Kylie Minogue's people came up with a number of ploys to ensure her performance at last week's Brits was a showstopper. There was the skimpy dress and the thigh-length boots. Then there was the stir created when she sang her former number one Can't Get You out of My Head over the backing to New Order's Blue Monday. This dramatic new version had been created in secret by her record label for maximum impact. And it worked.
Minogue was cleverly cashing in on the vogue for unofficial records that mix two or three wildly different songs into a new track. No trendy London party is complete these days if the DJ doesn't play one of these illegal "mash-up", "bastard pop", or "bootleg" records. The more outrageous the combination, the better. Recent favourites include Smells Like Teen Booty (Destiny's Child mixed with Nirvana); 9lb Cock (Missy Elliot and thrash metal group Compulsion) and George Michael's Faith mixed with Missy Elliot's Get UR Freak On.
There are hundreds of these mash-ups - one observer has spotted 50 different uses of Missy Elliot's Get UR Freak On alone. Minogue's label even has plans to release her new version on a B-side. And the next single from R&B group Sugarbabes is a reworking of a bootleg that mixes an Adina Howard soul vocal with Gary Numan's Are "Friends" Electric.
London DJ Dave Dorrell has been including bootlegs in his sets since he heard Whitney Houston's I Wanna Dance With Somebody welded on to a couple of Kraftwerk tracks a year ago. Put out by mash-up pioneers Girls on Top, the sleeve even glued Houston's head on to one of Kraftwerk's bodies. "It was reappropriating pop culture from the corporate world," he enthuses.
London radio station XFM's Remix show, presented by James Hyman and Eddie Temple-Morris, has led the craze for the past two years. "It's fashion," says Hyman. "Everyone wants to be a DJ," says Temple- Morris. Remix has an avid listenership, many of whom use cheap editing software to construct their own mash-ups, which they send in. The best of them get played.
"We're getting sent bootlegs by schoolkids," says Temple-Morris, ripping open a parcel and taking out a CDR. "What's this? Slim Shady versus Primal Scream by Fast and Mikey H. And a mobile phone number."
They play me their favourites. There's the Art Garfunkel weepie Bright Eyes, cut with a breakbeat and snippets of dialogue from Watership Down. Here's Public Enemy rapping over Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. And Missy Elliot - again - over the Cure's Lovecats.
A few weeks ago Hyman and Temple-Morris played a new track by one of their favourite bootleg producers: the Freelance Hellraiser. A Stroke of Genius pitched the vocal from Christina Aguilera's R&B number Genie in a Bottle over the opening bars of Hard To Explain from the Strokes. The two songs fit together so well that the track sounds like the product of one artist.
But soon XFM received a legal notice telling them to "cease and desist" playing the record. "It worked so well," says Hyman. "It was so musical. It was the result of a sick mind, and a trainspotter's mind, and a musician's mind."
Some musical knowledge is key to understanding a mash-up such as A Stroke of Genius: to get the joke, you have to understand the references. But the British record industry is still struggling to find their sense of humour. "When you buy a CD you buy the rights to listen to it, not to change it in any way," sniffs the British Phonographic Institute's Matt Phillips. "As long as [these bootlegs] are released on CDs and they're not cleared, we'll try to stop them."
A Stroke of Genius is the only bootleg The Freelance Hellraiser has actually released: "The others I just put on CDR and use when I DJ." Aristotle defined the good metaphor as "an intuitive perception of the similarities in dissimilars". At his best, on A Stroke of Genius, or another track that sets US rapper Nelly to the theme from Grange Hill, the Freelance Hellraiser turns this into the physical. There is an angular sexuality in both The Strokes guitars and Aguilera's vocals; an exuberant child in both Nelly's bouncy raps and Grange Hill's twee melodies.
But at his most simplistic he is doing nothing a clever DJ couldn't do with two records, as he admits. "That's how it came about - I'm not the world's greatest DJ and it's a way of playing stuff no one else has got."
Bootlegger Osymyso has taken the science to a new level, along with the two video pranksters who make up the Cartel Communique. "When it's done well it is a form of art. But it's not taken seriously by those who do it," says Osymyso. His first mash-up, Pat'n' Peg, released a couple of years ago, turned the infamous EastEnders fight between Peggy Mitchell and Pat Butcher into a breakbeat dance track. It even has its own promo video - which can be seen on the Cartel Communique website (cartelcommunique.co.uk).
The site also includes the bootleg clip John's Not Mad, built around a 1989 TV documentary about a teenage Tourette's Syndrome sufferer called John Davidson. The clip cut his compulsive swearing with scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the video to the Tears for Fears hit Mad World. It is both hilarious and strangely poignant. "A few people told me they laughed and then felt guilty. Which I like," says Osymyso.
He and the Cartel Communique are anxiously awaiting the follow-up, profiling a now 29-year-old John Davidson, which is broadcast on BBC1 tonight. They are planning to update their clip. And they have been approached by Channel 4 to contribute to a new comedy show.
But as the craze, like sampling in the 1980s, is gradually legitimised, Osymyso may have sown the seeds of its destruction. His extreme new mash-up, Intro Inspection, welds more than 100 of the best-known pop intros into one constantly changing piece of music. And, like that 1980s "cheesy" DJ favourite, Stars on 45, it is, frankly, unbearable.