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You searched for sex pistols - Page 2 of 7 - Cover Me

They Say It’s Your Birthday: John Lydon (Johnny Rotten)

Posted by Brianna Goldberg at 11:00 am No Responses »

Jan 312012

They Say It’s Your Birthday celebrates an artist’s special day with other people singing his or her songs. Let others do the work for a while. Happy birthday!

Oh, the dark deeds that must occur on the birthday of the spiky-hair-crowned prince of punk. How does one fete a man whose very name conjures smoking images of filth, fetidness and psychopathy — Decorate a cake with rancid raspberries spilled over the Union Jack? Present a champagne flute of fermenting trash juice to pour on DVD copies of the Queen’s Christmas address? Continue reading »

One Great Cover: Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy”

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 10:00 am 1 Response »

Nov 262024

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

Some songs are transcendent and seem inevitable. They were always going to be a hit, and destined for greatness. As soon as the opening notes are played, or a motif is reached in a cover, you feel comfortable that you are in the presence of something important. No ornamentation or elaboration is necessary.

“I Want Candy” is not one of those songs. From its very first iteration, writers Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein and Richard Gottehrer felt that the song needed something extra to help it along. They cast themselves as The Strangeloves, and implied that they were an Australian Beat Combo, consisting of the Strange Brothers (Niles, Giles and Miles), so that their song about the undoubted appeal of Candy Johnson could have an unusual hook.

Other covers sought other boosting methods. When Aaron Carter made his version he felt that he had to draft in his brother, Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys, to make it more interesting. In a much different iteration Spice Girl Melanie Chisholm, having successfully curated a girl-next-door persona as Sporty Spice, decided to go “raunchy” in an (unsuccessful) Olivia Newton-John style transformation for her take.

Who might you call if you had to create something that is successful as a triumph of form over substance? If you were thinking of Malcolm McLaren, ex-Sex Pistols manager, you get a prize. McLaren was a man who realized that presentation could trump musical ability or artistry if handled correctly. He proved it multiple times, but “I Want Candy” may be the catchiest proof in his particular rucksack.
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One Great Cover: UK Subs’ “Sabre Dance”

Posted by Mike Tobyn at 10:00 am No Responses »

Nov 082024

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

Punk paradigms provoke panic. Whether it is parents worried that their young people who do unnatural things with their hair may do more natural things if left alone together, politicians who fear anything they can’t readily control, or prog musicians who feel that someone is about to eat their lunch, there have always been reasons for fearing the new art form from the ’70s. Of course, none of these paradigms really hold true. Punk youngsters had no greater rate of teenage pregnancy than any other group of horny young people, and often proved to be good parents, and prog musicians have continued to thrive for the last few years, despite the efforts of the Sex Pistols and New York Dolls. Punks are inherently “anti-establishment,” but the remarkable thing about “The Establishment” is that no one can agree on who it is, so rebelling against it has no universal means and meaning.

Mexican-British (a much smaller demographic than Mexican-American) David Perez may be a nephew of original Joker Cesar Romero, or maybe he is not! Born in 1944 he didn’t find his true calling, as a hardcore punk now going by Charlie Harper, until 1976. He has embraced it as a member of the UK Subs ever since, combining skills with admirable industry. However, by the time he formed the band, in response to seeing The Damned, he was no longer a teenage tearaway, but a married man with experience of the world, and a history of playing in a range of R&B bands. He assembled a band that knew more than three chords, could turn his hand to harmonica and had assimilated a range of influences from the ’50s and ’60s, as well as the ’70s. He still includes songs by Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie in his sets, putting his politics alongside his music. We might guess who his “establishment” is. His band’s only previous appearance on these pages was to be included in a Nirvana cover feature, indicating a wish to stay current.
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The 50 Best Kinks Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 10:35 am 1 Response »

Jun 212024

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

If The Kinks had stopped after their first year, they’d still be legends. “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” two of the all-time-great sixties rock singles, were both released in 1964. That’s more classics in one year than most bands have in decades (and their year gets even better if you slide in January 1965’s “Tired of Waiting for You,” recorded before “All Day Etc”).

But if The Kinks had stopped after their first year, this list certainly wouldn’t run 50 covers deep. Because, of course, they didn’t stop. They kept releasing hits, including Top 10s in both the ’70s (“Lola,” “Apeman”) and ’80s (“Come Dancing”). Maybe even more importantly, they kept creating, kept innovating, kept pushing forward, not settling into retreading their early garage-rock sound. That wide breadth gets reflected in the Kinks songs that artists covered. The big hits, of course, are well represented. But so are plenty of album cuts and singles that “flopped” at the time but were rediscovered years later.

Ray Davies turns 80 today. So today, we celebrate his birthday—and his ability to withstand decades of interviews about whether he and brother Dave will ever reunite—with our countdown of the 50 Best Kinks Covers Ever.

The 25 Best Goth Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 11:00 am 4 Responses »

May 312024

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

As regular readers know, here at Cover Me we put together a Best Covers Ever list every month for a celebrated artist. We’ve recently done the Pet Shop Boys and Sheryl Crow. And before them we did the biggie – The Beatles – and before them, Bob Dylan! But every now and again, there’s a particular genre that’s crying out for the Best Covers Ever treatment – and this month it’s the Dark Genre. It’s goth!

So why now, you ask? Are goth covers really a thing? And why don’t Alien Sex Fiend or Fields of the Nephilim have their own Best Covers Ever features?

Fair questions, all. First off, goth music is everywhere right now. It may have emerged out of the UK post-punk scene and enjoyed its most innovative period from 1980 to 1982, but it’s now the reason we have Whitby Goth Weekends in April and November (well, that and Count Dracula), World Goth Day on May 22, and goth nights down the Hatchet Inn in Bristol most nights, particularly Thursday. It’s also why we have heaps of goth books on the market right now, from John Robb’s The Art of Darkness to Lol Tolhurst’s Goth: A History and Cathi Unsworth’s Season of the Witch, all trying to explain goth’s lasting influence as a musical subculture: the fixation with death, the dark theatricality, the Victorian melodrama, the leather, the thick black eyeliner, the fishnet tights, the deviance, the sex, the deviant sex, and, of course, spiders. Continue reading »

Five Good Covers: “Johnny B. Goode” (Chuck Berry)

Posted by Seuras Og at 2:30 pm 2 Responses »

Feb 022024

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

Really? As in, surely Cover Me must have talked about “Johnny B. Goode” before? Well, I’ve searched, and it seems “Memphis, Tennessee” is the only Chuck song to show itself on this platform. Of course, it may just feel like we’ve given Johnny the once-over twice on account of ol’ Charles Edward Anderson Berry wrote so many of the standard templates of rock (and roll). I mean, it isn’t as if nobody’s ever tried a cover, it difficult to imagine any guitar band ever not taking a crack at it. Is it not compulsory that every band of spotty youth, convening in a reluctant father’s garage, include it in their nascent set of tunes? Hell, I bet it casts a longer shadow than even “Louie, Louie,” always previously the lodestone at such gatherings. Secondhand Songs, still the wiki for cover lovers, suggests 328 versions, which, given the site’s understandable inability to know or find every single itty bitty rendition, suggests possibly a fair few more. (Indeed, as ever, we rely on you to let us know some more good(e) covers in the responses.)

Continue reading »