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Music history comes alive. Forgotten favourites & undiscovered gems from the rock, soul & reggae archive and a few of the stories behind them. Your host is Simon Tesler, former publisher and editor of 1980s music, media and pop culture magazine BLITZ.
I'm Simon Tesler. Welcome back to another hour of great music on the theme of cover versions, kicking off with Emerson Lake & Palmer and Fanfare For The Common Man.
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Prog rock giants Emerson Lake & Palmer with their version of Fanfare For The Common Man, by the important American classical composer Aaron Copland, who wrote the piece in 1942 for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as part of a programme of music to honour the ordinary men then being called up to fight in World War II. Not much more happened to the piece after that, at least in wider popular culture, until it was picked up by ELP -- Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer. They had already become one of the first mainstream rock bands to adapt classical music, largely at the prompting of classically trained pianist Emerson. One of their biggest early successes was with the 1971 album Pictures At An Exhibition, a rock-based interpretation of Mussorgsky's piano suite of the same name.
Their version of Fanfare was included on Works Volume 1, released in 1977, and came about almost by accident while the band were rehearsing. "We were recording in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1976," Greg Lake said later "and Keith was playing it as a piece of classical music. I played this shuffle bass line behind him and all of a sudden it started to connect. Then Carl came in and we three started to play it. Luckily, the engineer had the tape recorder running, and that is what's on the record - the first time we played through the piece. We got a very 'live' dirty R&B sound that was really incredible. And all done with one microphone. We hadn't played together for quite a while before that, apart from rehearsals and stuff. Fanfare was thoroughly jammed, from top to bottom.
Only problem was they still needed the permission of the composer to put the track on the album. ELP's manager Stewart Young was tasked with that particular job. "The publishing house said forget it," he said. "So I got Mr Copland's home number, called him up and he was very friendly on the phone. And he says "Send it to me, let me listen." And he loved it. He called me and said "This is brilliant, this is fantastic. This is doing something to my music."
That shorter edit of the piece was released as a single, and was a big commercial hit, especially in the UK where it rose to #2 in the chart. ELP have claimed it to be the third best-selling instrumental single of all time. It also caused the piece to cross over fully into pop culture. John Williams' theme for the movie Superman a year later was inspired by Copland's Fanfare, and The Jacksons used it as the opening music for their 2001 reunion concerts. Numerous TV networks all over the world have also used it as the theme for their sports broadcasts.
Let's stay with progressive rock -- sort of -- with one of the prime movers in that genre, Pink Floyd. Here's one of the most memorable songs from their spectacularly successful album The Wall, reinvented a quarter of a century after it was first released as a dance song. In a few minutes, we'll have Ry Cooder's reinterpretation of Elvis Presley's Little Sister, but first, Scissor Sisters and Comfortably Numb.
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I think it's fair to say that both those versions take the original songs in a completely different direction. I'm sure you're familiar with Pink Floyd's original Comfortably Numb, but probably not with Elvis's original Little Sister. Well, let me tell you that it's just a straight rock n roll number. You might not even recognise Ry Cooder's version as the same song.
By the time of his 1976 album Bop Til You Drop Ry Cooder was already one of the most respected session guitarists in the US, working with scores of artists including The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Nancy Sinatra and Little Feat. At the same time, he released a string of solo albums. Bop Til You Drop was a collection of classic early blues and rock n roll songs from the 50s and early 60s, but all given a smooth mid 70s overhaul. Though that album in particular did well, Cooder eventually gave up a solo recording career to focus on movie soundtracks -- most notably the haunting themes for Wim Wenders' astonishing Paris Texas.
In the 1990s he was a pioneer in introducing different types of world music to a wider audience. In fact, perhaps the biggest success of his entire career came in the 1990s when he was the producer and artistic director of a hugely popular album of traditional music from Cuba, released in 1997 as The Buena Vista Social Club.
Comfortably Numb, of course, was one of the standout tracks on The Wall, with lyrics written by Roger Waters, while the music was largely the work of David Gilmour, though the two musicians have always disagreed over who exactly contributed what. This song in fact was the subject of one of their fiercest arguments, and arguably initiated the eventual break-up of the band. Though the lyrics suggest it Waters' account of a childhood infection, it was more to an experience he had while touring with Pink Floyd in the US in 1977. He actually had hepatitis but didn't realise it.
He told Mojo, "I had stomach cramps so bad that I thought I wasn't able to go on stage. A doctor backstage gave me a shot of something that I swear to God would have killed an elephant. I did the whole show hardly able to raise my hand above my knee. He said it was a muscular relaxant. But it rendered me almost insensible. It was so bad that at the end of the show, the audience was baying for more. I couldn't do it. They did the encore without me."
So how come Scissor Sisters took it on? In fact it was one of their earliest recordings. In the early 2000s they were an electronic disco band, mainly playing gay clubs in New York. A local indie label agreed to fund the release of one of their most popular club tracks Electrobix as a single. But what to put on the B-side? "We were just in the studio messing around, and we really didn't know what we were doing," said singer Jake Shears, but just as a bit of fun they thought they'd give Comfortably Numb a go, and it turned out to be great. It was a big hit in clubs, especially in the UK, and as a result won them a contract with the British label Polydor. The resulting album was the UK's top seller of 2004.
Where shall we go now? In a few minutes, Grace Jones takes on the song Warm Leatherette, a bizarre early piece of British electronica that laid the foundations for the acclaimed indie label Mute, later home to Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Erasure and Goldfrapp. But first, a track by the British rock band The Futureheads. I'm sure you know the song...
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Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love -- or rather Luv -- by The Futureheads from Sunderland up there in Tyne & Wear. It was their first release, and ended up being named by the NME as Single Of The Year for 2005. Not bad for a debut. But then as we've already heard on several occasions on this week's show, there's nothing like a cheeky version to attract a bit of attention.
And then we had Grace Jones with a cover of Warm Leatherette, originally released in 1978 by The Normal. That was the performing name of Daniel Miller, who as a teenager had become obsessed with German experimental bands like Can, Faust, Neu! and of course Kraftwerk. In the slipstream of punk he bought himself a cheap synthesizer and began writing his own songs. Two of these -- TVOD and Warm Leatherette -- he pressed up as a one-off single, and sent it to Rough Trade Records, who agreed to fund a wider release. The success of that single, and another side-project Silicon Teens, generated enough cash to allow Miller to launch his own record label Mute Records.
At least part of the success that first single was its rather perverse subject matter. TVOD was about injecting the signal from a TV aerial directly into your blood stream, while Warm Leatherette was inspired by JG Ballard's cult novel Crash about a group of car crash fetishists who get aroused by auto accidents. No surprise then that the song came to the attention of Grace Jones who was definitely on the prowl for a bit of sensationalist content to re-boot her music career. Warm Leatherette provided the title track for her 4th album, a fine collection of carefully curated cover versions with a stunning musical backdrop provided by a hand-picked team of session musicians led by superstar reggae rhythm section Sly and Robbie.
From one iconic female performer to another, or maybe two. First up, Patti Smith covers Prince, and then punk pioneer Pauline Murray and her band Penetration cover Patti Smith. That's a lot of P's!
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Two fine versions. Patti Smith's cover of When Doves Cry was released as part of her Land (1975-2002) album, the definitive compilation of all the very best tracks from her career to that date. She's never that I can see explained why exactly she selected that particular song, which was recorded in 2001 specifically for the retrospective collection, but of course Smith began her career with covers of sogs like Gloria and Land Of 1,000 Dances, each adapted to incorporate her own poetry. Later of course she also recorded The Byrds' So You Want To Be A Rock n Roll Star for her album Wave. That version of When Doves Cry is lovely, and it eventually inspired a whole album of cover a few years later, released as Twelve. None of those are quite as good though.
Though never quite as celebrated as The Clash or Sex Pistols or even Buzzcocks, Penetration were among the first wave of British punk bands, formed in 1976 up in Country Durham. They enjoyed three spectacular years before burning out as a result of the sheer exhaustion of constant touring, But they left behind a powerful legacy, not least with their debut single Don't Dictate and their fine first album, Moving Targets, from which Free Money comes.
We'll travel north now from Penetration in Country Durham to Edinburgh, where the Rezillos were formed, also in 1976. Believe it or not, both of the next two tracks were originally written and recorded by Fleetwood Mac towards the end of the 1960s. Not the Fleetwood Mac of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, I should add, but the first incarnation, led by Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer. In a few minutes, Black Magic Woman, which was Fleetwood Mac's second ever single in 1968, but was made far more famous two years later when it was covered by Santana. But before that, The Rezillos with Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In Tonight, originally the B-side to Fleetwood Mac's 1969 single Man Of The World. It was officially credited to the fictitious band Earl Vince & The Valiants, but it was actually Fleetwood Mac.
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Two songs that couldn't be more different from one another, but both originally written and recorded by Fleetwood Mac. Famously, Fleetwood Mac's live performances of Black Magic Woman in the early 70s would turn into an extended jam session that could occasionally last the entire show. But Santana's version was the one everybody knew and bassist John McVie later decreed that the band would no longer include the song in their set because it was so closely associated with the other band.
To close the show this week, two helpings of the famously versatile Robert Palmer, a man who could interpret just about any musical style with ease. We had some of his electro synth-pop on last week's show with Johnny & Mary. Here's some more, his version of You Are In My System, originally released a year earlier by US synth duo The System. A year later, Palmer joined up with Duran Duran's John Taylor and Andy Taylor, and Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson of Chic to form Anglo American supergroup The Power Station.
That project started as a party favour when the Taylors and the Chic duo agreed to provide musical backing for a cover of the T-Rex classic Get It On sung by John Taylor's then girlfriend the mode Bebe Buell, who was trying to launch a career as a singer. Her version was never released but the Power Station guys also invited Robert Palmer to guest on another track; he agreed but also suggested trying his hand at Get It On, and that one-off collaboration eventually turned into a whole album. You Are In My System by Robert Palmer, followed by Get It On from The Power Station.