“Sister Midnight” is the lead track from Iggy Pop‘s debut solo album, The Idiot. It’s also his least characteristic solo album, because it was hijacked by David Bowie at the beginning of his own Berlin Trilogy. Bowie co-wrote every song, produced the album and played many of the instruments. The studio they used for The Idiot was also used for the early sessions for Low, which he began recording immediately after. Bowie later re-used his music for “Sister Midnight” for the Lodger track “Red Money.”
Paul Banks, lead singer of Interpol, was recently commissioned to write the soundtrack to a new film named after this Iggy Pop track. For the soundtrack, he’s covered two classic Iggy Pop songs, this and The Stooges’ “Gimme Danger.”
Banks doesn’t do a lot different to start. He apes the intro and he keeps the distinctive rhythm and angular guitar. The vocals are even more muddied than the original, and they mostly keep to the original melody.
Where Banks takes the song to a new place is in the guitar. The guitar part is far more expansive than in the original and takes more and more of the song as the cover goes on. There’s a longer break in the middle that extends the song and then an extended vamp which feels like it will close the song. But then there’s a brand new guitar solo which actually features as the climax and serves as the outro. If you know either “Sister Midnight” or “Red Money” as well as I do, this guitar solo comes out of nowhere and is a very pleasant surprise, especially given how faithful the rest of the cover is.
