A little over a year ago, I remember the mini-explosion of excitement as then reigning X-Factor winner Leona Lewis released her soon-to-be #1 single “Bleeding Love”. The video experienced some of the same troubles that Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You” has seen this week (video leaks, quickly yanked by YouTube), but people were eating it up. For those of you who never saw the British version, here ya go:

I made the mistake of commenting on a post about how it would only be a matter of time before the U.S. record company would decide to re-shoot the video, and you would have sworn that I had shot Leona’s dog and hung it out in the town square. You probably know where this is going, though. Four months later:

There’s actually a long line of “alternate” versions of videos, dating back to the early days of the video revolution. For example, can anyone say “relax, don’t do it?” Video #1 for Frankie Goes To Hollywood featured what can best be described as a leather bar/sex club setting. Fun for the whole family, eh?

A second Godley and Creme version popped up that was strictly performance, but played off the whole “laser beams” line in the song:

Version 3 was filmed by Brian DePalma in conjunction with the movie “Body Double”. Watch out for the up-and-coming starlet toward the end of the clip [corrected from original post]:

Finally, for those of us in America who came to the party late (no pun intended), there was this chaotic live performance that utilized just a brief amount of the original video at the very beginning:

So what inspired this post? Well, last year, the Ting Tings released the brilliant “We Started Nothing”, and a highlight for me was “That’s Not My Name”. Here’s the original video:

Fun video, but not much to it. Now that the Tings are making a full-court press at breaking the U.S. market, they’ve booked a club tour (Denver in April, yay!), and now they’ve completed one of the final components of success: a new video.

There are many of these alternate version videos along the highway of pop music history. What’s your favorite?