Pop had been going for about 15 years before it started to eat itself. Cover version albums were virtually born in the autumn of 1973 when David Bowie and Bryan Ferry released records of other people’s songs. They were so influential that many musicians, some not even born when they were released, are still referencing them today.
The main two from Supergrass — Danny Goffey and Gaz Coombes — are releasing a covers album,Turn Ons, on January 25 under the moniker Hot Rats. The album is produced by Radiohead’s producer Nigel Godrich, so it sounds terrific — You Gotta Fight for Your Right to Party re-imagined as a far-out 1960s trip is a particular highlight. It contains Kinks and Pink Floyd songs just as Bowie’s Pin Ups did and includes Bowie’s Queen Bitch and Roxy Music’s Love is the Drug for good measure.
“Turn Ons was influenced by Pin Ups,” Goffey explains, “but not specifically. We definitely like the way Pin Ups sounded like an addition to Bowie’s catalogue. The similar choices have no connection really. David and us must have the same music taste!”
Covers albums have remained largely unchanged since their appearance in the middle of the glam-rock era and continue to be propelled by a steady chug of reworked rock classics from The Who, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Oh, and everyone loves Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, from Duran Duran and Cat Power to Nick Cave and Tori Amos, whose covers albums all include a track from Warhol’s Factory babies.
The covers album is more than an album of songs written for someone, sung by someone else. Susan Boyle’s debut record was made up entirely of songs written by and for other people, but we don’t consider it a covers record. The true covers album comes from the rock and pop tradition.
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The Sixties established rock’s identity, and by the Seventies many were naturally compelled to dissect and reconstruct what had gone before. John Lennon’s 1975 covers record Rock’n’Roll traced his roots even farther back as he tore through the hits of Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. It didn’t fare well. And that is the danger with cover albums; Lennon is not beloved simply for his voice but for himself, his lyrics and melodies. When Columbia put out Dylan, an album of covers that they had lying about, it did appallingly and regularly ranks as the worst Dylan record, proving that a poet is nothing without his own verse.
At the end of the 1990s Travis stirred up the cover convention by reinterpreting a brand new song that wasn’t perceived as remotely cool. The Scottish four-piece turned Britney Spears’s . . . Baby, One More Time into something heartfelt and sinister, and soon after there was an onslaught of bands eager to transform current pop songs into something “deeper”, spurred on by Radio 1’s ubiquitous Live Lounge sessions. The phenomenon reached a zenith with Mark Ronson’s multiplatinum 2007 album Version, which flipped recent rock and pop hits into brass-bolstered feel-good soul tunes, nearly eclipsing the originals.
Cover versions are a funny thing. On the one hand they can be a sloppy, lazy, money-making exercise of painting-by-numbers proportions. But if you paint outside the lines, use a different palette and screw the whole thing up, something familiar but uniquely beautiful can emerge. A recent example of the axis of good cover/bad cover was painfully evident when the X Factor winner Alexandra Burke released her version of Hallelujah. The “music-loving” masses weren’t up in arms because she had murdered Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece; they were apoplectic that the memory of Jeff Buckley’s sublime rendering of the rock hymn was ruined, relegated and royally rogered. In the end it was a win-win situation, for Cohen’s accountant at least, with the two covers occupying the No 1 and No 2 spots respectively — the first time that this had happened in 51 years.
“There are so many X Factor type singers these days basically releasing covers albums and to me they seem soulless, just an updated rehash,” Coombes says. “I found a great record a few years ago called Pussy Cats by Harry Nilsson which is mostly covers, with John Lennon producing and playing. There are songs on there like Many Rivers to Cross and Subterranean Homesick Blues. It feels like a group of musicians having fun and expressing themselves with no hint of novelty or a commercial masterplan and for me that’s what makes a covers album work.”
Turn Ons is out January 25 on G&D