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Arcade Fire do Bruce Spingsteen:
Watch Arcade Fire's Win Butler cover Bruce Springsteen's 'Born In The USA' at US election concert https://t.co/5nfSYUevLi pic.twitter.com/Fz9xdpiMVp
— NME (@NME) November 7, 2016
@NME snore...
— graham coxon (@grahamcoxon) November 7, 2016
It's been a while since Ryan Adams recorded something memorable. I'm sure there's been something this century, but nothing springs to m... actually, that means it wasn't memorable, doesn't it?
Still, all that's about to change as about to release an album full of top quality material.
One hitch, though. Not his songs:
Adams is covering a singer with a country past of her own: Taylor Swift. Today Adams announced on Twitter and Instagram that he’s recording a cover of her hit 2014 album 1989. The 28-second clip of “Welcome to New York” that Adams shared sounds like a big improvement over the original: With heavy guitar backing and Springsteenian vocal harmonies, Adams makes 1989’s weakest track sound like a bona-fide rock anthem.It's not actually better, but it's better than anything else Adams has done recently.
Here's a sweet deal: if you give Hannah Peel your email address, she'll give you a download of her cover of East India Youth's Heaven How Long.
Fair swap, surely? Especially since your email address is being traded elsewhere in return for money a thousand times a day. Make it work for you today.
Gary Burger, lead singer of The Monks, has died.
An American band who formed in Germany (all the members were GIs), they threw in "wacky" elements like banjos to keep themselves entertained as they slogged round the German toilet club circuit.
There was a look, too: vaguely Monkish robes and roughly Monkish haircuts:
“We didn’t like it that much, the haircut,” Burger chuckled [in an interview with The Current]. “You had to shave the thing almost every day, or else you’d get a stubble like a guy gets after a day of not shaving. So we all had electric razors—it was a funny sight, you’d see us all in our room shaving our heads.”
Macaulay Culkin's new girlfriend Jordan Lane Price has reportedly helped him beat drugs after threatening to walk away.
We Saw Macaulay Culkin’s Pizza-Themed Velvet Underground Cover Band Last Night
Junior Murvin, the reggae singer whose Police And Thieves, about Jamaican turf wars, became a soundtrack when the policing at the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival led to a riot, has died.
Murvin's first attempt at music didn't quite work out - a rastaman called Mr Sunny advised him to attend an audition, but his mother, unimpressed by the enthusiasm of Derrick Morgan, Roland Alphonso and Desmond Dekker, called him back home. Luckily, opportunity knocked again, and Murvin started back-up singing - first for Sonia Pottinger, and then for Derrick Harriot.
A return to his birthplace saw him join the band Young Experience, but their lack of a van scuppered them. Three weeks after the split, though, Murvin wrote Police And Thieves - an impressed Lee Perry played the track to an even more impressed Chris Blackwell; a release on Island later, and Murvin had an international hit.
Talking to UnitedReggae last year, Murvin talked about Police And Thieves being covered by The Clash:
I wouldn't even say Police and Thieves is a song. I would say it has moved from a song to a proverb. A proverb is greater than a song, I would put it that way. Music doesn't carry a grievance to nobody. It's just in the lyrical content. Music only talks to you when you play it. Music can't say "hey no play me"". Music can't do that! So as long as the man them sing the conscious things we can uplift the nation with it. But if you deal with violence, violent and downgrading lyrics that call the woman "Gyal" and that sort of thing there "Gyal yuh underwear" and "siddung pon it" I have no business with it.Murvin was 64. He died from complications from diabetes on Monday 2nd December.
Tell my fans I wish the best for them and love them and I will always sing until my eyes are closed.
If you didn't already love Jane Horrocks, her low-key project covering tracks by Manchester's indie heroes is surely going to win you over.
She told the Lancashire Evening Telegraph about the plan:
“I thought they were so interesting with female voices, and you heard the lyrics in a different way, and I thought I'd like to do that with a couple of my favourite songs — and these are indeed my favourite songs. I’m a massive fan of Joy Division, I love their music — particularly the lyrics.”She's going to poke them out via iTunes over the coming weeks, and once she's had a crack at Morrissey and Curtis, she's planning to do Hawkwind and Cabaret Voltaire.
Tears For Fears covering Arcade Fire, anybody? Here you go:
The Fears (or "The Fears" as nobody calls them) explained why they've done this:
"Having appreciated artists like Kanye West, Katy Perry, Kimbra, Nas, Gary Jules/Michael Andrews, Adam Lambert & Dizzee Rascal covering & sampling our songs over the past years, we agreed that some reciprocal cross-generational love was in order. We decided to give Arcade Fire a twist of TFF. Enjoy."You've got to tip your hat to Curt and Roland - only they could over-intellectualise 'doing a cover version'.
Here's something: the kids of the Mustang Steel Band having a go at covering The Primitives' Crash:
This is excellent. The Capital Children's Choir covering Crystal Castles with only mouths to work with.
Finishing up, then, it's a cover of one of the few songs from Thriller to not make it out as a single in its own right:
[Concluding the Quadron Quarter-past quartet.]
Cecil Womack has died.
He married Sam Cooke's daughter, Linda - although he proposed to her first when she was just twelve. He explained this to The Independent back in 1994:
By the time her father died in 1964 I felt very close to her. I decided to get my nerve together and propose to her. Either way I wanted to know how she felt about me. One evening, just before I was about to go on tour, I told her, 'I know this may sound strange to you, but I really want to marry you.' She said we were both too young. She wasn't shocked by my confession, but just thought the timing was wrong. She had plans to go to college. Sometimes I wish we had got together then.Perhaps even more uncomfortably, he told the paper he'd thought about her "romantically" from the time she was eight; although he also describes his feelings for her as "like brother and sister".
When we married we started working together all the time. I think that upset some people. A lot of the guys I worked with were very anti-women. They knew I was all for promoting women who could do the job well. I've had good relationships with women and kind of looked after them.Perhaps the best-known fruits of their collaboration is Teardrops. And that's had a healthy second life, being picked up by the XX:
Here's a headline to chill the blood:
Mick Hucknall and Stereophonics to re-record first Beatles albumObviously it's not just those two; War and Famine will be also be taking part in the project to complete the team.
I know that we shouldn't be surprised at anyone who has ever released a record, ever, returning by now. But who ever foresaw a Wendy James comeback, much less one partnered by a Stooge (James Williamson) and a Bad Seed (Jim Sclavunos)?
Can you even imagine what it's going to sound like?
Actually, you don't have to imagine, as both tracks of the single are available to share through Soundcloud.
Here's one song, then, You're So Great:
That's a cover of Sonic's Rendezvous Band, although it carries a none-more-Wendy-James title.
This is the other side of the double-a sided single, It's Alright, Ma:
Yes, that's a Dylan cover in there.
You know, back during the pomp of Transvision Vamp I'd probably not have put money on being so pleased to see Wendy James turn up with a couple of covers in 2012.
[This important alert made possible thanks to a tweet from @frankosonic]
Hal David worked with John Barry for the theme tune to On Her Majesty's Secret Service. It then got reworked all over me by My Bloody Valentine. This appeared on an album Peace Together, a 1993 attempt to solve the Troubles in Ireland through the power of indie guitar music. It wasn't all Bond covers - it included Curve doing Ian Dury and Therapy? having a go at being the Police. But the Valentines doing Bond was something of a highlight.
Altogether now: "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to disappear for twenty years burning through Alan McGee's money."
[Buy: Peace Together]
[Part of 24 Hours from David]
This was originally supposed to be a message to Martha, but Dionne Warwick wanted to record it, so Hal David reluctantly changed the name.
Might have been better to leave it as Martha, as it would have saved the song's premature death by GOP-attempt-at-humour when George Bush senior tried to build a joke about it relating to Michael Dukakis. I suspect he only fell back on it after having four speechwriters spend three days trying to make something out of Duke Of Earl sounding a bit like Dukakis.
This version, by the way, is the Marvelettes cover, made all the better by their never having run for high office since their 1988 Midterm bid to represent Kansas in the House.
[Buy: Message To Michael]
[Part of 24 Hours from David]
The Gals And Pals were a mid-60s Swedish vocal group. Most of the stuff they did was in Swedish, but when they wanted to work in the English language, it was most commonly Hal David's words that they reached for.
[Buy: Vocalss: 1963-1967]
[Part of 24 Hours from David]
The Dionne Warwick version of this was originally thrown away as a demo of the track. Jerry Butler and The Walker Brothers got to have a run at the charts with it before Dionne was allowed to stick her version out. And then later, much later, Neil Hannon slipped on a lounge suit and did his own Divine Comedy cover. It turned up on a Short Album About Love, but not any version you can get any more.
[Buy: A Short Album About Love]
[Part of 24 Hours from David]
One from the 'when good songs happen to bad people' files, as Mike Patton of Faith No More makes grandmothers everywhere go 'why can't you do more songs like that?'.
[Buy: This Guy's In Love With You]
[Part of 24 Hours from David]
