So, while I was at university (and for a couple of impoverished years thereafter) I was a full-time musician. I don’t talk about it much because, well, it didn’t really work out in the end and I turned to videogame writing instead.

Yeah, this was my best fall-back. Sheesh.

Anyway, I did a fair few vocal and guitar sessions during that period and worked with some ace producers many of whom I’m still friends with. About six weeks ago I got a call out of the blue from one of them asking if I’d be willing to do a last minute vocal session for him.

Universal, he explained, was putting together a compilation album of famous songs from film and TV. Where possible with these things the record company attempts to use the original recording by approaching the artist to seek their permission.

However, if an artist refuses to allow their version to be included on the album for whatever reason, the record company will seek out a producer who can start from scratch to recreate it as near as possible. The idea is that the average listener won’t be able to tell the difference between the original and the version they’re hearing on the record and, very often, the results are astounding.

It’s tough work for the producers commissioned to do this stuff, requiring through the night hours and a weighty contact book of vocalists they know who sound like other people. To cap it all off, their role is to recreate the work of producers before them with such skill and meticulous mimicry as to be invisible. In fact, the better they are at their job the less likely their work is to be noticed. There’s an interesting list to be made of people whose jobs consist of striving for perfect anonymity.

Anyway, my friend was calling me because he figured I sound a bit like Jón Þór Birgisson, the vocalist from Icelandic post-rock group, Sigur Rós. He requested I record a line from their single Hoppipolla to establish if his hunch was right.

I did and he was and ten minutes later the studio was booked. The next few days I did my best to learn Icelandic or, at least to approximate Birgisson’s lyrics in this particular song (which, it turns out are super-twee when translated to English). And now, six weeks later, the album’s for sale on play.com and Zavvi so housewives everywhere can add musical drama and meaning to their daily school commute. The text on the album reads: ‘Over Two Hours of Pure Chillout’. Hmm

There’s a slim kind of symmetry here. I’ve always liked Sigur Ros (which was possibly grounds for declining the session) and literally the first thing I wrote on this site was some horrible pretentious gush about their newly released ‘mainstream’ album at the time, Takk.

Before that release the group was resolutely niche (all previous albums were sung in a made up language), and it was only the plastering of Hoppipolla all over the BBC’s Planet Earth series that booted them firmly out of the record collections of indie snobs and onto Tesco store shelves the country over.

So yeah. There I sit, first track on the second disc, right after Karl Jenkins, OBE, singing a song by a band who I love a bit, who probably didn’t really want me to sing their song a bit. I’m not really sure how I feel about that but, either way, life’s really weird sometimes…

Here’s an iTunes link to the track if you’re interested.