We are living through an epidemic. Not as scary, say, as bird flu, but equally potent — I’m talking about the epidemic of genre-bending that has seized the music business. Those afflicted feel compelled to cover old pop songs with a zany, stylistic flip-reverse: AC/DC given a bluegrass makeover, polka versions of Nirvana, that sort of caper. Radio 1 has even set aside a space, The Live Lounge, where sufferers may roam freely — Lemar recasting a Darkness song as a soul ballad, Goldfrapp taking the Ordinary Boys to the Weimar Republic with Alison as Sally Bowles.
Some of these are merely amusing novelties (Rolf Harris’s Stairway to Heaven still on your hi-fi?) but thoughtful genre-bending actually adds a dimension to the originals that you never realised was missing.
Such was the case a few years back when trendy night spots in New York and London rediscovered roots reggae. Among all the usual Gregory Isaacs and Black Uhuru throbbing away, something unexpected started seeping through: a Pink Floyd song, Breathe. Then Time, Money, Us & Them. Then the penny dropped. Someone’s covered the whole of Dark Side of the Moon in roots reggae! Indeed they had, but Dub Side of the Moon by the Easy Star All-Stars wasn’t from the 1970s. Released in 2003, it was the brainchild of three men from Brooklyn, New York: Eric Smith, Michael Goldwasser and Lem Oppenheimer, friends from high school with a love of reggae. When they realised that many classic reggae artists had moved into their neighbourhood and were unable to get recording deals, they set up their own label, Easy Star. Dub Side, featuring several of those Brooklyn-based artists, was a genuine word-of-mouth hit. A fixture of the US reggae charts since its release, the album was so successful that Easy Star found themselves with an unexpected problem: customers were demanding a follow-up and they hadn’t planned one.
“We didn’t see it as a franchise,” says Smith. “We didn’t just want to do The Wall or something that might have been an obvious follow-up. We are very aware of the stigma of the covers genre, we know that there’s a backlash saying this is a marketing-led genre rather than an art form, but we wanted these to be records full of artistic expression.”
It took them about 18 months to think of the perfect next candidate — a powerful bestseller that functioned as a whole work, and came with a broad-minded fanbase who might enjoy hearing it reborn in a new form. They chose Radiohead’s OK Computer.
Outlandish? The Oxford quintet is hardly new to reinterpretation. While often considered by casual listeners as mere purveyors of gloomy indie (once memorably dismissed as “complaint-rock”), the group has inspired thoughtful classical arrangements, irresistibly upbeat hip-hop/jazz remixes and even an album of lullabies for babies.
The Easy Star version — retitled Radiodread — took 18 months to make, producer Michael Goldwasser spending six of them on arrangements while the team assembled their ideal cast. It wasn’t always easy persuading their reggae heroes to step up to the mike for some alienation ina Oxford stylee.
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“A lot of the pairings we tried on paper worked out — we immediately thought Horace Andy would be great for Airbag, and he was,” says Smith. “But many artists, when we first sent them the lyrics, just didn’t get it. You can’t blame them. They had never really sung anything like this. Once they started singing the tracks you’d see their comfort level rise. Like Sugar Minott — there was a real transformation from the first takes to the last. By the end he really got it, he liked the song and understood the emotions behind it.”
But others could not be coaxed. “There were some who tried to do the songs and decided they couldn’t,” says Smith. “A lot of our artists are devout Rastafarians and pacifists, and might refuse to sing certain words, whatever the context, that deal with violence.” The reggae star Luciano declined to sing Lucky, because early in the lyric is the line “Kill me Sarah, kill me again with love”.
“For these artists it’s very simple,” says Smith. “There are certain words, like ‘kill’, that they would never sing: anything that could be misinterpreted as being inconsistent with their religious beliefs.”
Knowing this heightens the tension when you hear Minott deliver the bitter kiss-off of Exit Music: “We hope that you choke.” Yet you’d imagine OK Computer’s themes of detachment and dismay in the mod- ern age would find empathy among Rastafarians. Toots Hibbert growling “let down and hanging around” on a brilliant ska reading of Let Down certainly sounds impassioned.
That track has won public endorsements from its authors, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. This is no Dread Zeppelin, a bit of preposterous genre-bending played mainly for laughs, but a heartfelt, skilful and very affecting reinterpret-ation of a life-changing record. In fact, Radiodread is more satisfying and compelling than Dub Side of the Moon. You should hear it. As Morgan Heritage declaims on Electioneering: “I trust I can rely on your vote . . . rockers!”
Radiodread is out on Easy Star records (www.easystar.com)
RADIOHEAD RE-INVENTED
Radiohead’s dark chords have inspired a multitude of genre-bending. Look for the Exit Music EP by Mark Ronson, which includes a brilliant party-starting hip-hop jazz version of Just from The Bends.
By contrast, the jazz pianist Brad Mehldau creates sophisticated arrangements of Paranoid Android, Exit Music (for a Film) and Knives Out either as a soloist or with his trio. (Mehldau also does Nick Drake and the Beatles.) The classical pianist Christopher O’Riley has cut two entire albums of Radiohead songs, True Love Waits and Hold Me To This. And yet another pianist to tackle Exit Music is Katia Labèque, who put it on her Unspoken CD.