With A Little Help From My Friends - Joe Cocker

Orig. The Beatles

WRITTEN for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Lennon and McCartney always intended this to be the "Ringo'' song of the album. The music reeks of McCartney, filled with jaunty piano and layered optimistic vocals and lyrics. Just two years later, Cocker blew Ringo out of the water with his bombastic version at Woodstock. While saying Cocker is a better singer than Starr is redundant, what brings the song alive is not just Cocker's voice, but the way he sings it. His soulful reading - aided by a switch from the straight 4/4 of The Beatles version to a 3/4 waltz time approach - can be heard in every line, as if the song is bursting out of Cocker no matter how much he tries to keep it in. Cocker's band takes the dynamics of the song to new places too. Nothing quite compares musically with the lulls and crescendoes the group pulls out of a previously innocuous "Ringo'' song.

Easy - Faith No More

Orig. Commodores

THE tempo of a song can make all the difference. The original of this, released on the self-titled Commodores album of 1977, is faster than the Faith No More version but only by a few beats. It makes all the difference though, as Faith No More sound like they really are "easy like Sunday morning''. They settle into a groove that's far more relaxed and chilled than Lionel Ritchie and his Commodores achieved, which is strange when you consider Commodores were a funk band and groove should have been their stock in trade. Ritchie wrote Easy as a pop-crossover and it proved to be one of their biggest hits. Sixteen years later, it did the same thing for Faith No More, proving to be their last big hit in the US and Europe. Mike Patton's voice on the FNM version is sublime, while Jim Martin's guitar solo is faithful to the original but with a '90s edge.

Nothing Compares 2 U - Sinead O'Connor

Orig. The Family

PRINCE originally wrote this in 1981 and gave it to The Family, one of the protege bands he was Svengali-ing for, who finally released it in 1985. With former The Time bassist Paul Peterson on vocals imitating Prince, the song was a decent piece of synth-pop. But in the hands of young Irish singer Sinead O'Connor, Nothing Compares 2 U became the tortured lament it was always meant to be. With a subtly sadder twist to the melody line and a breathy, cracking vocal full of heartache, O'Connor pulls more pain from beneath the lyrics' brave front than The Family's version ever did. If you needed further proof, look at O'Connor's film clip for the song - singing from her heart and soul, O'Connor taps into the song's inner grief and anguish, causing two lonely tears to roll down her cheeks towards the video's end.

Halleluj ah - Jeff Buckley

Orig. Leonard Cohen

WITH it's funereal pace and Cohen's gothic baritone, the original of this stirring gospel-inspired track was never going to be a massive hit, despite being a stellar piece of songwriting. Numerous people have covered it, from Rufus Wainwright to UK X Factor winner Alexandra Burke. The latter took it to number one on the British charts at Christmas last year. Amazingly, Jeff Buckley's version was at number two at the same time (Cohen's version simultaneously made it to number 36) but Buckley's version is the definitive one. Whereas Cohen sounds like he's solemnly reading the lyrics straight out of the Bible, Buckley sings like he's recalling the incidents that form the verses from past tortured memories. Buckley's stratospheric vocals take the song into new angelic regions that Cohen could have only dreamed of, adding extra layers of beauty to a beautiful cover.