Sharleen Spiteri was one of those mainstream talents we always were glad to hear on the radio, a pop star with personality in the voice, a tonic for histrionic X-generation warblers. But with The Movie Songbook, a covers album, the bulk of which was recorded in eight days with full orchestra at Capitol Studios in LA, Ms Spiteri has gone over to the dark side: the MOR supper club mob.
This 13-song set opens with ‘Xanadu’, originally a hit for Olivia Newton John and ELO in 1980, and a rather lovely tune it is too, if not quite lovely enough to escape the black hole suck of association with the ludicrous Robert Greenwald movie of the same name. From the ridiculous to the sublime: a version of the Gibb Brothers’ Saturday Night Fever classic ‘If I Can’t Have You’ is by far the best thing here, tailor-made for Spiteri’s sultry but soulful tones, and Paul Simon’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ is such a mysterious and magical song, there’s no way she could put a foot wrong.
But that’s as good as it gets. The rest of the record rejoices, if that’s the word, in an air of bland professionalism, arrangements that are dull xeroxes of the originals. Even songs as uncommon as Prince’s ‘Take Me With You’ sound clocked in and punched out. Rarely does Spiteri engage her imagination, and on the rare occasion she and her longtime collaborator Johnny McElhone think laterally, they exhibit such bad taste it’s shocking: Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’ is a pub rock mutton dressed as lamb, Bowie’s haunting ‘Cat People (Putting Out Fire)’ regurgitated as a Jools Holland Big Band boogie-woogie travesty.
The Movie Songbook might sound like a million dollars, but under all that gloss is little more than high-class karaoke.