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Cover Versions Geekery

I was going to call this post "Tedious Music Geek musings" but felt that might not bring the google hits pouring in.

Grandmaster Mark, who irresponsibly doesn't have a blog to link to, sent me the url of this piece in the Daily Telegraph, purporting to be a list of the fifty greatest ever cover versions.

As he knows, I have something of a penchant for the genre myself, and have hundreds of the little devils.  I cannot, therefore, help but offer an opinion.

Of those in the list (and I have a fair chunk of them myself) I have to agree with the Happy Mondays' Step On, The Wedding Present's Come Up and See Me,  Tricky's Black Steel (In the Hour of Chaos) and Siouxsie and the Banshees' Dear Prudence.  The latter in particular has been covered very, very often (cf. Our Lady Peace) , but the Banshees' version (with Robert Smith on guitar and vaguely visible, poncing around in the video) is superb.

For Jolene, I prefer the versions by either Queen Adreena or The Sisters of Mercy to the one cited.  Queen Adreena's version is threatening and seductive.  The Sisters' (which they performed live many times, from their earliest days) is the highest of arch-Camp.  Excepting possibly their version of Abba's Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight).

Cowboy Junkies' cover versions would be better represented by their take on Blue Moon, IMHO, just as Johnny Cash doing Nine Inch Nails' Hurt was far more successful and challenging than the Times' choice of U2's One, which isn't really a huge stretch in style for him.  Hearing Johnny Cash turn a piece of techno-minimalist industrial music into a melodic and haunting love song is touching enough, even without the video, one of the most beautiful I have seen.  His recording of Nick Cave's The Mercy Seat makes that song sound as if it were written specifically for him.

And Rocket Man's definitive cover is by William Shatner.  Who should, in rather more seriousness, be in there with Joe Jackson for theor collaboration on Pulp's Common People.

And in case you're interested, my top 50 would also have to include:

• A Perfect Circle's take on Imagine, which takes Lennon's overplayed, over-familiar and (he admitted) over-orchestrated, original and makes it new and listenable.  Their cover of The Fiddle and the Drum, by Joni Mitchell, was even more stripped down (performed a cappella), and almost tricked me into pacifism for a few seconds.
• Snake River Consipiracy - doing the Cure's Lovesong far better than the original, which was the weak spot on "Disintegration".  Their version of How Soon Is Now is an excellent also-ran.
• I wish I could find what I did with the acoustic cover of F*** da Police that Popbitch linked to.  It is up there.
• The Deftones, for their live cover of If Only Tonight We Could Sleep.  I'll stop including Cure covers at this point, of which I own enough to require a 64-bit int data type for storage.  The Deftones' cover of Duran Duran's The Chauffeur is just played too close to the original, even down to the timbre of the Moreno's voice.
• Alanis Morissette performing Black Hole Sun, although I suspect a song this great would sound good even if covered by the Vengaboys.
• Rolf Harris doing Stairway to Heaven.  And yes, I am serious.  Interestingly, he had never heard the track before he recorded it, asking only for the sheet music to be sent to him.
• Dinosaur Jr.'s cover of Temple of Love.  I would have chosen their take on Just Like Heaven, but for my self-imposed rule re no more Cure covers. They really have fun with Temple of Love, down to their little additional chorusette of:

"Goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth,
"Goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth goth,
"Black black black black black black black black black,
"Black black black black black black black black black black black black (blacker still)."

• The Beatles' Twist and Shout, from the live Hamburg sessions. They ieave the Isley Brothers' version seeming rather static in comparison.
• Kirsty McColl's version of Billy Bragg's A New England, even though the original still wins by a wide margin.
• Tori Amos and her dark, truly disturbing take on Slayer's Raining Blood
• Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine  - The Impossible Dream.  If ever there was a jarringly different song on an album it was this closer.  Played admirably straight.
• The Revolting Cocks - Do Ya Think I'm Sexy.  Rod Stewart should hide in shame: this cover reveals that what he made into a revolting travesty of the musical form was, in fact,  a potentially great track.  That said, I'm all in favour of Rod Stewart hiding in shame on a more general level.
• Ian Brown, whether for Billie Jean or Thriller.  Again, the cover versions make the originals seem embarassingly poor treatments of the compositions by comparison.  That said, I still want someone to cover one of Brown's other tracks, changing the lyrics to "If dolphins were monkeys|They'd fall out of the trees...".  If dolphins were monkeys, Ian, they'd just be monkeys.  Maybe, at best, bottlenosed monkeys.
• There have been many good covers of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart.  The Cure's was good, but I think The Swans did the best one, back in '88 or so.
• The Lemonheads' cover of Mrs Robinson was fun, light-hearted, if a little too faithful.  I prefer something that puts a new spin on a track. But it is definitely skifflicious.
• Marilyn Manson does some good covers, not least a version of Gloria Jones' Tainted Love that I much prefer to the Soft Cell one (that the Times preferred), and an excellent take on Patti Smith's Rock'n'Roll Ni**er (edited for the sake of making safe for work links), back on the deliberately obscurantist Smells Like Children.  But they deservedly broke through with Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), which is another cover that suddenly reveals something that was there but less prominent about the original: in this case just how menacing the Eurythmics' lyric really was.  An uncompromisingly goth version of Tainted Love, in my anything but humble opinion, was done better by Skinny Puppy.
• Citizen Dick - Touch Me I'm Dick, from the film Singles.  Citizen Dick were, of course, mainly made up of Pearl Jam members, and the song was a pretty straight-faced cover of Mudhoney's classic Touch me I'm Sick.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' relentlessly dark and repulsively brutal cover of the old standard Stagger Lee.  Better, even, than the Grateful Dead's version, which is saying something.  I just hope he didn't kiss Kylie with that mouth.
• Blue Monday is another track, like Imagine, that I have heard too often to really enjoy, at least when sober.  But Orgy's reworking of it, complete with an alteration to the end of the "I thought I was mistaken" line, transposing it into a major mode by raising the final note by a semitone, is inspired, and changes the feel of the whole song.