Sam Smith, 'Fire on Fire' review: Watership Down song sounds like it was recorded on a diet of seeds and lettuce

Smith’s bog-standard orchestral soul track is lyrically about bursting with palpitating lust, but sounds like he gave up trying to achieve arousal some hours ago

(PA)

There are numerous reasons why Watership Down and Sam Smith feel like a natural fit. I approach both with the same sense of wincing dread: there will be tears, existential bleakness and moments that I fear might psychologically scar my child.

They’re both outwardly fluffy but inwardly traumatising. Smith is the contemporary singer who most sounds like a dying rabbit. And since the new four-part BBC-Netflix adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel has been criticised for being a far tamer proposition than Martin Rosen’s notoriously harrowing 1978 animated film – essentially Saving Private Flopsy – who else could you go to provide a signature song even wetter than Mike Batt-via-Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes”?

They couldn’t have expected a track as incongruous and mimsy as Smith’s closing credit contribution “Fire on Fire”, though.

Although Rosen requested a song about death back in 1979, at least “Bright Eyes” – a bona fide Seventies kids’ classic whichever way you boil it – arguably had some vague affinity with rabbits. It was soft, cute and sparkle-eyed. Some of the lines rhymed with “tail”. It sounded like it was recorded on a strict diet of seeds and lettuce.

Smith’s bog-standard orchestral soul track, on the other hand, is another of those songs he does that are lyrically about bursting with palpitating lust, but which sound like he gave up trying to achieve arousal some hours ago. “They say we’re out of control and some say we’re sinners, but don’t let them ruin our beautiful rhythms,” Smith whimpers, like McLovin making out he’s Prince.

The song itself resembles another crack at a Bond theme that Smith lost interest in just before the big blockbuster chorus – plaintive pianos and tremulous strings promise a bombastic Bassey break-out, then resoundingly bottle it at the last minute.

The result is a plodding mush that’s about as moving and dramatic as a three quid profit on Bargain Hunt. If the BBC wanted a poignant showstopper, they'd have been slightly better off hiring The Wurzels to adapt Baldrick's “The German Guns”.

If there’s any hint of bunny about it at all, it’s that he sings like he’s got a pelt stuffed down his gullet, or has succumbed to a withering dose of myxomatosis. A thumper it most definitely is not; it’s not even offensive enough to be fittingly upsetting. And who wants Boretership Down?