Purists may wince, but there's no doubt Alexandra Burke's winning performance of 'Hallelujah' on 'The X Factor' sealed the song's canonisation as a mainstream modern standard.

With her tear-soaked take on the Leonard Cohen-via-Jeff Buckley classic witnessed by a TV audience of 15 million, and the single version destined to be the Christmas Number 1, we can now expect 'Hallelujah' to join the likes of 'Angels', 'Imagine' and James Blunt's 'Goodbye My Lover' as the kind of universal ballad that gets played at funerals, over traumatic moments in 'Hollyoaks', and whenever the England football team lose on penalties.

Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Anything that widens appreciation of this infinitely nuanced secular hymn - with its complex intimations of devotion, transcendent sex and sado-masochism - is to be applauded. Plus, as a heartstring-yanking talent show climax, it shits on 'That's My Goal'.

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Moreover, those who claim Burke 'ruined' the song miss the point. The power of 'Hallellujah' lies in its very plasticity. Each artist who sings it, from Jeff Buckley to Willie Nelson, imprints their own personality on to it.

Indeed, this malleable, multivalent quality goes back to the track's very roots. Even Cohen himself sang two radically different versions. There was the gravely spiritual studio version, included on his his 1984 album 'Various Positions'. Then there was the more secular, sexual edit that he sang live from 1988 onwards.

Below I've ranked my own favourite performances of the song, taking care to ignore those by Bono (too pompous), Bob Dylan (too clunky), Damien Rice (too overwrought) and Bon Jovi (too shit). Which is yours?

[Photo gallery: the history of 'Hallelujah']

Regina Spektor
Backed by piano and cello, Spektor's minimalist, measured version wisely kept the lyrics front and centre, keeping vocal hysterics to a minimum.

k.d. Lang
Swerving the earnest approach favoured by cornfed shouters such as Allison Crowe, Lang delivered the song with subtlety and restraint, plus a careworn quality that suggested she'd lived every verse.

Rufus Wainwright
As a teenager Wainwright attended many of Jeff Buckley's formative gigs at New York cafe Sin-E, so would have experienced Buckley's 'Hallelujah' first hand. It's no suprise, then, that his own version, which appeared on the 'Shrek' soundtrack, plays it pretty straight - apart from the puzzling substitution of 'holy dark' for 'holy dove'.

John Cale
The crucial bridge between Cohen's rather ponderous original and the celestial beauty of Buckley's. Using verses cut from the original, the Velvet Underground man arranged the song for piano and altered the pacing, crafting that now-famous build-up to the line "It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah". It was this version that Buckley covered, not Cohen's.

Jeff Buckley - 'Mystery White Boy' live version
The version you hear on 'Grace' was actually comped together from 20 separate performances by producer Andy Wallace: Buckley never played it the same way twice. Live, the track became a showcase for his improvisational skills, often stretching for ten minutes or more, and incorporating snatches of other songs.

The most entrancing of these extended versions appears on the live album 'Mystery White Boy', in which Buckley segues the song into The Smiths' 'I Know It's Over'. Offering a disturbing portent of Buckley's death the following year ("Mother I can feel the soil falling over my head..."), Buckley's inspired improvisation introduces a note of macabre fatalism into a song already heavy with somber spiritual import.
Stream it at Last.FM (the segue is at 5.50)