About The New Idea

I've been threatening to do a Covers post for a while now. The day has finally come. I wasn't planning on it but then the former drummer of the Kaiser Chiefs introduced me to my new fad band and I thought yes, it's time.

It's funny how these things happen, isn't it? Synchronicity, I suppose. Or maybe quantum entanglement. 

I'm not sure I've ever consciously listened to a Kaiser Chiefs' song. I certainly couldn't name one. You'd think I'd have less than no interest in clicking through a link to read about some new band their old drummer'd put together. 

And I wouldn't, if Nick Hodgson, to give their old drummer a name, hadn't decided to call his group Everyone Says Hi. First off, that's a great name for a band. Second off, it sounds oddly familiar. 

And it should. It's the title of a David Bowie song. It was on his 2002 album, Heathen, of which I'm pretty sure there's a copy somewhere in the house and which I've certainly heard a few times.

Hodgson didn't know what it was when he chose it:

“I’ve got a list of band names and in my band names list it said ‘Everyone Say Hi’. I thought ‘OK, that’s unusual, I’ll go on Spotify to see if there’s a band already called that’, which is what I always do. Usually there is but this time it just came up with that Bowie song. But the Bowie song is ‘Everyone Says Hi’ and I had Everyone Say Hi and I thought ‘I’ll change it to that because I love David Bowie’. I didn’t know [the song].”

That's a long-winded way of explaining how I came to be reading about a band I wasn't particularly interested in listening to, although their debut single, Brain Freeze, isn't at all bad (It also happens to be co-written by someone who also co-wrote Lana del Rey's seminal Video Games, but if we go much further down the synchronicity hole we may never come out...) but it doesn't begin to explain why I'm writing about it now.

For that, we need to dig deeper into the short interview, in which Nick Hodgson answers the somewhat random question "How do you see the landscape for bands now?" Nick takes it as his opportunity to big up a scene I'm pretty sure no-one reading this knows exists. I certainly didn't and I don't think the NME journo did either:

"There’s some good stuff. Do you know The Molotovs? I love what they’re doing. They’re only about 15 and they’re playing in these venues full of 15-year-olds and they’re throwing themselves around and getting onstage and joining in. It’s like, ‘So the kids are still excited by bands’. They’re in a scene with a load of other bands, all the same age. You need to think of a title for the scene."

As you can see, whoever put the page together for the NME included a link for the one band Nick names, the Molotovs. Since I'd gotten that far, I clicked on it to see who they were but it goes nowhere. Apparently NME doesn't even have a placeholder for the Molotovs yet. 

Of course, that just made me more curious so I went to YouTube to see if I could get a look at these guys, whoever they were. It didn't take long to find out. NME might not know who they are but oh boy, YouTube sure does! I spent about an hour and a half, last night and this morning, going through some of the dozens of live performances uploaded by fans, venues and the band themselves.

The Molotovs are very good, compelling even, which is weird because the very last thing they are is original. It's really hard to do what they're doing without sounding like a tribute act or a pastiche or, god forbid, a covers band. They don't sound anything like any of those. They sound like what they are - a guitar band. Apparently they do still exist. Who knew?

They have a bunch of very solid, convincing originals but we'll get to those in another post. What matters today is that they do a lot of covers. (We got there in the end!) More importantly, they somehow manage to make some very familiar songs sound fresh and thrilling, even though they don't change anything very much. My rule of thumb for covers is that they need to be quite different from the original to be interesting but sometimes just giving it everything you have works, too.

It's not just the performances, which are electric. It's the audience reaction. Nick Hodgson talks about "a scene with a load of other bands", something I struggled to find evidence for, unfortunately, because if there are more bands like this, I want to know about them, but what he says about venues being full of people the same age as the band, who are purportedly still in their teens, "throwing themselves around" is right there for everyone to see. And enjoy.

As for the songs, originals and covers both, I have been known to comment on the way these days everything sounds like everything else. Also, how originality is hard to come by any more, a line which puts me in somewhat uncomfortable company with any number of ageing rockers, whose irritatingly narrow-minded, short-sighted and often just plain ignorant observations litter my feeds day by day. 

It's a valid observation but an unsustainable complaint.  There's nothing remotely wrong with drawing inspiration from the past as well as the present, as Cindy Lee would surely tell you.

Who's Cindy Lee? You may very well ask. She's the widely-acknowledged genius behind the recently-rleased two-hour concept album, Diamond Jubilee, which I've had playing loudly the whole time I've been writing this. It's the album that got a rarely-awarded 9.1 review on Pitchfork back in April, after which it was added to that publication's tally of the best albums of 2024 so far.

As an incendiary live review on Stereogum a short while later went on to explain, Cindy Lee is smoking hot right now and everyone wants to say they were there when it happened, although since she's been recording as Cindy Lee ("the drag queen hypnagogic pop project of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel, former guitarist and lead singer of Women", as Wikipedia puts it), for around a decade now and her debut 2020 album was long-listed for the prestigious Polaris prize, it's a bit late to be claiming discovery rights. 

The current album, which is bizarrely hard to buy, being available for a recommended donation of $30 only through a GeoCities page, which also contains links on how to listen to it quite legally for free, is over two hours long and sounds, as one YouTube commenter appropriately puts it, like "All the things I love about the last 50 years of rock and roll distilled perfectly into one collection". The past now present in the future. (I may have used that line before. I said originality was hard to come by.)

But I'm not here to talk about Cindy Lee. She can wait for the next What I've been Listening To Lately post because for all the ineffable familiarity of Diamond Jubilee, I don't believe it features any actual covers. And covers are what we're here for today, right? 

And that was a pretty lengthy lead-in so we'd probably best have some, hadn't we?

A Town Called Malice - The Molotovs (Jam cover)

Unsurprisingly, the Molotovs do several Jam covers. This one, Down in the Tube Station at Midnight, When You're Young... They also cover the Clash, the Undertones, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, Supergrass, Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Pretty much all rock and roll is here, so long as it's fast and doesn't last longer than three minutes. 

They don't seem to go much on the sixties, or not as much as you'd expect, which is a surprise, but I guess they have that decade pretty much covered with the gear they wear. There's always room for another Mod revival...

What I Like About You - Lillix (Romantics cover) 

Talking of provenance, I have Syp to thank for this one. I knew the Romantics' original, which is great, but I'd never heard Lillix' cover, which is brasher and brattier. Makes sense it ended up on the soundtrack of the Lindsay Lohan vehicle Freaky Friday, which now I come to think about is also a cover. Only with movies, we say "remake". 

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the 2003 movie is the third version... I wonder who's in the one that doesn't star Lindsay or Jodie Foster? Oh, here we are.. it was Gaby Hoffman. No, me neither...

Dancing With Myself - Maren Morris (Billy Idol cover)

If I wanted to claim a thematic link, I'd call on bleached blond hair but I could also play the "everything is everything else" card again because this is seventies-goes-eighties-goes-now and punk-goes-alt-rock-goes-country and every other damn hyphenate you want to pin on it. 

It's also a shill for "Visible — the wireless company for independent people", who presumably not only commissioned it but wrote and directed the video, given the prominent product placement. Uncool, as I believe they used to say back in the sixties, when people pretended to care about that sort of thing.

Owner Of A Lonely Heart - Trevor Horne feat. Rick Astley 

(Yes cover)

This one takes a bit of unpacking. Yes were (Are, I suppose...) a prog rock band who were massively successful in the 1970s but who veered into the oncoming headlights of the pop singles charts in the 'eighties, when they teamed up with electro-pop producer Trevor Horne, the man often ceded responsibility for the sound of an entire decade, thanks to his work with the likes of Dollar, ABC and, of course, Frankie Goes To Hollywood. 

Before he did all of that, Horne had a band of his own, Buggles, remembered today solely for his involvement and for their one and only, annoyingly catchy hit, Video Killed the Radio Star. At the time, Buggles and Yes both happened to share the same management, so when singer Jon Anderson and keyboardist Rick Wakeman upped and left the prog band for reasons I cannot begin to remember or care about, their mutual manager thought it would be a jolly good wheeze to slot Trevor Horne and his bandmate Geoff Downes in to replace them.

I'd been a big Yes fan in my early teens and I still liked them by then, even though it would have been tantamount to an invitation to public ridicule to have mentioned it to anyone. I remember thinking it was a bit weird but these things happen. What doesn't usually follow is that the management-made monster lumbers out of the album charts into the top 40 but that's what happened. Anderson returned to sing the song, whose creative process was unbelievably convoluted, as this laughably detailed Wikipedia article explains, but eventually the track became Yes's most successful single and their only US #1.

Four decades later, Trevor Horne decided to remake a bunch of his old hits. By the time he got to this one, he clearly felt in need of a little light relief after digging through the bones of his past.  As Stereogum quotes him "When “Owner of a Lonely Heart” was mentioned, I thought of a nicely unlikely angle – a dance groove like one I’d heard on an unreleased 12” mix with evergreen Rick Astley singing Yes an octave down. It made total sense."

I'm not sure it did but it sounds pretty good all the same. And I bet Jon Anderson just loves it.

I Wanna Be Adored - Horsegirl x Lifeguard (Stone Roses cover)

Reportedly, Horsegirl get a bit ticked off with GenXers latching on to them while acting as though their timeless sound somehow belongs to only to men old enough to be their dads. I dread to imagine how they'd feel about someone in his mid-sixties grabbing on to it too. I mean, I'm too old even to make a convincing Stone Roses fan...

This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us

 The Last Dinner Party (Sparks cover)

I'm exactly the right age for this one, though, or the original, anyway, which I remember first hearing on the car radio on my way home from school. Like the Molotovs, the Last Dinner Party do a lot of covers and do them exceptionally well. Unlike the Molotovs, everyone knows who they are. It's weird who gets the attention and who doesn't, isn't it? I still can't figure why Starcrawler aren't huge...

Jolene - Beyoncé (Dolly Parton cover)

Then again, when it comes to people knowing who you are, there's famous and then there's F.A.M.O.U.S. That's both of them, of course. Takes some doing to cover a song like this and not have it run you over. That's why she's Beyoncé, I guess.

After Hours - Sandrushka Petrova (Velvet Underground cover)

In case you don't recognize the name (And why would you?) it's her out of Descartes a Kant. Remember them? No? Oh well...

After Hours is one of those songs everyone thinks they can cover. And mostly they're right. it's damn nearly bomb-proof. I bet it goes down a storm in karaoke bars. (Do you know, I 've never been to a karaoke bar? That's a life experience I should probably make for myself some day.) 

I've seen versions by everyone from Eddie Vedder and Antony Kiedis (Not together!) to six year-old Evangeline Lorelei (A lot better than you're imagining.) but I kinda like Sandrushka's slightly sinister take on what is, after all, a pretty bleak lyric. It's her phrasing.

And that, I think, is that. For this time. Be assured there will be more. Just not for a while. Next time it'll be all new stuff.

Well, new to me, anyway. And hopefully new to you, too.