Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Four

One more cover version Sunday mix then I'll leave it alone for a while. I've been finding cover versions in all sorts of places since I started the first mix four weeks ago, songs springing to mind at random moments. Most of the ones I've chosen do something with the source material, take it somewhere else emotionally or stylistically. Some rip the original to shreds, some pay their respects but still tear it up. Some nod their head to their influences or pay something back. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Four

• Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End
• Spiritualized: Any Way That You Want Me
• The Kills: Pale Blue Eyes
• One Dove: Jolene
• Galaxie 500: Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste
• John Cale: All My Friends
• Monkey Mafia: As Long As I Can See The Light
• Raz and Afla: Windowlicker

Sonic Boom formed Spectrum after Spacemen 3 split up and his cover of Daniel Johnson's True Love Will Find You In The End is a gorgeous, angelic take on the song. Released in 1992 as a single and later included in two versions on a Sonic Boom/ Spectrum compilation.

Two years earlier Jason Pierce/ J Spaceman flew the Spacemen 3 coop first, releasing the first Spiritualized single, a cover of The Troggs 1966 single. Jason doesn't radically alter it but he makes it a Spiritualized song all the same. 

The Kills cover of The Velvet Underground's Pale Blue Eyes is gloriously ragged and fuzzed up, the guitar stuttering and ripping a hole in the speaker while Alison gives deadpan vocals. It was a B-side to their 2012 The Last Goodbye single.

One Dove's dubbed out, trippy reggae cover of Dolly Parton is a blast, Dot's beautifully off key vocals perfect for the band's blissed out but slightly on edge comedown re-imagining of the song. It came out as one of the B-sides to the 1993 single release of Why Don't You Take Me.

Galaxie 500 recorded several fantastic covers- their take on New Order's Ceremony may be the best NO cover ever recorded. Their cover of Jonathan Richman's Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste is superb, Jonathan's ninety second original stretched to to seven minutes, a thrilling Galaxie performance, the rumble of drums and bass matched by Dean's trebly, overdriven guitar. They only existed for four years, 1987 to 1991, but what a great band they were. 

John Cale covered LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends for LCD's own release of the single back in 2007- it came out as the B-side on 7" along with a sister 7" that had  Franz Ferdinand cover of the same song. Cale's version, piano, clipped krautrock guitars and his lived in, baritone voice give James Murphy's song a new dimension- when Cale sings, 'where are your friends tonight?', it conjures all sorts of imagery. 

Monkey Mafia's cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's was a 1998 single, a late 90s revisiting of a 1970 song, a call out to the weary travelers and wanderers, a song about going home. Pre- millenial tension?

Raz and Afla's cover of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker came out this year, a fantastic synths and percussion Afro- electronic floor filler- well, I can imagine some floors that it might fill. 

Weatherall Remix Friday Five

1990's Andrew Weatherall output is pretty definitively Weatherall- Loaded, Come Together, Soon, Come Home, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Hallelujah, Bomba- technicolour, widescreen, everything thrown in, acid house/ indie- dance madness, era- defining stuff. There are a few outliers from 1990 though, remixes that don't quite fit into the ecstatic nature of the list above, like this remix of Meat Beat Manifesto, with The Orb's Thrash assisting on studio technical duties...

Psyche Out (Sex Skank Strip Down)

Bass heavy skanking with dub- techno rhythms, a scratchy vibe with a fragment of female vocal, a moan. It's got an underground, afterhours, everything gone south feel that prefigures the Sabres sound by a few years and some of his DJ sets of the mid 90s that had a hip hop groove. There's some of the Two Lone Swordsmen Virus With Shoes minimalism in there too. 

Meat Beat Manifesto's industrial hip hop was trip hop before it was a thing, before it had a name, massively influential. Main Meat Beat man Jack Danger's released Radio Babylon in the same year, a destroyer of a record, with a huge rapid fire breakbeat, the chant of 'Babylon' and fuzzed up bassline capable of causing mayhem. Combining samples of Cheryl Lynn, Boney M, The Troggs and Mikey Dread on one record is genius enough in itself. 

Radio Babylon

Go On

I was reminded of this poem earlier this week while reading something else, sweltering in the heat we've had hanging over us. It's called The Dead and it's by US poet Billy Collins.

'The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'

It was the final reading at Isaac's funeral last December, read by the celebrant at the graveside. I found it in a poetry anthology I have and it seemed appropriate. How we managed to do anything last December baffles me looking back, never mind plan a funeral- it seems now like we were alternating between being on numb autopilot and stumbling round in a fog. I haven't thought much about the poem since the funeral but reading it two days ago, sitting and sweltering in the heat we've had hanging over us for the last few days, it moved me (again) and I was struck (again) by the sentiment in it and it seemed to provide some comfort in a way I hadn't considered when I chose it back in December. 

I've not been very well recently. In the middle of May I developed a cough which refused to go away for six weeks. After three weeks of coughing I went to the doctors and they sent me for various tests- a chest X- Ray, blood tests and so. All came back clear. It was suggested I might have developed asthma and I was prescribed an inhaler which made no difference. Just as the cough started to clear up I went deaf in my right ear (nearly four weeks ago now). At a rough estimate I'd say I've got about 10% of my hearing in that ear. It's muffled and feels blocked and no matter what I do I can't pop it. It seems my sinuses and eustachian tube are blocked but nothing seems to be unblocking it and as well as being incredibly frustrating (not being able to hear is grim) it veers between uncomfortable and painful. In the morning it has sometimes cleared but as soon as I get up and stand up, it fills up again. At times the tinnitus in the right ear is very pronounced too (although that was there before it got blocked). Since going back to the doctor I've been on a steroid nasal spray and decongestants but nothing seems to be working. I've had some hay fever in the past but nothing like this. I don't know if the pollen is particularly bad this year- some reports say it is- and maybe my hay fever has been exacerbated by having Covid last December, everything inflamed by the virus, or if the stress of the last seven months has poleaxed my immune system, or if it's something else, but having never been a particularly ill person, it's really affecting me being unwell for so long. I can't help but feel it's in some way connected to Isaac's death and the aftermath of all that. Apart from anything else, it's really affecting my ability to listen to and enjoy music, which is shit. 

This is new from Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, a summer infused slice of Beach Boys style psychedelic pop called Go On with a Troggs sample contained within it's grooves. An album follows in July. It's got little to do with either the Billy Collins poem above or my medical woes but it's a feel good piece of music for the middle of July and even heard in mono lifts me up. 

I Can't Stand Still Cos You Got Me Going

RIP Reg Presley

Spiritualized 'Anyway That You Want Me'

Yesterday Plain Or Pan posted the video for Spiritualized's second single, the lovely one chord drone of Run, and this morning Drew posted Feel So Sad, so I'm jumping right on this blog bandwagon with their debut 45, a cover of The Troggs' Anyway That You Want Me, from 1990, which sets out Jason Pierce's template from the outset. Tons of instruments, drones, stoned, builds, falls, very very hazy and very very nice. Not sure where it went in the end. Ladies And Gentlemen... was great and after that they've chased their tail a bit. I saw them on the Let It Come Down tour. The opening two songs were good and the encore was superb (two songs, fast, short and loud, one being the brilliant Come Together). In between they played the same song over and over, starting quiet and building as everyone joined in. It got a little dull. Early on though, as this and Run demonstrate, they produced a magnificent sound. Soak it up.

Anyway That You Want Me.mp3

The Troggs 'I Can't Control Myself'

Jump forward ten years from previous postee Sparkle Moore and here's The Troggs with I Can't Control Myself- great 60s garage rock, and Reg Presley is so het up he can barely keep his trousers done up. The sound of young lust- 'Your slacks are low and your hips are showing...'

02 I Can't Control Myself.wma