The cover version has always been a strange Marmite moment for music fans. Tending to come down on either one side of the fence or the other, your average aficionado loves or hates them in principle, and refuses to deviate from their opinion.
I have to confess, I’m a sucker for a good CV, as long as they obey a few obvious rules. Number one, they need to deviate as widely as possible from the original. This is why St Etienne’s version of Neil Young’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ is sublime, and everything on Robbie Williams; ‘Sing While Your Swinging’ is tosh of the first water. Rule number two; there are some songs that should never be attempted, as the original nailed it so completely that there’s no further room. Exhibit #1, Mick Hucknall’s take on Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye’. Actually, I could write a whole book on why every attempt to try and equal the heights so effortlessly scaled by Ella should be erased from the memory of mankind, but now is neither the time or the place. So…
I mentioned I was reviewing this show to a friend, and how it was an interesting concept, a prime example of the kind of format you would never get on terrestrial UK radio. His response?
‘What if you hate cover versions?’
If you subscribe to that side of the argument, then I apologise for wasting your time so far. Because you’re really not going to like ‘Coverville’ at all.
The format is simple. Every show takes a different artist, and plays a load of covers of their tracks, both known and obscure. The presenter, Brian Ibbott, puts the podcast together three times a week from his home in Colorado. It broadcasts on KYCY 1550AM in San Francisco. Although at first a bit gratingly nerdy, obvious love of the music and a warm, relaxed and engaging style wins the listener over. His determination to cram every last morsel of information into each link is a little wearing at times, but it’s so much better than the usual info-desert that makes up most radio presenters’ blather.
But it’s the music that’s the point of these podcasts. Whether it’s looking at an artist like The Kinks, or occasionally giving a whole album the treatment – as in recent shows where Ibbott takes ‘Abbey Road’ and ‘London Calling’, and plays a cover of each track in the sequence of the original record – it’s the change in the reading of the songs that makes the show work.
It’s why Simple Minds manage to remove all trace of thuggish menace from The Stranglers ‘Get A Grip’, while Nouvelle Vague’s version works fantastically. And why the bizarre, auto phoned version of ‘You Really Got Me’ – featuring the sliced up syllables of Tom Baker, no less – is possibly the best cover version, in the world, ever.
Go on, dive under the covers. You don’t know what you’ll find.
© Matt Hall 2009
*This article was originally published at Night Listeners
