Adam Mason

Adam Mason lives in Warwickshire, England, with his partner and two small daughters. He's written stuff for PopMatters and once wrote a PhD thesis. He edits and proofreads by day (for money) and enjoys films, collecting vinyl, the occasional play by local-boy William Shakespeare, and beer. He also has an autobiographical novel in the works called 'A Life as a Stranger', named after an Ultravox lyric from 1983, and featuring Ultravox quite a bit. It's gonna be big.

Jan 032025
 

Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.

What a great year 2024 was for The Police!

No, they didn’t reform. And no, we’re not talking about yet another cover of “Every Breath You Take,” to add to the 358 already made by the likes of Andy Williams, Sacha Distel, Shirley Bassey, and Dolly Parton. We’re not even talking about the 137th cover of “Roxanne,” to complement those by George Michael, Aswad, and terrible a cappella group The Flying Pickets. Instead, we’re talking about all three ex-members of the mighty new-wave band having been out on the road and performing live sets sprinkled with revitalized versions of Police tracks, to remind us of the remarkable range of their iconic catalog.

That man Sting? The ex singer, bassist, and chief songwriter of the group, who went on to occasional–shall we say?–po-faced solo stardom in his liking for lutes, madrigals, and live albums from his Italian villa? He performed Police songs, at places like the Wiltern in LA, with just one killer guitarist (Dominic Miller) and one killer drummer (Chris Maas), and sounded more urgent and more rock than he had in ages. He tore into era-defining favorites like “Can’t Stand Losing You” and “Message in a Bottle,” but also “Driven to Tears” and “Reggatta de Blanc”!

Guitarist Andy Summers? He performed intimate solo gigs at venues like Le Poisson Rouge in New York, armed with “Roxanne” and “Spirits in the Material World,” but also “Tea in the Sahara” and “Bring on the Night.” And drummer Stewart Copeland? He put on “Police Deranged for Orchestra” shows at such opera houses as Teatro degli Arcimboli in Milan, with renditions of “Walking on the Moon” and “King of Pain,” but also “Murder by Numbers” and “Walking in Your Footsteps.”

So, no, we’re not here today to discuss a country legend putting her spin on a song about sexual possessiveness and stalking, which is seemingly up there with “Happy Birthday to You” in terms of social ubiquity and popularity (as fun as that may be). We’re here, instead, to reflect Sting and co.’s own dusting down of some lesser known–yet still essential–Police tunes by concentrating on the acts that have dug deep into their catalog to bring us compelling covers of tracks from “O My God” to “Once Upon a Daydream” and “Behind My Camel.” We’re all about the artists who’ve reinterpreted the instrumentals, the early songs, the deep cuts, and the B-sides, in celebration of the punk- and reggae-inspired power-trio brilliance of the band in their blond-haired 1977-83 pomp.

Come, then, on an alternative journey though Policedom that takes in Seattle rock legends, a German dub act, ex-thrash-metal heads, ex-Lemonheads, and, actually, an a cappella group. A good one!
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Oct 252024
 

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

I got a letter from the government the other day
I opened and read it. It said they were suckers
They wanted me for their army or whatever
Picture me giving a damn, I said never. 

Public Enemy, “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” 1988

Tricky was doing what no one else was doing musically in 1994, as he was pretty much most other years. His audacity (or complete naivete) as an artist knew no bounds, being largely how he got female vocalist Martina Topley-Bird to sing Chuck D’s none-more-Chuck D rap lyrics from Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” over an exhilarating rock-dance backing. Which she did in her uniquely seductive tones, bringing melody and wispiness to words that once seemed inseparable from the hip-hop frontman’s testosterone-pumped New York baritone, so renowned for emanating righteous anger in the face of injustice and prejudice.

It was consequently hard to know what the oft-called “trip-hop pioneer” from Bristol UK had, in fact, delivered in the track he simply called “Black Steel”  but there was no doubt it made for one of the most original and exciting singles of the times. No doubt too that it made, in an unprecedented way, for one great cover.
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Nov 102023
 

Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.

I Wanna Be Your Dog covers

For a song so often described as primal, raw, and primitive, the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is surprisingly adaptable and open to interpretation. That’s apparent in the incredible 86+ cover versions it’s spawned since the band originally released it as their debut single in the unsuspecting Summer of ’69.

The guitar riff is widely regarded as the crux of it. That dirty, menacing, and God-forsaken thing that emerges like a badass out of a storm of feedback, with its three Ron Asheton chords dramatically and relentlessly progressing the good work of the Kinks, the Sonics, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience in terms of sheer distortion. It’s at #37 in NME‘s 50 Greatest Riffs Of All Time. It’s one of Dig!‘s 20 Licks That Changed The Course Of Rock Music. And it’s one of the Top 10 Best Punk Rock Guitar Riffs Of All Time, according to WatchMojo: “a one-eyed monster that basically serves as the song’s entire framework.” Yet, for all that, there are many artists out there who’ve made the song work without it.
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Oct 132023
 
That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

Breeders

The Breeders—that female-fronted alt-rock supergroup forged long before Boygenius came along—are currently on tour celebrating the 30th anniversary of their post-Nevermind, platinum-selling, grunge-pop triumph, Last Splash. They’re also boasting an “original analog edition” of the album which made them a mainstream success in 1993 and which, in 2022, came out #35 in Pitchfork’s Top 150 Records of the 1990s. That means, of course, that they’re giving “Drivin’ On 9” another bask in the sun. The record’s country-tinged anomaly may not have been a single, but it sure turned out to be a deeply loved, radio-friendly classic and a signature Breeders song—their second most popular track on Spotify, in fact, between “Cannonball” and “One Divine Hammer.”

It’s a song, furthermore, that the band continue to wheel out for significant public appearances, recognizing it as a towering presence in their catalog. They performed it in bed for Bedstock 2017 in support of MyMusicRx. They also played it in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lobby in September 2023, to console a few hundred people when forced to cut short their “Rock Hall Live” outdoor show due to a storm. Kim Deal wrapped her uniquely dirty-pretty voice around it for the thousandth time. Jim Macpherson tapped along on a nearby surface. Kelly Deal broke off her inaudible guitar plucking to play the solos on her phone. And Kim joked that she’s like Stevie Wonder, the whole thing being a funny, intimate, shambolic delight—shared on YouTube—that was nothing short of quintessential Breeders.

But here’s a thing:

  • The Breeders did not write the song. That’s according to @carriebradleyneves1839, who was quick to affix to the Rock Hall YouTube clip: “Words and music by Dom Leone and Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, published by Buck Tempo, copyright 1989.”

And here’s a bigger thing:

  • It’s a cover. That’s contrary to cover-song oracle SecondHandSongs, which notes “Steve Hickoff, Dom Leone” as the writers, but stamps “Original” on the Breeders release of August 30 1993.
From this, it’s certain that the Breeders’ “Drivin’ On 9” belongs to a very different camp to that of the Breeders’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun” or the Breeders’ “Lord of the Thighs.” Few people, to be sure, are aware of Steve Hickoff or Dom Leone in the same way they are the Beatles or Aerosmith, or know who or what Ed’s Redeeming Qualities is. Even fewer are able to credit the Ed’s version of 1989 as the official original. Or credit Ed’s as the first public performers of the song. Indeed, the true status of Ed’s Redeeming Qualities as the original artists as well as writers is seemingly lost in a distant 1980s haze of amateur musicianship and cult followings, where DIY recordings and demo tapes mattered, where ramshackle live shows in a shabby basement club in Boston could easily give birth to a ‘hit’ song, and where the word ‘official’ held very little sway.

So what’s the unofficial story of the perky yet strangely melancholy strummer that the Breeders made famous?
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Aug 112023
 

One Great Cover looks at the greatest cover songs ever, and how they got to be that way.

Saint Etienne Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Prior to Saint Etienne, a bevy of notable names stepped up to cover Neil Young‘s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” with varying degrees of success. Elkie “Pearl’s a Singer” Brooks wrung out the simple—almost childlike—lyrics of the classic 1970 ballad on a moribund disco version of 1978. Stephen Stills rediscovered its 3/4 time and added a self-written verse on a schmaltzy non-hit version of 1984. Psychic TV made an agreeably acid-tinged waltz out of it (yes, one of those) in 1989.

However, it was the UK trio of Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Moira Lambert, going by the name of a French soccer team, who made the song the basis of a massively influential post-house sound in 1990. That’ll be the great cover you’re looking for. And that’ll be the great cover that launched Saint Etienne’s long and remarkable career in samples, beats, and basslines.

But just how an old folk-rock number by a nasal-voiced Canadian hippie made the journey to cutting-edge electronic pop in the days of UK rave is a question worth asking. Continue reading »

Jul 072023
 

Nick DrakeWhen tasked with covering a Nick Drake song, your first thought might very well be, are my finger-picking skills up to scratch? Then you’d likely be anxious that your acoustic guitar isn’t tuned in the strange and unorthodox way it should be, while under pressure to do justice to Drake’s deeply poetic lyrics. You might also be tempted to slur the occasional word for jazzy effect, as you basically try to honor a uniquely melancholy acoustic sound that’s become a sacred thing since the English singer’s death in 1974, aged just 26, from an overdose of antidepressants.

The message behind The Endless Coloured Ways – The Songs Of Nick Drake, however, is this: don’t sweat all that stuff.

The newest Drake tribute album curators are Cally Callomon, Manager of the Nick Drake Estate, and Jeremy Lascelles, co-founder of Blue Raincoat Music, who are both keen to popularize Nick Drake posthumously in major new ways. Indeed, now that the Estate has agreed to a global publishing deal with Blue Raincoat Music Publishing, why wouldn’t they be? Lascelles, therefore, claims to have issued “one simple brief to each of the artists” involved in paying tribute to the musician barely recognized in his lifetime, which was to “ignore the original recording of Nick’s, and reinvent the song in their own unique style.”
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