Pardon My French

I probably ought to be posting about the Nightingale revamp today but I forgot all about it until I saw Azuriel's post so I won't be doing that. I have the update downloading now, all 28Gb of it so maybe tomorrow. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and finish the Covers post I keep talking about. 

I went through all the possibles this morning and narrowed it down to ten or twelve good ones so all I have left to do is put them into some kind of order, write some words, find them on YouTube, embed them, change the sizes, do the header ...

I might have left this a bit late. I'd better get on with it.

Les Cactus - The Last Shadow Puppets

(Jacques Dutronc cover)

I regret not getting into the Arctic Monkeys a lot sooner than I did and I regret missing out on the Last Shadow Puppets even more. Still, better late than never, eh? I'm not sure if it's Alex Turner or Miles Kane who has the great taste in covers but they did this and they did This Is Your Life by the Glaxo Babies, who I used to go see play locally when I was still a teenager (Just about...) and whio I thought I'd never hear covered by anyone, ever. We've had that one before or it'd be here now. (Don't say that. You know why.) 

They also covered I Want You/She's So Heavy by some band called the Beatles but I guess even that has a kind of hipster cred - I mean, it's hardly Hey Jude, is it?

Miles Kane is also partly responsible for one of my top ten favorite Lana del Rey tunes, Dealer, which comes from what's supposed to have been an album's-worth of songs they recorded together. Every bloody Lana out-take and demo leaks except the ones you really, really want to hear, right?

Les Cactus - Jacque Dutronc

I'm not going to paste in all the  originals full-size for these but there are a few I don't want to throw away on just a link. Also, fair warning, there are quite a lot of French acts coming up. Maybe I should just front-load them. Yes, I think that's best.

It all started when I looked up something by Serge Gainsbourg and ended up down one of those notorious YouTube rabbit holes that are so damn easy to fall into and sometimes so revelatory. The internet in general and YouTube in particular has made it possible, easy even, to shake prejudices that otherwise I would have taken with me to the grave. I mean, who knew French pop before Daft Punk was good?

Les Cactus - Vanessa Paradis

(Jacques Dutronc cover. Oh. You knew that.)

Good things always come in threes, right? More to the point, Vanessa tees up the next one perfectly.

Joe Le Taxi - Petite Meller 

(Vanessa Paradis cover)

A fan-made video, using a whole bunch of clips from other Petite Meller videos, which is one way to do it. Probably means that this will be a dead link in a year but no-one is ever going to come back and try to click on it, so so what? Anyway, the entire internet will be dead by then if you listen to some people, so so so what, what? Eh? Eh?!

Ces Bottes Sont Fait Pour Marcher - Muguette  

(Nancy Sinatra cover)

Okay, I admit it. This is what I think of when I think of french pop music from the sixties. Kitsch covers of kitsch songs or kitsch originals that sound remarkably like songs you already know. Which is how I found Muguette.

As I was tumbling down my rabbit hole I happened to hear Ne Fais Pas Le Tete by Katty Line and I thought to myself well that sounds familiar, which led to me to wonder if any of the many French Ye Ye girls had actually covered Nancy's classic stomper and of course they had.

Ce N'est Pas Un Vie - Pussy Cat  

(Small Faces cover)

I thought this sounded remarkably familiar, too, which it should do, seeing as it's the Small Faces' Sha La La La Lee with the title changed. And quite possibly the rest of the words, too. 

When I was about sixteen or seventeen I once did the lighting for a school dance. There was a band playing and a friend of mine was in it. He later played keyboards and did some of the vocals for the band I was in, although only for our first three gigs, which was how we got a review that compared us (Inaccurately but favorably.) to Capt. Beefheart but for this band, which I think was his older brother's outfit, he was on drums. I was in the wings, supposedly working the lights but actually doing something entirely more interesting with a girl I ended up going out with for about two weeks. My pal Chris, who was also doing the lights, had to do the whole thing. He was quite good about it, considering.

The band played mostly covers, as you'd expect at a school dance. They did Sha La La La Lee. Can't help but think of that night every time I hear the song. Even in French.

All Shook Up - Camp Claude  

(Elvis Presley cover)

Transitioning smoothly out of the francophone pop phenomenon by way of a band whose origins I still haven't entirely figured out. They certainly have french connections. I suspect they might be French-Canadian. I'd look it up but where's the fun in that?

I thought I'd heard all their stuff but there was an EP I missed at the end of last year and it's all covers. All of them great, too. Could have used any of them but this is the one with the video so that's the one we're having. 

They seem to have been doing this one for a while, too. There's a live TV performance from 2017 I like but not as well as this.

Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) - Oktavia  

(Cover ... Your guess is as good as mine.)

This is where things get messy. This is a cover but not only had I never heard the original before, I'm not entirely sure what the original is. I came across it while I was doing a bit of "research" on AI music, which this isn't, not really, but even before I got started I found myself deep in a subculture about which I know a little but understand almost nothing.

The singer is a vocaloid, meaning it's produced artificially. How? Don't look at me. I don't know! I mean, I've read quite a bit about it all  and I know who (What?) Hatsune Miku is but I'm still not at all clear on how it actually works. 

There are lots of variants on Persecution Complex Cellphone Girl (LOL) on YouTube but I haven't had much luck working out which is the ur-version. Plenty of them have millions of views so that doesn't help. Most of them have a name or a pair of names appended to the end (GUMI, GUMI&Rin, GIgaP&Shooze...) but I get the impression at least some of those are the names of the vocaloids used in the cover. 

Also, I'm not sure cover is the right word. It seems to me these are more like remixes. Further research is required but if anyone is already deep in this and wants to school me on how it works, the comments are right down there.

These Days - Miley Cyrus 

 (Nico cover... or is it?)

On the subject of what constitutes a cover, here's an interesting case study. This was posted on a YouTube account by the name of MileyCyrusFans with the rubric (Nico Cover) appended. And it is, in the sense that Nico recorded the song on her first solo album, Chelsea Girls. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that most people who know the song would think of Nico in associoation with it before they thought of anyone else but she didn't write it.

Jackson Browne, who plays guitar on the album, did. He wrote it specifically for Nico. Astonishingly, given the elegaic feeling of looking back in time to an earlier version of yourself that it so perfectly evokes, he was just sixteen at the time. Nico, of course, has always been older than god.

Nico's album came out in 1967 and Browne didn't get around to releasing his own version until 1973. @MileyCyrusFans acknowledges Browne's authorship in the details but that knowledge clearly doesn't make it a Jackson Browne cover as far as they're concerned.

To make things even more complicated, the arrangement Nico used, which Wikipedia credits to her, has been followed by many subsequent artists, including Miley, but when Jackson Browne recorded his version he used an arrangement originally created by Gregg Allman, earleir in 1973. But things gets fuzzier yet.

Wikipedia may be wrong about Nico being responsible for the arrangement in the first place. I was skeptical, thinking that it sounded an awful lot like the kind of arrangements John Cale was doing for his early solo albums like Paris 1919. Cale was in the studio, played on most of the tracks and wrote or co-wrote some too but he wasn't credited as either Producer or Arranger. Those roles fell to Tom Wilson and Larry Fallon respectively but Fallon's distinctive string and flute arrangements were done at Wilson's request and overdubbed later without Nico's knowledge or agreement.

So, when Miley covers the song, is she covering Jackson Brown or Nico? And if Nico wrote neither the tune nor the lyrics and possibly didn't have much to do with how the song turned out other than the way she sang it, is her version a cover, even though it had never been recorded before? Are all songs sung by singers who aren't also credited at least as co-composers covers?

No, of course they aren't! That would be silly. Let's move on.

Let's Get Lost -  Fontaines DC  

(Chet Baker cover)

They get better and better, don't they? Give them another couple of years and I reckon they could make an album their fans hate as much as Arctic Monkey's fans hated Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino. And it'll have taken them half as long to get there.

Probably should have a couple of fast ones to finish with. Send everyone out into the cold night air sweating and buzzing.

Deceptacon - Blondshell  

(Le Tigre cover)

I fucking love Blondshell! I fucking love Deceptacon! I don't love the mix but you have to take what you can get when it comes to audience recordings.I'm just happy I get to see and hear it at all.

Deceptacon - Le Tigre

I'm not hiding that behind a link!

Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've?)

 Le Butcherettes  

(Buzzcocks cover)

Remember last time, when I posted Le Butcherettes cover of Miley's Wrecking Ball and I said I had another by them that was even better? That was it!

And we're done. Managed to get through less than a fifth of the covers I had bookmarked. I guess I'd better do another one of these pretty soon...