Was listening to Kim Wilde's greatest hits on the way home. Yes, I was a teenager in the 80s (won't use the words 'grown up'). Obviously remembered the cover version of Kids in America that Lawnmower Deth did and thought up an idea... a compilation of 1984 pop songs covered by metal bands :D

1. Lawnmower Deth - Kids in America (Kim Wilde)
2. Morgana Lefay - Darling Nikki (Prince)
3. Xentrix - Ghostbusters (Ray Parker jr.)
4. A Perfect Circle - People Are People (Depeche Mode)
5. Paradise Lost - Small Town Boy (Bronski Beat)
6. Freedom Call - Dancing with Tears in my Eyes (Ultravox)
7. Atrocity - Wild Boys (Duran Duran)
8. Axel Rudi Pell - Forever Young (Alphaville)
9. Sodom - The Kids Wanna Rock (Bryan Adams)
10. Queensryche - Gonna Get Close To You (Dalbello)

Bit of a short one, but I'm sure there's more if I really go for it!

Was just playing around with the coverdatabase a bit and had a check on the average age of an original when it was covered. For the songs where I know the release year of both the original and the cover the age was 17.8 years. Not 19, surprisingly ;) Oldest one in the book was A Perfect Circle doing When the Levee Breaks. Done on eMOTIVe in 2004, it was 75 years after Memphis Minnie & Kansas Joe McCoy first released it.

On three occasions I have the cover listed in the same year as the original. First one's Bloodthorn covering ...And Oceans on the '... And Oceans vs. Bloodthorn - War Volume I' EP. Russian band Sultan did Metallica's No Leaf Clover on a tribute album. The third one... is a bit puzzling for me. Have listed Trampled Under Foot from Led Zeppelin as originally release on the Remasters Boxset in 1993.

Bit of searching and it's on Physical Graffiti from 1975. There's nothing like self correction, isn't there?

Meanwhile I've remembered the second original! It was Neneh Cherry & Yousou N'dour with Seven Seconds. Only remembered it because I was listening to Love Like Blood's cover version last night. It's on my favourite cover album : Cut's You Up. It's an excellent collection of mainly gothic metal related bands doing 80's pop tunes. My beloved Sympathy for the Devil by Tiamat is on there as well as Paradise Lost doing Sisters of Mercy and Moonspell doing Depeche Mode. Only Cradle of Filth (Iron Maiden's Hallowed Be Thy Name) and Death (Judas Priest's Painkiller) don't really fit the general mood of the album, but are great songs nonetheless.

This morning I heard Adamski on the radio. His song Killer, with Seal doing the vocals, provides an interesting angle. Is it a cover of the Temptations' Papa Was a Rolling Stone? The bassline is quite obviously the same, but that's where the similarity stops. Wouldn't describe this as a cover, but things went complicated when George Michael took Killer's bassline and Papa Was a Rolling Stone to create Killer/Papa Was a Rolling Stone. Now this is obviously intended as a double cover, but with Killer's bassline effectively already taken from Papa... I'd say it leaves us with only a cover of Papa Was a Rolling Stone.

A whole week without a post! It's criminal! Been working hard and had a long weekend away from computers, as you can read in my other blog.

Heard two originals on the radio this morning that had me thinking about covers done of them. First one was the Wings song Live and Let Die, which was later done by Guns N Roses. Must say that the Guns version sounded more natural to me, more fitting in their style. The transitions between the various (very) different parts of the song seem less smooth in the original.

Having been positive, I have to be negative about Guns as well. Their version of Sympathy for the Devil wasn't very good. In my humble opinion the version Tiamat did would have been much more suitable for the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack. It's darker and has the more goth feel that suits the film. Obviously with it being a big Hollywood production, a big name on the soundtrack is far more important and thus it became the band who's next release has been out soon for the past 10 years or so.

Why did that thought of the Chinese Democracy release put the song In the Year 2525 in my head? :) Speaking of dark covers, you might want to give Laibach's version of that song a try. Or anything they did really. These guys really know how to twist a song into their own sound.
Meanwhile I've completely forgotten what the second original was....

Just like everything, covers come in all sorts of forms. The good, the bad and the ugly, so to speak.

Was playing The Corrs' Unplugged album last night, which contains two covers I'd definitely classify under 'the good' : Jimi Hendrix' Little Wing and Phil Lynott's Old Town. Both work really well with Andrea Corr's voice as well as that little bit of Irish folk in the music. Especially Little Wing becomes a bit more dreamy than the original. The third cover on the album, REM's Everybody Hurts, doesn't impress me nearly as much. As usual, it might have something to do with me not liking REM very much in the first place, but it comes across less inspired.

If we're talking bad covers, Tori Amos' version of Slayer's Reign In Blood springs to mind. I've mentioned it long ago, but I can't help it. It's one of the few covers by genuine artists that come across as dreadful.

Just listening to the bonusdisc of Transatlantic's Bridge Across Forever. Must have for cover fanatics like me. First they do Pink Floyd's Shine On Your Crazy Diamond, which is very well done. After that you hear a studio 'chat' which continues into a jam of the Beatles And I Love Her and then Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water. I just love these 'peek into the studio' kind of jam things. Metallica released an hour long session in their first fanclub release where they drift from one cover into the next while fooling around. You don't get to hear things like that enough! Mercyful Fate, Tygers of Pan Tang, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Beatles.

Was surprised to hear Madonna incorporate a bit of ABBA into her new single. Thought she was too big a pop diva to do such a thing. That is until I remembered she did Don McLean's American Pie and did John Lennon's Imagine at Tsunami Aid. Not sure whether I actually like the ABBA thing, but just like any other time it's probably down to personal preference. I'm not very much into the mature Madonna. Like her work circa Like a Virgin, but that's me growing up in the 80s, of course.

Did a bit more digging on the mysterious Alice In Chains tribute album. It was released by Big Eye Music. They release tribute albums by the dozen. Worse than Dwell Records used to do! An artist seems to get a tribute with them for every top 10 position in the charts. Tried to find sound clips at Amazon and guess what...that actually mentioned the artist : Sad Reason. A bit more googling sent me to a record label in Australia, which mention that band do the entire Alice In Chains tribute. A few soundclips later and I'm still undecided. It's not brilliant, but I've heard worse. Then again, I'm listening to three 30 second clips and not a full album. And I'm not a big Alice In Chains fan to begin with.

What remains is that we're dealing with a band that can't be found with any online presence. Third rate cover band? Mass tribute producing studio musicians? Wouldn't know, but in either case I won't be adding it to my coverdatabase. I've got a rule there requiring artists to have release material of their own as well. Especially nowadays, anyone can produce a cover with a computer and a bit of determination.

Inspiration sometimes comes from the strangest places. RoHo mentioned the rooster in a post this week. Made me think of the Alice in Chains song of the same name. Didn't seem a likely cover target, but I still managed to find 2. One is on an Alice in Chains tribute of which details are very vague. Can't find anything about which artists appear on it, only about how incredibly bad it is. The other one is from a tribute 'Smells Like Grunge Spirit'. Looks like an interesting concept in which bands cover various grunge bands. Not sure whether Manic Street Preachers and Smashing Pumpkins can actually be classified as grunge, but one song definitely stucks out like a sore thumb : Pretty Fly for a White Guy, originally by the Offspring. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Offspring is an Orange County neo-pop-punk band who have as much to do with grunge as Frank Sinatra???

Continuing on yesterday's subject of not so pop artists covering pop artists, lets talk about one of the biggest pop acts ever : ABBA!

Back in 2001 Nuclear Blast released a tribute to ABBA. The result in some cases is stunning. Therion put their classical goth metal stamp on Summernight City and turn it into something amazing. Also worthy of a mention is Nation doing the all-time classic Waterloo. They give it a bit more of a bluesy rock feel and once again it works out. A song I personally really like is Paradox' speed metal version of SOS, but I'm sure the original composers will be less than happy with that one :) In some cases the vocals are the real problem. Thank You For The Music is professionally destroyed by the singer of Metalium, for example.

Another probably not so approved cover version is Nevermore's version of the Simon & Garfunkel classic Sound of Silence. It's pretty much only the lyrics that are the same and even the order of those has been meddled with. The end result is a display of raw aggression which perfectly fits the rest of their Dead Heart In a Dead World album. When I saw them several years ago in Hardenberg, singer Warrel Dane announced when introducing the song "I'm sure mr.Simon does not approve of our version".

Remember I mentioned Paul Gilbert covered the Spice Girls? There's more not so pop acts doing very pop songs. And it works out! It essentially proves that the songs aren't bad, but the way they're performed and the money machine attitude behind them. Was just listening to Z doing Britney Spears' Hit Me Baby One More Time. Replace keyboards with distorted guitars and there you go...not too bad at all. Still not sure whether it's a serious thing or whether they're taking the piss with the original. After all, we're talking about Ahmet and Dweezil Zappa here, sons of the legend Frank. Another version of the same song my Mike Patton's Mr.Bungle sure as hell is a piss take.

Speaking of which and previous posts... Bad News doing Bohemian Rhapsody. Hilarious! Actually just found a list of Bo Rap covers. Most of them seem to be cash in instrumental versions on compilations, done by nameless artists. Probably for the better anyway.

Revamp of the still not quite released cover database website is making good progress. Decided to ditch some things that made it needlessly complicated and had a long hard look to simplifying some other stuff and it seems to be working out alright :)

Just started Yngwie Malmsteen's Inspiration cover album. I like it and play it quite regularly, but it does have a downside. Every single song sounds like it could be a Malmsteen song. I realise that can be positive and negative. One thing I appreciate is when artists give a cover their own signature. The thing with Malmsteen is that his choice of covers sticks so close to his usual antics that the signature comes without doing much different than the original. Kansas, Deep Purple, Rainbow, Jimi Hendrix, Scorpions, UK....the only thing that is even slightly from standard Malmsteen is Rush's Anthem.

Most of it sounds so Malmsteen that the uninformed listener would automatically assume it was his own. Happened to me when I first heard Metallica play Diamond Head's Am I Evil. Of course in that case Diamond Head was very underground when they recorded the original and didn't even exist anymore by the time I got into Metallica.

Back to Malmsteen's coveralbum and I must admit to one brave step. He felt confident (or arrogant, you never know with Yngwie ;)) enough to take on Child In Time. That's one of those classics I think you have to be really careful with when you cover them. Child In Time, Bohemian Rhapsody, Hotel California, Paradise By The Dashboard Light...I suppose those are the songs that you'll find in the top whatever of all time all over the planet. First of all the originals are so good that almost any artist is almost certain to make a worse version. Also they're songs that have such a unique character that it's almost impossible to cover them without sticking very very closely to the original. Dream Theater just about got away with including Bohemian Rhapsody in their big medley on A Change of Seasons, but I recall a pop duo called the Braids or something like that committing total blasphemy by turning it into an R'n'B chart hit.

Oh boy did I forget some Gilbert! Paul Gilbert also coverd David Bowie (with Racer X), the Beatles (with all star Beatles coverband Yellow Matter Custard, featuring Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater, ex-Spock's Beard singer Neal Morse and ex-David Lee Roth/Steve Vai Matt Bissonette), Emerson Lake and Palmer, Mozart as well as playing guitar on an Alice Cooper tribute.

While we're dragging classical music into the cover realm here, I have to say that I don't really see that as cover music. After all, when you count that, any performance of any work of Mozart, Bach, Handel, Wagner or Rachmaninov would count as cover. As it were in general other people covering those composer's songs, they never did cover an original performance, did they?

Anyway, Gilbert's 'cover' of Mozart's third movement (allegretto) to Piano Sonata in C (K. 330) (yes, I copy pasted that) has one of the coolest titles I've encountered : Whole Lotta Sonata. Mozart rocked! That somehow brings up the name of an old shortstory by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner : Mozart in Mirrorshades. Cool title, interesting story about what the effects of timetravel could be when influencing the past.

Just doing some work on my forever work in progress cover database website (some stuff can be traced back as far as 2001!). Maybe if this rework is done (I'm calling it 3.0), I will unleash it onto the world at last. Don't hold your breath though.

A band possibly as covernut as me would have been Mr.Big. When you listen to their Live cd, before they start The Who's Baba O'Riley, you hear Eric Martin say "Stop the band" and they start into the first 30 seconds of Van Halen's Ain't Talking Bout Love. Paul Gilbert once explained in an interview that this is actually a game the band usually play in rehearsal. Someone calls out and starts into a coversong, the rest of the band is to pick up which song it is and join in. Considering the background of the musicians in the band, the diversity must have been enormous!

A quick check. Mr.Big have recorded covers of The Who (Baba O'Riley), Cat Stevens (Wild World), Free (Mr.Big) and Deep Purple (Woman From Tokyo). Guitarist Paul Gilbert really was the cover monster of the band. In his solo work he covered Johan Sebastian Bach, Spice Girls, Donna Summer, Jimi Hendrix and ABBA, while his adventures with his current band Racer X had him do Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath. And I might be forgetting a few!

Was listening to the Kiss tribute 'Kiss My Ass' last night , which is in fact a very good and interesting tribute. With the contributing artists Extreme, Garth Brooks, Anthrax and Lenny Kravitz, amongst others, you can say it's a real all star tribute.

However, there's one thing that really made me puke and that's the inside back cover. It has a message from Gene & Paul "without the four of us this would never have been possible". While directed at their old band mates, it comes across to me as rather arrogant. To put something self glorifying like that on a tribute to yourself is just plain wrong!

Getting back to RoHo's comment with regards to Paul Hardcastle's Nineteen, I did in fact find one! A band called Presidents of Funk has done it. Haven't heard it, but it seems like a band who's only aim is to cover 80s tunes without actually writing any own songs. I would actually think that this is a hard one to cover, because of all of the samples. Did get this brainwave of some nu metal band updating it from Vietnam to Iraq. Would probably be called 26, which while "twenty sixsixsix" comes across diabolically nice, wouldn't actually fit the flow of the chorus. Slipknot, prove me wrong!

Heard an interesting cover on the radio yesterday : No Doubt doing Talk Talk's It's My Life. Interesting because it was one I didn't expect. Also interesting because it works well. Gwen Stefani has that dramatic edge to her voice that fits the song well. I initially thought this must be another revival of the band with that certainly has the potential to be a hit single. Unfortunately it's from their album Boom Box, released two years ago.

The radio followed with the Eurythmics classic Sweet Dreams, which prompted a next cover thought. Marilyn Manson has made this a hit for an entire new generation, just like he did with Tainted Love. That one of course is a third generation hit. While a lot of people will think Soft Cell did the original back in 1982, they actually covered Gloria Jones, girlfriend of T Rex frontman Marc Bolan, who originally did it in 1964.

Hmmm 1964,1982,2001 and 1984,2003....would 18/19 years be the ideal age of a song to score a hit with a cover of it?