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Male-female collaborations have come a long way since Sonny and Cher - from the sublime (as with Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue's brilliant duet "Where the Wild Roses Grow") to the ridiculous, represented by Alex James and Betty Boo's new venture under the name WigWam. The 1990s pop starlet and the Blur bassist-about-town have been throwing their ironic weight around the media lately, talking about everything from Girls Aloud to Bulgakov.
Call me a cynic, but projects that are honed quite so deliberately in their cultured postmodernism are worthy of more than a little suspicion, not least because their debut single - also called "WigWam" - is, frankly, appalling.
The pairing of a gruff Y chromosome with a sweet female vocal has long been a recipe for success, however. Most famously there was 1969's combination of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, who "changed French culture with one song", as a Gallic friend of mine put it - the song in question of course being "Je t'aime . . . moi non plus".
More recent examples abound, the aforementioned duet between Cave and Minogue representing a perfect unison of the sinister and the divine. Taken from Cave's album Murder Ballads, the song tells a really rather unpleasant tale of death and destruction, brimming with ill-concealed misogyny that is difficult to forgive in theory. In practice, however, Kylie singing "And the last thing I heard was a muttered word/As he stood smiling above me with a rock in his fist" at the song's grim conclusion is an impeccable pop moment.
All the above are available on iTunes.
The grime crossover star Kano has performed a number of great duets with the honey-voiced R'n'B singer known as Katie (sometimes KT); their track "Leave Me Alone", recorded with DaVinChe, is a brilliant reworking of the classic "boy pursues, girl withdraws" formula. Available from www.karmadownload.com for 99p, the badinage on this is sublimely involving.
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