The Zutons saw Amy Winehouse’s ‘Valerie’ cover as a gift from god
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(Credits: Alamy)
Dave McCabe, who fronts The Zutons, has reflected on Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson’s cover of their song ‘Valerie’, deeming it a “gift from god.”
The Zutons singer holds no bitterness about the success ‘Valerie’ brought to Winehouse and Ronson. Rather, he noted how grateful he and the band were for the traction it brought them in turn, and for how it “immortalised” the song.
“The way I see it, it was like a gift from god and I was there to receive it,” he told Radio X, “The band was there to receive it… and some people are like, ‘Were you pissed off when she took your song?’ And I was like, ‘Well not really, because she just immortalised the whole thing.’”
Winehouse and Ronson’s version of the track earned them a number two spot on the UK charts in 2007, and remains well-loved over 16 years later. “It was a big song anyway,” McCabe acknowledged, “but that just took it to this whole new level.”
“I think it’s in the Top 10 of karaoke songs,” he added, “I’ve walked past boozers and you can hear people singing it and it’s like, we wrote that in that little room in town and here it is now.”
The frontman maintains that he doesn’t have “any bad feeling about it” now, despite having some trouble with people asking about money over the years. The success of the single also overshadowed the band’s third album, You Can Do Anything, in 2008.
“At the time it did my head in,” he recalledn, “because we made a pretty weak third album after it and no one was asking about the songs on that, do you know what I mean? It’s just one of those song’s though. It’s its own entity. It’s in the ether.”
Revisit Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson’s take on The Zutons’ ‘Valerie’ below.
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