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.

One Great Cover: Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”

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Dec 052025
 

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

I almost regret doing it.
— Bjork, 2002

Bjork‘s “It’s Oh So Quiet” is a rare example of a cover song being way more successful than the cover artist would have wished. The Icelandic singer-songwriter recorded the old Betty Hutton jazz hit in 1995, only as “sort of a joke.” She didn’t expect it to be her most successful single as a solo artist. She didn’t expect it to outperform her innovative Top 40 originals: “Venus as a Boy,” “Big Time Sensuality,” “Play Dead,” and “Army of Me.” She didn’t expect it to be a Christmas favorite, or to catapult her to a level of fame that involved physically attacking an invasive reporter at a Bangkok airport. And she almost certainly didn’t expect it to be considered “quintessential Bjork” in all its whimsicality, or to go down in history as the most recognizable showcasing of her acrobatic vocals.

“It’s ironic ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ became my biggest song,” Bjork said in 2002, the same year she agreed with her fans to omit it from her Greatest Hits album. She deemed it a track she’d put the least creative effort into, and one that didn’t represent her at all, as if its immense popularity was entirely out of her hands and an abomination in her catalog. She made perfectly clear that she was embarrassed by it; that she disowned it. She therefore left us asking the important question: Who or what is to, erm, blame for this One Great Cover?

Here are a few contenders, with reasons given.
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One Great Cover: Fine Young Cannibals’ “Suspicious Minds”

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Jun 202025
 

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

Suspicious Minds

When Fine Young Cannibals covered “Suspicious Minds” in 1985, they covered more than just a song made famous by Elvis Presley in 1969. They covered a song that was iconic of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll in his post-“’68 Comeback Special” pomp at the globally televised “Aloha from Hawaii” show in 1973. Sweaty, lavishly sideburned, and spangled in white American-eagle jumpsuit. Colorful lei around neck. Huge band behind him. Thirty-piece orchestra. Choir. Enraptured fans. Frenetic dancing during the extended drum fills. And acrobatic shapes that came with the immortal line: “I hope this suit don’t tear up, baby.”

Brave, then, for Fine Young Cannibals to even attempt such a song, and hugely unlikely that they should proceed to have an international smash hit with it in early 1986. They were, lest we forget, a decidedly unstarlike three-piece from Birmingham, UK, two of whom had only recently emerged from the ashes of punk-influenced, inner-city ska band The (English) Beat. They’d further stripped the song of the flamboyance, grandeur, and melodrama we’d come to associate with it, and pretty much de-Elvised it, making sure it fit, instead, with the gritty, socially conscious, and virulently anti-Margaret Thatcher vibe of their debut album.

FYC also made the song sound fresh, more urgent, and more relevant to a new—largely unemployed—generation, gaining for themselves an immortal signature tune in the process, one which would more than hold its own against “She Drives Me Crazy,” “Good Thing,” and anything off their all-conquering second album, The Raw and the Cooked. They’d clearly given the world… One Great Cover.

How, though, did the flagrantly non-jumpsuit-wearing band pull off such a stunt?
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That’s A Cover?: “Got My Mind Set On You” (George Harrison / James Ray)

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Feb 212025
 

That’s A Cover? explores cover songs that you may have thought were originals.

George Harrison seemed an artist reborn upon the release of “Got My Mind Set On You” in 1987, in a way that compared with Paul Simon on “You Can Call Me Al” the previous year. No sad relic here of a legendary 1960s act with fading powers, whose days of selling gazillions of records were a long, long, long time past. No whiff of recent flop albums, or flop movies. Instead, a pop star wielding an insanely upbeat and wonderfully infectious pop nugget, reveling in an MTV-conquering video, and quite rightly storming up the singles charts in a style we’d come to associate with Madonna, Whitney Houston, and the Pet Shop Boys.

Caught up in the fun of it all, there was no reason to believe the track was anything other than a Harrison original, either, being exactly the kind of catchy rock ‘n’ roll number someone who’d been in the Beatles would come up with (right?). Only with a big 1980s pop sound: big drums, big horns, and big backing vocals. Besides, no other version of the song ever got played on the radio.

But the truth was this: Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” was a cover. And a cover very much in the vein of early Beatles cuts “Please Mr. Postman,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Music,” and more specifically the George-fronted “Devil in Her Heart,” and “Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby.” It was a cover that had everything to do with the American soul, R&B, and rock ’n’ roll that first inspired Harrison as the lead guitarist/singer in what would become the toppermost band in the world. It’s just that the original was by an artist a lot more unsung than the Marvelettes, Chuck Berry, the Donays, and Carl Perkins.

Essential to Harrison’s 1980s revitalization, then, on his biggest solo single since “My Sweet Lord” in 1970, was a mighty sayonara! to years of tribute and soundtrack doldrums and a nostalgic reconnection with an obscure and sorrowful 1962 non-hit by an unsuccessful and largely unknown black soul singer by the name of James Ray. Unlikely, we know! So it’s high time we offered more in the way of explanation. Specifically, the illumination of several key moments.
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Rarely Covered: The Police

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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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One Great Cover: Tricky’s “Black Steel”

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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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Five Good Covers: “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (The Stooges)

 Posted by at 12:00 pm  4 Responses »
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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