Idol Vs. Team Archuleta

A 'Team Archuleta' insider has revealed that there was a battle between David's camp and Idol producers over one of this week's songs.

Arranger Richard Parkinson said that he had come up with a daring interpretation of the ballad Longer for David's Top 3 performance.

But he claims that the show's bosses vetoed his hip hop re-working of the Dan Fogelberg love song, and told David to sing a cover that was faithful to the original.

"I was a little bit frustrated," Richard, from Utah, told the Z103 radio station.

"We had put a lot of time into making sure the arrangement for that was absolutely amazing.

"I didn't want to see him do a straight cover and so we put together kind of a hip hop, ballad feel behind that lyric and melody.

"And the producers overrode what we did and just wanted to have him sing a straight cover."

The music pro, who is part of 'Team Archuleta' -- along with David's father, Jeff, and voice coach Dean Kaelin -- promised that "the whole world" would have been talking about his 'street' interpretation of the song.

It seems that Simon Cowell would have been on Team Archuleta's side on this matter, musically at least. After the performance the judge called the song "gooey" and "something you would choose for a 90-year-old".

It was apparently not the first time that the two sides had gone head-to-head over arrangements.

Last week David inserted lyrics from Sean Kingston's 2007 version of Stand By Me into his cover of the Ben E. King original, ever after producers had told him not to.

Exec producer Nigel Lythgoe later called the incident a 'misunderstanding', but there have been reports that it was one of the factors that led to Jeff Archuleta being banned from backstage last weekend.