My appreciation of the band Squeeze increases every time I hear a track by them. I really like the story-telling aspect of this song, and the shambolic quality of it all. Dance to this with a mug of tea in your hand, that's what I did yesterday, and I felt pretty cool. Bonus! Spot young Jools Holland in the video! He looks great.
Of course I heard this next track on 6 music, source of at least 90% of what I hear now. It's Lulu and it was apparently produced by Bowie himself. Love the production on this, especially the sax.
There's something about off-kilter pop music that I love. I heard this next one again recently in a coffee-shop. Weird contrast between the lyrics and the sound of the song itself.
There's been a couple of tracks that have recently popped up on the radio that I'd first heard only as covers. It's a little embarrassing when that happens sometimes -- you hear a song, love it, and don't even realise it's a cover. I'm not sure it matters but I can definitely see some purists berating anyone who loves a cover while thinking it's an original.
The ones that have come up recently for me have been 'Concrete Jungle' by the Wailers (and by the way, I'm assuming it's an original by them, but I don't know for certain) and 'Staring at the Rudeboys' by the Ruts.
The Wailers track is the one I'm more embarrassed about. I first heard it in a version by Ceu, but then heard the Wailers' version on the radio last week and thought "of course it's a cover!". There was always something about that track on the Brazilian artist's album, but I never thought to look into it. I like both versions though, I think Ceu did enough to make hers her own. You can check them both out below:
The Ruts track I first heard as a version by Gallows. Unlike with Ceu, hearing the original has changed my thoughts about the Gallows version. It's almost a straight cover (just some added aggression) and I don't think it even makes any contextual sense. Yes, they added some rapping and a weird bit in the video that looks like a stand-off between black and white people. But the Gallows track came out in the UK in 2007 and, as I recall, there weren't exactly any racial tensions that needed addressing -- at least not the black vs white kind. Plus, I find it hard to take the short, shouty, ginger, Gallows singer very seriously -- he looks sooo angry, and he's got lots of tats (but everyone does now), and he screams a lot in the vid, but he'll never seem very hard to me. The original is more appealing, especially when you consider that it came out in 1980 -- you can imagine how it addressed some of what was going on at the time -- race riots, the rise of the skinhead, but also the musical mashup that was happening between punk and music from the Caribbean. The Ruts vid I'm putting up isn't complete, but I'm sure you can find your own, better, version, if you try hard enough.
Doing this has got me remembering one of the first times I heard a song and realised the version I'd been liking for so long was actually a cover, and a cover that didn't really change much about the original. The song is 'That's When I Reach for My Revolver; by Moby, or so I thought for years! Then I heard the original version by Mission of Burma and realised that Moby had changed nothing about it! I'm sure it served a purpose for him though, as up til then I, and probably most people, had only known him to be an electronic artist. The production on his version is a bit cleaner, the song a bit tighter, but if anything I think that makes it slightly worse than the original.
Obviously, this happens a lot. There are good covers and terrible covers (oof, remember that horrible cover of 'Blue Monday' from a few years ago? Shudder!). If you've got some you'd like to highlight, feel free to stick them in the comments.
