The Independent (London) February 18, 1990, Sunday Don't judge a record by its cover; Some call it homage, others theft. David Honigmann on the art of trying to make new hits out of old songs By DAVID HONIGMANN SINEAD O'CONNOR'S despairingly dignified rendering of Prince's song ''Nothing compares 2 U'' is still at the top of the singles chart, for what that's worth. But to many, there's still a faint whiff of dishonesty about having a hit with someone else's material. As the term ''covering'' a song implies, it involves burying the personality of the original singer. The self-deluding call this process homage. The honest admit that it's theft. We all go to concerts expecting to enjoy the odd wittily chosen cover, thrashed out in the exuberance of the moment. It's when it comes to recording them that bands slip up. Sinead O'Connor has a powerful plea of mitigation: Prince never recorded the song himself, and no one can honestly claim to have a clear mental picture of how it sounded to start off with. Previous musical raiders of the Prince songbook, however, provide object lessons in the art of the lazy cover version. Recently, Simple Minds dished up a grievous ''Sign o' the times'', and it's only a few years since Tom Jones startled Jonathan Ross with a tight-trousered reading of ''Kiss'', once again by Prince. Still, it's Simple Minds who exemplify everything that is wrong with cover versions. Prince's original is a characteristically deft single from an artist who attracts more critical admiration than outright affection, and whose albums are pretty heavy going. Apocalyptic lyrics bounce around a sparse, echoing aural landscape, inhabited for most of the time only by a repetitive drum machine pattern and Prince's taut voice. Peripheral bursts of other sounds vanish before you quite reach them. In this menacing setting, Prince can rail about the end of civilisation as if he means it. Simple Minds have their strengths, but no one could accuse them of subtlety, and the kind of hubris that drove them to impose their full-steam-ahead bombast in a nifty little number like this is what earned them their title of undisputed biggest disappointment of the decade. Even when they quieten down, a suppressed feeling hangs about their recordings, as great slabs of guitar and synthesiser lurk in the background to clog it all up again. The real objection to this exercise is that Simple Minds and Prince have nothing to do with each other. Jim Kerr, their singer, once famous primarily for dancing like a man desperately searching for a dropped contact lens, has now transformed himself into a bargain-basement Peter Gabriel. The choice of song at least fits in with their embarrassingly adolescent political sensibilities; but po-faced Glaswegians warning of children whose ''idea of fun/is being in a street gang called the Disciples/high on crack and toting a machine gun'' simply sound as if they've stayed up late for Hill Street Blues once too often. With its references to Aids and the Challenger disaster, it sounds terribly, well, 1987. Simple Minds get left holding the bathos. Why doesn't all this apply to Tom Jones's ''Kiss'' as well? Prince's record was so dry in sound that you had to tip the sand out of your speakers; delivered in a strangulated shriek of frustrated sexuality so high- pitched that attempts to sing along were doomed to end in tracheotomy. Brought down several octaves, so that you know that he knows that he can't duplicate the original, the relatively straightforward love song suits Tom Jones surprisingly well. His subtext was that he was the Prince of his generation, and, your eyebrows winched high, you could laugh along with him. The link between Tom Jones and Prince teetered on that all-important knife-edge between banality and presumption. But as the Simple Minds B-side, a wordless amble through Blake's ''Jerusalem'', cruelly demonstrates, what they are is the Emerson, Lake and Palmer of today. The joke is definitely on them. Sinead O'Connor had better make tracks; this is pretty dodgy company to be seen in.