Audlem v Bryan Ferry

One of the delights of Spotify is that you can access around 30,000,000 tracks of music. Having signed up only just before Christmas, your reporter's efforts in the past few weeks have hardly made a dent in that challenging number.

For reasons not hard to guess, Bryan Ferry's album Taxi, released in 1993 and a commercial and critical success when it went to Number 2 in the UK charts, was a must as it includes his rather curious version of 'Amazing Grace.'

An eminent music critic this week, reviewing Bryan Ferry's latest album, recalled the wonderful singer's 'Amazing Grace' as an embarrassing catastrophically ill-chosen cover. This had to be listened to!

Indeed, the critic Marcus Berkman, who is clearly a Ferry fan, was being too kind in his assessment. The backing seems not to belong to the song, Ferry's normally fine voice sounds almost as if he's trying to swallow the microphone in the hope that this number may never see the light of day.

Overall, the treatment is down-beat – indeed, it's almost 30 seconds longer than Audlem village's up-beat version of the same number. Hearing the two one after the other on audio – Audlem's Amazing Grace was on Spotify within a day of it being released on iTunes – is like listening to two totally different songs.

One is uplifting, the other, frankly, is not.

Even worse, in contrast to Macy's brilliant Audlem finale, the ex-Roxy Music star, with little imagination in this instance, simply allows his version to fade away.

So, there's little doubt about the winner and why Audlem's version went straight to the top of the Religious & Gospel charts. And if you don't believe this verdict, have a listen to Bryan Ferry's version on the Taxi album. We suspect you will agree.

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