LIGHTNING NEVER strikes twice. Well, what’s true of meteorological electrical discharges operates on reverse polarity in Pop. Pop’s most sacred tenet says that what sold last year and the year before last will sell again now. Like Lou Christie once sang in Pop, “Lightnin’ strikes, again and again and again and again . . .”
Anyone out there remember when vinyl was hip? In its 7” singles format, plastic injection moulding technology aspired to its highest art-form. So that now, regurgitations of its finest moments uncork a genie of repetition as welcome as a bad case of flatulence in a crowded lift. Old hits come up rebuffed into meaninglessness, like apples polished against a digital sleeve. And it’s scaling the depths. Working backwards down the evolutionary chain.
When KWS (‘Please Don’t Go’) and Undercover (‘Baker Street’) snatched the BRITS in ‘93’s ceremony, spokesperson Rob Dickins defended such wretched dullness with the observation that “this has been a year of cover versions, and the fact that there’s a couple of pure cover versions there is just an indication of the times.”
Since then the virus has multiplied. In an increasingly unmanageable world, covers are not just a distraction from chaos, but a reflection of it. Bands and buyers alike seem strangely drawn to the lure of comforting familiarity. It’s not just singles either: Guns’n’Roses do a ‘Pin-Ups Of Punk’, while The Ramones – once the shock-troops of reality – turn an album of Sixties songs into subways for necrophiles, with their once-lethal guitars blinking in and out of rock’n’roll’s radio-friendliest relics.
This is serious. Kids are at risk of retro-addiction the moment they wrestle these CDs from the box; they might as well be smoking pure crack. From here they escalate into the hard-core nostalgia O.D. of The Time Between (everyone sings The Byrds), Who Covers Who (on which Buzzcocks, Alex Chilton, Ronnie Wood and others who should know better retread Pete Townshend’s most lurid texts), Stairway To Heaven (an album of multiple revisions of that one song) . . . and on. Why try to kiss the sky yourself when you can re-kiss Jimi Hendrix doing it for you?
The only thing more spinelessly creepily anal-retentive in its Freudian Casebook sickness is the complete suspension of the present in favour of total placental immersion in the past. Freeze it. Backtrack. The Australian Doors are not The Doors. Bjorn Again are not Abba. The Bootleg Beatles are not The Beatles. These imitators are not Elvis. These are contrived facsimiles, robbed of meaning, as sweet as a diabetic’s urine, in sensurround stage imitations one step beyond karaoke.
Projectile vomit ye may.
A ‘Cover Version’ is any dodgy old song dusted off and updated. The glamour of yesterday. The digital fit of today. Yes – or no, or none of the above?
Well, actually no. It was not always thus. In its original sense, cover versions could and did happen simultaneously, adopting a song from one specialist market and selling it to another. The most obvious transitions occurred across the racial barriers which divided America into what amounted to a form of virtual cultural apartheid. And it was largely a one-way traffic. White plagiarists fed on black energies, diluting and air-brushing the blemishes out for the more lucrative high-profile white market.
It happens as far back as you can trace. Credited as the first ever Jazz recording, ‘Darktown Strutter’s Ball’ c/w ‘Indiana’ in January 1917 was by the unaptly named Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white quintet. Although competent and dedicated musicians with a real love for what they played, they were drawing on the genuinely groundbreaking work done by black innovators who couldn’t even score a record deal. After them came the more aptly named Paul Whiteman who was billed ‘King Of Jazz’ with little justification beyond the inclusion of German-American Bix Biederbecke in his big band line-ups and the equally white Benny Goodman who became ‘King Of Swing’. It was only the arrival of fiercely aggressive Be-Bop, with an intellectual complexity that confounded mass audiences and proved impossible to ‘whiten’ commercially, that shifted the focus to the snotty, uncultured upstart of Rock’n’Roll, where the plunder began anew.
Elvis was guilty. As was Bill Haley. But the real atrocities were perpetrated by those with no love for R&B, but well-tuned instincts for commerce. God-fearing Pat Boone rushed out Top Ten carbon copies of Little Richard and Fats Domino originals, sign-posting gold to inoffensive College kids with names like The Crewcuts, The Diamonds and The Fontane Sisters. Sometimes it might be necessary to shade down lyrical content, along with the skin-tone of the performer, so as not to offend the sensibilities of middle-America. ‘Roll With Me Henry’ – a raunchy R&B hit with deliciously sexual overtones as done by Etta James – became the more coy ‘Dance With Me Henry’, in which form it sold a million for Georgia Gibbs. The passage of time has vindicated the originals, which are now highly prized, while the covers are deservedly forgotten.
But traffic across the Atlantic was just as busy. There was usually a time-lag between American and European release dates, allowing home-grown ‘artists’ to pre-empt the American originals, while taking advantage of local press, radio and new-fangled TV exposure to gain further unfair trading advantages. Tommy Steele began with some contrived Lionel Bart compositions designed to cash in on what he imagined to be the new thing – with titles like ‘Rock With The Caveman’ – until he discovered that theft paid better dividends.
He covered Guy Mitchell’s ‘Singing The Blues’, and never looked back. Entrepreneur Larry Parnes perfected the strategy with an entire stable of ready-made malleable pretty boy matrices upon which he could print note-for-note copies of whatever happened to be on the American chart at the moment. Marty Wilde’s unbroken run of hits was based entirely on covers from ‘Endless Sleep’ (Jody Reynolds), ‘Donna’ (Ritchie Valens), ‘Sea Of Love’ (Phil Philips) and so on. Craig Douglas, The Mudlarks, Mark Wynter, Mike Berry and Ricky Valance all lined up behind him . . .
The 1950’s was an alien planet in which they did things differently. Pop records were corporate product, filtered through professional songwriters, A&R and production teams. The nominal ‘artist’ was often an incidental add-on. So there’s some justification for arguing the superiority of interpretation. Gerry Goffin and Carole King wrote ‘Halfway To Paradise’ and if Billy Fury stole Bobby Vinton’s fire for the UK market, then just perhaps he did it better. As when both Bobby Vee and Marty Wilde battled it out in the Top Twenty with Aaron Schroeder’s ‘Rubber Ball’. But it was the synchronisation of markets in the mid-Sixties which all but killed off the trans-Atlantic cover version.
The Beatles were also part of the process by redesigning the basic model, making the self-contained writer/performer the standard unit of Pop. But even Brian Epstein was not above cheap Parnes-Shillings-&-Pence tactics. He heard The Righteous Brothers ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ on American radio and hastily knocked together a cover, using his gawky protégé Cilla Black to do the voice-over. She got into the charts first. For three weeks Cilla headed the sales race until – surprise surprise – the original leap-frogged the cover to take No. 1.
Things wuz getting complex. At the same time the American charts were crawling with British records. Sometimes those American hits didn’t coincide with their European release schedules. So you get bizarre situations like former Searchers’ lead singer, Tony Jackson doing a UK cover of ‘Love Potion No. 9’, an American hit for . . . The Searchers. While The Yardbirds did an American cover version of ‘Ha Ha Said The Clown’, a British hit for Manfred Mann.
But by then, another form of ‘cover’ had taken over. Singles were cheap. Albums were expensive. Thus, every Beatles’ album was treated as a demo, producing a rash of hasty covers and usually a No. 1 for opportunistic lesser talents. Who now remembers The Overlanders (‘Michelle’), Marmalade (‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’), Matt Munroe (‘Yesterday’), St Louis Union (‘Girl’) and the rest? The Fabs’ first album spawned Billy J. Kramer’s initial chart-topper ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’, and the process continued through to Joe Cocker lifting his first and greatest hit from their Sergeant Pepper.
Bands and wannabe’s awaited the release of each Beatles’ long-player with predatory intentions. They were seldom disappointed. The Rolling Stones were pirated only slightly less ruthlessly. Chris Farlow’s No. 1 ‘Out Of Time’ was a Stones’ original (from Aftermath), sponsored by the Glimmer Twins themselves in much the same way that Paul McCartney trailered his Revolver track ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ by mid-wiving a pre-emptive cover by Cliff Bennett.
Cover versions . . . taking a song from one market and selling it to another. But with the Seventies the traffic hit contraflow. Led Zeppelin didn’t issue on 45 rpm. So the Far Corporation (and Rolf Harris) took the singles statistics for ‘Stairway To Heaven’. And new markets? Eric Clapton hauled Bob Marley’s name above the celebrity event horizon by gratuitously snatching his ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ into the Top Ten. But increasingly, theft occurred not across the geographical, cultural, or format divides, but through time-zones. Both Showaddywaddy and Shakin’ Stevens were quick to spot its potential, stacking up effortless runs of hits on that principle. They’d both struggled to chart original songs to some small success, but once the string of Fifties covers came on stream their careers seemed unstoppable – until the novelty of their shallow xerox faded and they vanished as quickly and inexplicably as they had appeared.
The accumulated backlog of rock’n’roll’s forty-years-and-counting heritage is now too irresistibly rich to ignore . . .
Now the loops close alarmingly. Lightnin’ strikes again and again . . . and again. We get covers of covers . . . of covers. The soporific saccharine of ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ was a No. 1 patented by Elvis for his girls’n’surf 1962 Blue Hawaii movie. Andy Williams took it to No. 3 in 1970, and The Stylistics to No. 4 six years after that, each version slightly worse than the one that preceded it. This year it’s No. 1 again, with UB40 cringingly to blame.
Goffin and King conquered the Planet Dance with a song they wrote for their babysitter. Little Eva charted it herself no less than three times – in 1962, 1972, and then, in 1991, as part of an appalling Jive Bunny megamix. But soft, there’s also a massive version by Grand Funk Railroad and another by Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin. Kylie Minogue sold a few copies of it too.
Also in the most-covered category must be the Bee-Gee’s ‘To Love Somebody’ – their 1967 hit successfully recharted for Nina Simone just two years later, then for Jimmy Somerville in 1990, and most recently for the seriously bland Michael Bolton. Covers of covers seldom came worse. But few are immune.
Why covers? ‘Cos covers work. They combine the glamour of yesterday with the digital fit of today. Phil Collins’ only No. 1 singles have been with covers (‘Groovy Kind Of Love’ and ‘You Can’t Hurry Love’). Covers get instant day-time radio play-listing and an in-built audience familiarity rating. Similarly UB40’s only No. 1 hits have been revamps – Neil Diamond’s ‘Red Red Wine’ was blueprinted into reggae by Tony Tribe, from which they took their first; ‘I Got You Babe’ provided the second. Cher, of course, scored first time around with that one, alongside hubby Sonny but her only solo chart-topper came when she covered Betty Everett’s ‘It’s In His Kiss’.
Siouxsie & The Banshees’ highest chart position was with The Beatles’ ‘Dear Prudence’, while Wet Wet Wet couldn’t get a No. 1 until they discovered Lennon and McCartney too. It was their contribution to a Sergeant Pepper retread project that provided their key to the top.
Originally the art of selecting a cover was to unearth that neglected ‘B’-side or album track, then give it the kiss of life. But increasingly it helps to be obvious. It took Paul Simon’s ‘Mrs Robinson’ to break the mighty Lemonheads into the Top 40, and The Stones’ ‘I’m Free’ to bust Soup Dragons out of the Indies and into the proper, grown-up Top Ten.
And when all the hip hits are exhausted, Vic Reeves can still score with Matt Munroe’s ‘Born Free’ – even a camouflage of credits given to writer John Barry provides only flimsy disguise for its essential crassness. And those angry young Rock martyrs The Manic Street Preachers wimp out with ‘Theme From M.A.S.H.’, a pitiful contribution to a wretched genre that’s about as welcome as a fart in a ‘phone booth.
Dear readers, we live in sickness. Never in history has the past been so accessible. Or so inescapable. Is the future so frighteningly bright you gotta wear reflector shades? Reflecting only the past?
Science fictioner Michael Moorcock invented ‘Jerry Cornelius’, a character who could select a decade or milieu of choice and inhabit it for as long as it proved amusing. We all live like Jerry Cornelius now. We are all time-trippers.
Previous decades – those before the 1950’s – were regularly disrupted by war and convulsed by social upheaval. In Europe and America – or most of it – we’ve now had fifty years of near-unbroken social continuity during which the gradual sophistication of technology has rapaciously chewed up the same cultural raw material, while simultaneously improving its capacity for instant retrieval. Until ‘newness’ has become virtually impossible.
Movies once visited the local flea-pit for a week, then vanished forever leaving only a receding comet-tail of memories. now, personal libraries of videos by Bogart, Munroe, James Dean, Garbo, Presley and Chaplin mean that they are all bigger and more closely studied now than at any other time since their first screenings. They are re-wound and re-marketed into a universal imagery.
Terrestrial and satellite TV beams a 24-hour continuous reprise of the past, creating the endless cult tube-corn that Harlan Ellison calls ‘the glass teat’. New movies quote and pastiche at a knowing cine-literate audience, confident that their every nod and nuance will be correctly decoded and interpreted into context.
Classic Hits radio, ground down into numbing conformity, moulinexes rock’n’roll’s heritage into meaningless repetitions of comforting familiarity. Lightnin’ strikes again and again . . . and again.
But worse is surely to come. By the same principle, the charts in the year 2003 will be full of covers of current Bryan Adams and Meatloaf.
Ain’t there one damn (new) song that can make me break down and cry?

IT COULD NEVER HAPPEN: TEN COVER VERSIONS WE WON’T BE HEARING

(1) MICHAEL JACKSON “Baby Love”
(2) REVEREND IAN PAISLEY “Theme From Neighbours”
(3) HANNIBAL LECTER “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”
(4) CLIFF RICHARD “Ebeneezer Goode”
(5) JOHN MAJOR “Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades”
(6) SNOOP DOGGY DOG “Jailhouse Rock”
(7) BOY GEORGE “No-one Loves A Fairy When He’s 40”
(8) GRAHAM TAYLOR “Another One Bites The Dust”
(9) JASON DONOVAN “Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll”
(10) BORIS YELTSIN “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life”