Your band/solo act was coming along nicely. You’d worked through those tough years of playing crappy bars to audiences made primarily of your mates, gathered a bit of a following and started playing support slots to bigger bands. You may have released an EP or possibly even an album with a single that got a bit of attention from an indie station who claimed you as being the “next big thing” before lumping you somewhere in the tens of thousands of CDs in their library, along with all the other “next big things”.

Now you’re sort of stuck. After battling through the initial indifference of the musical public you’ve managed to find yourself a niche. The problem is that this niche is not what you were looking for. No one reaches the point where they’re playing support to a mid-level international band who can sell out a mid-level venue and says “I’ve made it”.

You’re not necessarily unhappy, but the tell-tale signs of not having “made it” are definitely there. There are people singing along to your tracks but they’re your mates. You might pick up someone working at the bar the night you play there but you sure as shit don’t have groupies. You’re still paying for your own cocaine. The little things that separate rock stars from people in a band.

So what do you do? Keep on keeping on until someone notices what a hardworking and therefore reliable band you are? Show up early and stay late at your own shows without requesting overtime? Write the most brilliant song of your career and take the music world by storm with its breath-taking simplicity and yet utterly staggering genius?

No, it’s far easier than any of that – start performing a cover. But not just any cover – a wussy cover of a well-established song.

It’s one of the most consistent ways of pushing an act from being an up-and-coming, “someday” band to the kind that have sweaty, overweight men lugging their equipment on and off the stage for them.  Or, if you’re already the kind of band successful enough to have a roadie or two, it’ll be the song that transitions you from high rotation on indie radio to being on an iPod commercial.

Just look at these four classic examples.

4. Boy and Bear – “Fall at Your Feet”

Forming in 2009, Boy and Bear were that classic, hardworking indie band etching out a living for themselves in Sydney. They wrote well crafted, harmonic pop songs with a lot of heart. They got some attention from Triple J, which led to attention from Nova and eventually a record deal with Universal.

But, even with the backing of a major record label, their debut EP managed a peak of 63 on the ARIA charts. Not exactly a failing but hardly the earth-shattering debut they may have hoped for.

Then in 2010 they were asked to contribute to the Finn Brothers tribute album “He Will Have His Way”. Though the whole album was made up of covers, Boy and Bear’s “Fall at Your Feet” was the stand-out track, with some beautiful harmonies and a none-too-offensive re-working of the song’s structure.

Boom. Number 5 on the Triple J Hottest 100 for 2010 and when they released their debut album in August 2011 it peaked at number 2 on the ARIA albums charts.

3. Ryan Adams – “Wonderwall”

After bursting on to the scene with his acclaimed debut album “Heartbreaker”, Adams followed up with his still-biggest-selling album “Gold”. Then he hit something of a rut.

Adams continued to churn out songs at the prolific rate one would expect of a man who has released 13 albums in 11 years but his record label, Lost Highway, felt his music was “too sad” to be commercially viable. Lost Highway refused to release Adams’ fourth studio album “Love is Hell” unless Adams gave them a commercially viable album to release as well.

Adams went away for two weeks and came back with “Rock n Roll”, an album Lost Highway were happy to release and therefore they also released “Love is Hell”. But rather than as an album, “Love is Hell” was split in to two parts and released as EPs.

The fifth track of “Love is Hell part I” was a cover of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”. And holy shit, didn’t that cause a stir.

Adams’ cover appeared on “The O.C.”, “Cold Case” and recently “90210” and features on the game “Guitar Hero World Tour”. It gained Adams his first, and only, Grammy award nomination for “Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance”.

Perhaps most significantly, it was well received by one of the most notoriously self-absorbed and prickly individuals in the music industry (no, not Adams himself) the man who wrote the song, Noel Gallagher. Gallagher said of Adams’ cover, “I never got my head round this song until I went to [see] Ryan Adams play and he did an amazing cover of it.” Subsequently, Noel’s live versions of “Wonderwall” now have a distinctly Adamsesque feel to them.

2. Jeff Buckley – “Hallelujah”

Perhaps the quintessential cover. Ask anyone to name an amazing cover and people will give you someone who does Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” brilliantly. It’s the go-to song on any singing talent show when a person is in the bottom two and facing elimination – just belt out “Hallelujah” and show people how deep your soul is. It’s a song about King David and the chorus is a word that means “praise God”, for fuck’s sake if you’re not getting deep on this one you deserve to be voted off.

The first notable cover of this song was actually John Cale’s version (which appears in the movie “Shrek” but, curiously, Rufus Wainwright’s version is the one on the “Shrek” OST). But there can be no doubt Jeff Buckley is the man who made this cover the worldwide phenomenon it is.

Buckley’s debut and only studio album, Grace, actually contains three covers – “Hallelujah”, “Lilac Wine” and “Corpus Christi Carol” but really, who’s heard of the other two (unless you’re a genuine Buckley fan and own perhaps the greatest and most important album of the 90’s).

While Buckley’s own tunes on his only record received a bit of attention – “Last Goodbye” pops up every so often on a movie soundtrack – it’s his great cover that stands as his legacy. It came in at number 3 in Triple J’s 2009 Hottest 100 of All Time and number 259 in Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (a much lower number but in a poll with a much higher reputation).

1. Nirvana – “The Man Who Sold the World”

The fact that Nirvana recorded this song for MTV’s “Unplugged” series provides a pretty staunch argument against the idea that it helped them become successful. This was a TV series that had showcased the likes of Paul McCartney, Mariah Carey and Eric Clapton (in which Clapton first performed the wussy cover of his own track “Layla” which was massively received and introduced Clapton to a whole new generation.)

MTV Unplugged meant you had an armada of roadies. You were no longer picking up groupies because you were married to, or in a relationship with, a model or fellow sex-bomb musician (or Courtney Love). You were not only being given your cocaine, you’d probably done a couple of stints in rehab which, as everyone knows, is the true test (price? Pffft.) of fame.

In short, if you were playing MTV Unplugged, you had “made it” as much as humanly possible.

So why are Nirvana’s efforts in New York in 1994 worthy of mentioning in the top spot? Two words – my Mum.

As far as Mums go, mine’s pretty cool. She does her best to keep up with modern music, likes to go to see bands play live and is always receptive to the music her kids give her to listen to.

But she’s still the kind of Mum who would rather listen to Jagger and Bowie’s cover of “Dancing in the Streets” than Nirvana’s “Rape Me”.

So it was a bit of a surprise when Mum went out and bought “Unplugged in New York”. Admittedly it was to give to my cousin for a Christmas present but still, she bought it because she liked it too.

And that was what “Unplugged” did for Nirvana – it crossed them over, encompassing not only mainstream popularity but also adult contemporary. It gave them the kind of accessibility which sees, once every blue moon, you flick between the local indie radio station, the mainstream station, the adult contemporary station and the golden oldies station and all of them are playing the exact same track.

“The Man Who Sold the World” is the track I chose to prove my wussy rock cover theory but the reality is almost half the album is made up of covers and the other half are softer, wussier re-workings of Nirvana’s own tracks, for which the argument could be made they are covers of themselves.

“Unplugged in New York” debuted at number 1 in the US and went to number 1 in the UK, Australia and Canada. Obviously being the first Nirvana album released after Kurt’s death contributed to the album’s stellar selling power but the softly-softly approach of the album, particularly compared with the raw grunge anger of their previous efforts, absolutely helped shift units.  

So there you go. Still struggling with being almost famous or possibly not quite famous enough? Find a track more famous than you, pick up your acoustic guitar and make people weep.

Dibs on Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”.