, like the contrapuntal beauty of the Nick Drake-inspired title track, "Bittersweet and Blue," reveal her as a natural folk singer.
But it is the half dozen karaoke classics like "Fever" which constitute the body of the album and which are, for someone of Herbert's range, entirely misplaced. "Every Time We Say Goodbye" and "Almost Like Being in Love" are now so overplayed that the only domain in which they can decently exist is that of advertising. Does the world really need another version of Ray Noble's "The Very Thought of You" or Cole Porter's "It's Alright With Me?" Even the slightly leftfield selection - Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" and Tom Waits's "The Heart of Saturday Night" - appears over-familiar among this crowd of bores. Commercially, this phenomenon of old-hat-with-new works well, as proven by Herbert's labelmate Jamie Cullum. Like a Radio 2 playlist, his quirky versions of "Singing in the Rain" and "What a Difference a Day Made," mixed with chic Buckley covers and original compositions, have cross-generational appeal, and have helped him sell half a million copies of his album Twentysomething. Cullum, who is an all round multi-instrumentalist, is genuinely passionate about his material (amusingly, the titles of his first two records were You've Heard It All Before and Pointless Nostalgic), but his love for Miles Davis or Tom Waits is equal to that of Nirvana or Public Enemy. Knowing how short the runway is out of the jazz world, Cullum is just as likely to return with an album of hip hop beats or slashing guitar chords as with big band arrangements of wartime classics.
Herbert's own passion for music is beyond question, as many will discover when she opens the London jazz festival at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in November. Billed - incredibly - as someone who "mixes unusual covers and self-penned songs," there is something cynical about her replication of the Cullum formula, even if she did compile the album with genuine enthusiasm. Both Cullum and Herbert would do well to pursue their own song-writing careers further. Herbert's partnership with co-writer Will Rutter may enable her to cast off the congress of American accents which currently muffle her voice. Meanwhile, in the absence of anything better, it seems our lot to enjoy the least inspiring music in the best possible way.
Bittersweet and Blue is released on 27th September
