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Cool choices: Barack Obama has chosen Sam & Dave's Hold On, I'm Comin' and Stevie Wonder's Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours

'Seasick' Steve Wold: 'I'm getting hip'

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David Smyth asks which US presidential candidate has the best tunes and highlights the hobo set to play a gig at the Royal Albert Hall.

ROCK THE WHITE HOUSE

Pop and politics never make easy bedfellows - but after Super Tuesday, with the race for the White House still too close to call, the presidential primaries could yet come down to who's got the best campaign music.

Republican favourite John McCain bounded onto his podium on Tuesday night, celebrating his strong lead to the rousing strains of comeback classic Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky) - but the other candidates have been more original.

Barack Obama has justified his status as the choice of young people by choosing the coolest tunes, including Hold On, I'm Comin' by Sam & Dave, Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours by Stevie Wonder (surely jumping the gun a bit) and a more recent song in the shape of Ben Harper's Better Way, with its bongos, droning sitars and lines including, "You have a right to your dream and don't be denied".

However, he probably didn't endorse the YouTube hit I Got a Crush ... on Obama by Obama Girl, in which a barely dressed R&B singer writhes beside his posters and sings, "So I put down my Kerry sign/Knew I had to make you mine".

Surprisingly, Hillary Clinton is the one who made the biggest deal out of her campaign song, encouraging a public vote on her website and announcing the result via a cringe-making YouTube video parodying the Sopranos finale.

"Everybody in America wants to know how it's gonna end," says husband Bill, somehow managing to be upstaged by a bowl of carrot sticks. Sadly, the winner turned out to be Céline Dion schmaltz-a-thon You and I, a song with lyrics so basic George W Bush could have written them: "You and I were meant to fly/Higher than the clouds we'll sail across the sky".

Still, at least it sticks to vague, uplifting promises. In the past, politicians have made mistakes by failing to listen to the lyrics. In 1984 Ronald Reagan famously used Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA without realising that the song is about his country's poor treatment of Vietnam veterans.

Extreme Left- wingers Massive Attack's Man Next Door was used by William Hague at the 2000 Conservative Party conference, despite containing the lines, "And he gets me down/He gets in so late at night/Always a fuss and fight". The band retaliated with a statement saying, "How dare they use our music to promote their bullshit?".

Most musicians aren't as keen to find themselves aligned with political partiesas D:Ream, whose biggest hit Things Can Only Get Better was the sound of Labour's 1997 landslide.

Unfortunately, politicians often don't ask first. In 2004, Fatboy Slim created a stink for Labour by noisily disapproving when they wanted to play his track Right Here, Right Now at their party conference. In 1996, US Republican candidate Bob Dole changed the lyrics of Soul Man to (go on, have a guess ... ) Dole Man, without mentioning it to Sam & Dave's people. He failed to defeat Bill Clinton.

Nevertheless, the rows of today are tame when you consider Little Mac! Little Mac! You're the Very Man, the campaign song composed by Stephen C Foster for Abraham Lincoln's Democratic opponent George McClellan in 1864: "Democrats, Democrats, do it up brown/Lincoln and his Nigger-heads won't go down", runs the second verse. It almost makes Céline Dion sound acceptable.

HOBO HOMES IN ON THE ALBERT HALL

The Royal Albert Hall has just announced it will play host this autumn to a bearded pensioner in dungarees who sits on a rickety chair, plays a battered old guitar and stamps on a box. "Seasick" Steve Wold, a nomadic bluesman, travelled between last year's music festivals sleeping in a van at service stations. Now he's a hot ticket.

As a young man he was a hobo, riding railroads and picking fruit for cash. In later years he has raised five children, worked in recording studios and lived in 57 different homes with his wife of 26 years. This week Dog House Music, his second album of raw, punky blues, went silver in the UK despite having been recorded in a kitchen.

The Californian now lives in a farmhouse studio near Norwich where he is recording his third, and tells me that belated stardom will not change him. "This country has adopted me. I haven't even played in America since the late Nineties," he says. "I was kind of retired before, so now I'm just happy to have a job."

KT Tunstall was his unlikely duet partner at a recent Astoria show. He promises more of his new mates will join him at the Albert Hall. "I didn't know who any of these young folks were before, but now I've met them at all those festivals, I'm getting hip."

He adds: "I don't reckon this second wind is gonna last long. But I'll just keep on making hay while the sun's shining."

• 1 October (020 7589 8212, www.royalalberthall.com.)

NEW ON THE NET

• Those who miss the husky-voiced charm of Cerys Matthews's solo albums since she sold her soul to celebrity mag hell will enjoy meeting her mate Dawn Kinnard, a Pennsylvania preacher's daughter who sings midnight blues in equally gravelly tones. Her excellent debut album, The Courtesy Fall, is in the iTunes store this week, more than a month before its full release.

• In between buying flowers and chocolates this Valentine's Day, do stop by a download store to pick up the new single from heartbroken Scots Glasvegas. They sound like the Proclaimers let loose in Phil Spector's studio and have an impressively dark sense of humour - their 14 February hit is called It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry.

• Welsh torch singer Duffy's impressive emergence looks set to turn into full-blown stardom with the release of her soulful next single Mercy. It's not out until 25 February but the video is already available to download in the iTunes store.

 

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