There have been a lot of productions which have used a sudden modulation towards the end of a song as a cheap means of squeezing out a bit of extra performance intensity, so the key-shifted final chorus repetition we get here has a good deal of precedent – but that’s about as far as things go in terms of it making any sense! For a start it shifts down a half-step, rather than up, which quite literally undermines the idea of giving the final chorus a ’lift'.

But on top of this, there’s not even the slightest musical warning or logic for the key change. The song clearly finishes with the exposed “in the back seat” vocal hook at 2:15. There’s nothing about that ending to suggest that there’s anything left to say, or any kind of build-up to indicate that there’s another iteration on its way – compared with the well-prepared modulations in, say, Abba’s 'Money, Money, Money' or Celine Dion’s 'My Heart Will Go On'. There’s not even the pure shock value of the willfully unprepared modulations in songs like Michael Jackson’s ‘Man In The Mirror’ or Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’.

And to add a further whiff of flippant disdain to the proceedings, it sounds a lot to me as if many of the parts have been simply pitchshifted down, rather than being rerecorded in the new key, undesirably compromising the sense of ‘air’ in the sound as well overlaying a distinct flavour of formant-shift on the vocal parts. If you ask me, what we’re hearing here is a song which was originally recorded and produced to completion at a duration of 2:15, but that was then somehow rejected as too short by someone in a position of power (perhaps some suit in the record company or someone behind the scenes in distribution), leading to a certain amount of last-minute scrabbling around and eventually this threadbare bodge-job that now everyone involved is trying to style out as if it were some kind of bold artistic statement.

Come off it! You’re having a laugh…