Video Of The Day: Charlotte Church [28 February 2007 Edition]

Some readers may recall Charlotte Church as the teenage Welsh ingenue with the big voice who achieved worldwide acclaim for her unique renditions of classical arias. Well, our little girl is all grow'd up now.

A couple of years ago, Charlotte decided to take her singing career in a modern BritPop direction. She released a straight-ahead pop album that achieved only modest success in Britain and was never even released Stateside.

Last fall, Charlotte decided to put her stalled music career on hold in favor of a television variety show project. The Charlotte Church Show seems to be a distant relative of American-style "late night" "talk shows", as it features a mix of sketch comedy, celebrity guests, interviews, and musical performances. The show has been only modestly successful in Britain [it's up against a popular long-established competitor] but has been renewed for two more seasons.

One feature of the show is a closing musical performance featuring Charlotte and a musical guest. In her short time on the air, Charlotte has been quite adept at getting some A- and B-list musicians to join her, and the performances are usually quite good. Trust me -- I've seen a few.

I stumbled upon the clip below on YouTube while searching around for something completely unrelated. This closing performance from the 6 October 2006 show features Alesha, who is better known in Britain as a former member of the R&B trio Mis-Teeq -- yet another BritPop fave that never caught on in the U.S. [their only Stateside hit was "Scandalous", which appeared in the dreadful Catwoman movie]. Charlotte and Alesha [and Charlotte's house band] take on The Killers's "Somebody Told Me", and the sound is...well, about what it would sound like if a Pop/R&B singer did the song on one of our "late night" shows with the house band.

I approached the clip with trepidation, but I quickly found myself digging the reworked version with the horns and female backing vocals. I also found it interesting that the women decided not to change the gender roles in the chorus ["well somebody told me, you had a boyfriend, who looked like a girlfriend, that I had in February of last year"]. Depending on your perspective of the narrative -- even the original is eyebrow-raising in its own way -- that makes the female version hotter, or weirder, or possibly both.

Because I haven't had one of these in a while, I decided to make this my Video Of The Day. Enjoy.