Now here’s the thing. I’ve just been to the pub. Just for a quick one, like. Inside there was music. And squeals of laughter. A hen night in full cry. Some fat bloke on the stage belting out a scarily loose approximation of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, reading the words off a big screen in front of him.

Aha, I thought, it’s karaoke night. Nowt wrong with that. A couple of pints later, with a couple of the hen nighters bumping’n’grinding their way through Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and the oily guy in the bobble hat lasciviously dancing in front of them threatening to be next up with My Way, I’m seriously thinking of giving Me And Bobby McGhee a go.

And then it happens. The hens collapse in a flurry of giggles to be replaced by a square-jawed bloke with silver hair and the jowelly look of one who’s halfway through a bender with Shaun Ryder and Shane MacGowan. I’m betting he’ll either go for Elvis or Van Morrison, but no, I lost that bet and he slurrily announces that tonight, Matthew, he’s going to be Johnny Cash. The pub approves, the guy cackles and for a moment I think he is Shaun Ryder. We brace ourselves. You can’t go wrong with Johnny Cash and. What’s it to be then, matey? Folsom Prison? I Walk The Line? Ring Of Fire?

Oh dear God, no, I don’t believe it, he’s gone for Hurt. Hurt. A Nine Inch Nails song which, as his extraordinary life ebbed away, Johnny Cash transformed with agonising minimalism into his own tragic death mask. And now this overwrought git in a suit stained with God knows what is yelling those desperate, heartbreaking lyrics like a leering sailor in front of a table full of drunken teenagers taking photos of each other on their mobile phones. Look, I’m not a killjoy but this whole horrible scenario needs to be terminally eradicated.

Mad men

I thought Simon Cowell and Alexandra Burke had committed the ultimate sin against music with that unspeakable X-Factor cover of the sainted Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but Hurt as a karaoke classic? Heads must roll. Maybe some sort of protection order needs to be placed on our classics. All this immediately after Bob Dylan’s unfathomable decision to allow Blowin’ In The Wind to be used in a TV ad for the Co-Op.

Je ne regrette rien, apart from this lousy ad

That’ll be the same Blowin’ In The Wind which inspired and became the soundtrack to civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam war protests then. People’s life paths were dictated by that song. Ideals were forged and a generation of rebellion was driven by that song. Is nothing sacred any more? Dylan was pretty much the last thing we could rely on as the corporate monster devours our musical heritage, gobbling it up and churning it out into a marketing tool. The world has indeed turned upside down.

It seemed like a good wheeze all those years ago when they had Ladysmith Black Mambazo flogging beans and the standard of television itself seemed to go up a notch when John Lee Hooker’s magnificent Boom Boom unexpectedly floated out of our screens selling Carlsberg lager. I can even raise a smile every time Woody Guthrie’s Car Song comes on selling Audis and Duffy’s Diet Coke ads are acceptable enough. But Nina Simone selling yoghurt, Nick Drake marketing Volkswagens and one of the best Beatles tracks (Revolution) flogging Nike? Well, it’s just plain wrong.

And whoever came up with the idea of putting those ridiculous and insulting sub-titles telling us to go to Specsavers under footage of Edith Piaf singing Je Ne Regrette Rien should be put on a rocket and sent to Planet Tacky with Simon Cowell and that bloke in the pub tonight desecrating the memory of Johnny Cash. There they might understand the real meaning of Hurt.