Friday, December 8, 2017

Robots

With most visits registered to this blog being bots and all comments generated by algorithms, it felt appropriate we should dedicate a theme to robots.


LIAM


Daft Punk - The Grid
You can't get much more robot'y than the combination of the movie Tron and the electro outfit Daft Punk. I'm a fan of the original Tron movie, I really liked the new one (despite mixed reviews), and the soundtrack by Daft Punk is an awesome fit. This track is as technical as I could get on the soundtrack, interlaced with spoken snippets from Jeff Bridges.




Fear Factory - Linchpin
Everything about pre/during and post nu-metal stalwarts Fear Factory screams robots. The imagery, the sound, the album and track titles; essentially their whole reason for doing what they do. Initially considered industrial metal pioneers, for many fans they lost their way and became annoyingly repetitive and unimaginative during the heyday of nu-metal. But they've kept churning out good old robotic themed and sounding, catchy and chunky metal. Linchpins, I assume, are vital in the robot-construction business, so that's why I chose this track, from their fourth album, right in the time of nu-metal, 2004's Digimortal.





CHRISTIAN


dEUS - Is A Robot
I love my favourite Belgium export: dEUS are a bastion of catchy indie, pop, rock from the low countries. They have a knack for churning out quality, quirky, moody yet memorable tunes. Each new album keeps surprising me with how they keep the bar so consistently high, without seeming to run out of ideas or material. This track is called Is A Robot. It's about how we are all becoming robots with unthinking enthusiasm. The ubiquitous use of phones and technology are turning us into automatons - turning ourselves into just another interface.

Is a Robot on Spotify 


Orbital - Dr Who
Gotta love the divine electronica and gravitas of Orbital. They knocked out some serious classics in their time. This rendition of the mighty Dr Who theme tune is a massive homage with no fromage. No cheese nor lazy sampling, just a faithful rendition with a modern synthesiser sound palette, wicked production and a funky beat. It pays the deepest of respect to the most famous denizen of deep space. The link? Dr Who single-handedly kicks some serious robot butt. Regularly saving the human race from the dominion of either the Cybermen or the Daleks. Unfortunately, for us, the Dr just never saw Facebook, Amazon or Google coming.




CARL


My immediate thought was the Alan Parsons Project album I Robot from 1977... I remember enjoying it at the time but a quick aural refresh didn't really do it for me 40 years later. Like my school report cards used to say, 'Could do better'. I'd come across a crowd called Welle: Erdball a while ago who were doing some interesting things with old C64 soundcards... very beepy, flashy, electronicky, roboty stuff, and they even had an album called Dance Music for Robots... bound to be something on there, and there was, in the form of Die Roboter which Google told me meant The Robots. That will do, now find something that matches on youtube and we're good. Except we aren't. Turns out Die Roboter is a cover, but not just any cover. It is a cover of a song from the godfathers of German Electronica themselves, Kraftwerk... and the original is much better! Here then, is Kraftwerk with The Robots from the 39 year old album, The Man Machine. What a difference a year makes!



I was still keen on getting something from the C64/8bit world which, like many genres, has gotten more sophisticated as it matures. Actually, sophistication is very subjective when you are dealing with a limited sound range... Let's just say it's more sophisticated than a kazoo. During my Welle: Erdball phase I'd also come across a group called Eisenfunk (Iron Radio in english). These guys specialise in 8bit EBM and this tune is from their album called, unsurprisingly, 8Bit. It is an annoyingly familiar tune and a little bit of research says I've probably heard it while playing Nintendo TETRIS at some point... and TETRIS took it from The Russians(tm) or at least from Russian folklore. So an old folksong about the human condition comes to this!      





TIM



The best electronica for me always sounds cybernetic, the product of a mind-machine interface.

Amon Tobin is a master of the form. I chose golfer vs boxer for its blend of furious jazz drumming and sci-fi synth.



More recently Arca has been exploring similarly intense sounds. I chose the jarring ecstasy of Xen as my second track.

Monday, October 2, 2017

Coming of age

The task: Bring along tracks from that time in your life when hormones are rushing about and the first buds of a blossoming interest in music are sprouting forth. Songs that conjure fond memories for you but as they are from a time before your tastes congealed into the hipster know all you are today they might be a little bit embarrassing.




LIAM



For this theme I went back to my pre-teens, to my pre-double-digits in fact, when I was about 7 or 8, jumping between two single beds, wrestling my teddy bear with only two vinyl albums to my name. Despite not doing anything for my music credibility, they do hold a special place in my heart, so while I'm not exactly proud to put present them, I can at least say I'm at ease with my choices.

Raffaella Carrà - Do It, Do It Again

I have no idea where I got this 7 inch single; on the one side the Italian version A Far L'amore Comincia Tu (about which there is an interesting Stack Exchange debate about the appropriate translation to English) and on the other, Do It, Do It Again (With Love). These are the same song with modified lyrics to better suit the language. About 20 years after I last listened to this single I found it stashed away in my old bedroom, still wrapped in a homemade, paper and sellotape sleeve. It brought back a whole heap of memories when I listened again on YouTube, and so it felt especially worthy of this theme.




Michael Bolton - How Can We Be Lovers If We Can't Be Friends

Ooh, controversial. Having sent Music Club into a complete tizzy with his selection of Red Fu some time ago, Carl has made it easier for anyone else to offer up something embarrassing or just 'wrong'. With that in mind I decided to present my favourite track from the first vinyl I ever bought - Michael Bolton's Soul Provider. This is the last track from side one and, if you really try, you can hear power metal (or at least power ballad) vocals that I occasionally enjoy in my adult life.



 

TIM



I grew up on a staple diet of classic rock, and mainstream nineties like pearl jam and radiohead. But there was the rare CD or tape in my parents' collection that hinted at a much wider and diverse musical world, one I'd only discover in my twenties.

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks was one of those tapes, my only real introduction to jazz. Beside You is my favourite track on the album, at its freest, sixties best.



And Dead Can Dance was the pick of my dad's brief New Age phase, which involved a lot of Enigma and Deep Forest. The Host of Seraphim sounded at its apocalyptic best on David's enormous sound system, vividly invoking the hormonal hyper-realism of the teenage years where even the most insignificant events often seem drenched in existential power.



 

CHRISTIAN


Nothing embarrassing here: My teenage years were spent in the shadow of my Amstrad all-in-one hifi. Veneer chipboard on the sides with a classy tinted front door window that enclosed a snazzy silver, twin tape deck, radio and record player. Hours of fun were had creating mix tapes and spinning discs

Kate - Breathing

I don't know where it came from (maybe the parents), but I played the living bejeezus out of a copy of Kate Bush's Whole Story. I recon it still has to be the best best-of that I can think of. Condensing a decent discography onto two sides of vinyl is tough. I love the fact that this record has a bit of everything, and I chose Breathing as the most evocative, strange and compelling tune on the album. What more does a teenager want to fall to sleep to, than sounds of the apocalypse being whispered into your ear by the dulcet tones of the very sexy, creative and leotard-clad Kate. Explosive stuff.



Frankie - Surviving


Slightly later in life, yet still tethered to the Amstrad; I started listening to heaps of London based radio stations. I think it was GLR that I used to record off of most often (before I found Sunrise FM. EDIT: just did a search and it lives again, online!! Result). I made mix tapes from sections of mixes. There was one tape that induced me to catch the train to a record store in London and buy up a list of 12"s that I'd heard and actually got the names of. Unfortunately many of the tunes on the hallowed tape were unknown. Fast forward a few decades, and lo and behold, I start listening to a Frankie Knuckles compilation, only to find 3 or 4 of his tunes were some of the most memorable on the tape. Hallelujah!


 

RAE



Faith No More - Epic, released June 1989 on The Real Thing album -  the source of influence was my big bro, I'd "borrow" his music, surf branded clothing, invite myself to hang out with him and his friends - he was pretty generous although some of the "borrowed" clothes he probably didn't know about!  It reminds me of a time when living in a big family was about making do with what you had access to and learning to share space and being exposed to a wide range of music that wasn't necessarily something you'd choose personally.
There's reasonable online debate about what the song was about, personally I'm happy to leave the debate to those who care more than I did.  I enjoyed the mix of genres and have a number of favourites from this album.



Def Leppard - Rocket, from the 1987 Hysteria album....a time where we embraced bands that openly wore more or equal quantities of makeup as women, hair was highly flammable, pants were almost painted on and my bedroom walls were covered in posters of these type of idols (Poison, GnR etc.).  
Rocket as a track has a heap of stuff going on, multiple version of varying lengths including an 8:41 extended lunar mix, the original 6:34, and was considered "experimental" for hard rock at the time, looking back I still love it and have plenty of fond memories from school disco days of "pashing sessions"...ewwww to generally kicking around with a group of people being a teenager.



 

DAVID



10cc "Don't Hang Up" from How Dare You 1976

This little gem is an absolutely classic piece of 1970's pop/rock. I recall listening to this with my close friend Brodey Jones in his bedroom after school. It is really a reminder of just how artificial and inauthentic a lot of music from this period now sounds. It literally seems to have come from a different planet to the other things that were beginning to happen at that time. Hard to believe that The Ramones were bashing out three minute wonders in New York let alone the mutant electronics of Suicide also in NYC. Still, the somewhat prissy and overly clever word play, fussy and glossy production not to mention the incredibly narcissistic subject matter (I think they intended it to sound as creepy as it does) seems to represent literally everything that punk rejected. Nonetheless, I still remember this album with fondness for those simpler times.

The Brothers Johnson "Strawberry Letter 23" 1977

While the rest of the world was exploding with punk fervour (well, London) I was grooving to this fine piece of funk/pop in my bedroom. This was huge in Henderson (West Auckland) and a staple of every party at the time. This was definitely the first time I had purchased a pure dance music album and it was actually a bit radical within my own little group who at the time were into Grand Funk Railroad (not really very funky at all) and David Bowie. As I had absolutely no clear 'taste' at this time I was happy to slot that in next to my Jimi Hendrix albums. Listening to it again after such a long time I think it still stands as a fine and enduring piece of groove. It has aged incredibly well when compared to some of the other stuff around at the time. 

Soon after this brief period between developing an awareness of music in its own right and before it crystalised into a lifelong passion I bought The Jam's All Mod Cons (1978) and it has been downhill ever since.


CARL


Slightly embarrassing pre-hipster tunes... my cuppeth overfloweth as I had the (un)fortunate experience of having the 70's and 80's running as the background track to my misspent youth...

For a variety of reasons I had moved cities and/or countries every two years of my life so the world was pretty impermanent. In each place you would get to know people over that two year period and then suddenly you (they) would be gone, never to be seen or heard from again... Except for that one guy who contacted you on linkedin two days after you signed up and remembered you from 1974 during the one year you spent at Carre's Grammar in Sleaford, Lincs. The other slightly bizarre thing that happened in 1974 was a small group from Sweden who were blitzing their way through the Eurovision Song Contest that year... luckily for you ABBA is not on my list because Glam Rock got there first... There, I've said it.

In my defence for this band a couple of their tunes have been used recently as soundtrack/promos for fantasy/action genre movies 'Suicide Squad' and 'Guardians of the Galaxy'. This particular track was written after an incident at a venue in Kilmarnock where the band were forced offstage by the crowd throwing bottles at them... maybe the spandex and glitter was a leap too far... I give you Sweet with Ballroom Blitz.   


 

Things didn't get much better in the eighties, sad to say. On the plus side, I'd stopped moving around every two years and was flatting in Wellington. On the minus side there was big hair, power shoulders and tight pants with the added bonus of makeup for one gender and moustaches for the other. Being on the other side of the planet from the action meant that my musical diet was dictated by the whims of whichever radio or TV producer happened to be in charge. Yes, the Music Video had arrived and it was bigger than a Big Thing(tm)! As with all Big Things the music video just kept trying to outdo itself to the extent that sometimes the song got lost in the process. But we didn't care about that as we tried to look cool in pants that gave parts of the anatomy a lot of grief while watching A Flock of Seagulls performing I Ran on TV on a Saturday night before hitting the town, getting legless and vomiting on the way home...



Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Earworms

 Image result for ear worm





DEB


Blue Sky mine – Midnight Oil
This song has been an earworm for me for YEARS. And every time I think about, it starts up (happily playing in my head right now!).
Why an earworm, for me, it is the melody and some of the lyrics. The melody is consistent and repetitious, does not stray much out of one octave, very constant style. So it gets in my ear and stays. I am not a big fan of Midnight Oil, though this is one of my favourite songs of theirs – is that because it is an earworm and I hear it constantly in my head, or, because I liked it that it became an earworm. Chicken and egg.


Cult of personality – Living Colour

Love this band, love this song. And an earworm for me because of the same repertoire – repetitive beat, constant melody - and limited lyrics. Limited lyrics really makes it, constant repetition, what a cycle!  and a fabulous beat. The song beats in your head, your head bobs out the chorus and refrain, with a great guitar solo. Not a bad earworm to have.




CHRISTIAN 

When jumping around like a loon on the dance floor, overwrought musical complexity can stymie the enjoyment somewhat - that's why they often check noodling in at the cloak room. The real geniuses of production can disguise complexity over hours of 'progression' or, even better, to provide easy to consume polyrhythms without you even noticing it. This tune, Sunday Shouting by Johnny Corporate, is none of the above. It wears its colours proudly on its sleeve. It's an unashamedly short cycle of very catchy sax notes, bridged with an equally basic yet catchy base line. Repetition is key. When repetition is done well repetition can be a great mechanism to repeat listens, repeatedly. Psychologically, you find yourself instantaneously pleased with yourself, that you already know each section of the song before it arrives, after only hearing it once. Humans love routine, and Johnny obviously realised that you can't have enough of a good thing.




 

I play samba in a percussion group. Over the years, Brazilian swing has provided an almost constant rhythmic background to daily life. My pedestrian footfall provides the primera and segunda, and then the brain fills-in with claves and syncopation. Much to the annoyance of work colleagues and people in the lift, I can randomly verbalise rhythms or just tap them out with my hands (tourette's for drummers). So, my second earworm is most definitely some crazy, class samba action esquenta from Rio. Manguiera are an awesome school and this video always gets the blood boiling. Boom!



 

TIM



I love a good catchy pop song. I chose two that refuse to leave my head for days after I put them on. The first is from Charli XCX, an aggressively provocative 2010s answer to comparatively quaint 90s icons such as The Spice Girls. It’s an intensely youthful song, about the simple chaotic pleasures of taking drugs with good friends. Its not a song intended for my demographic, but the quality of the hooks is too good to ignore.

Charli XCX – Take My Hand.


My second choice is perhaps my favourite ever pop song. If Take My Hand reflects the simple pleasures of the cool and extroverted youth, this song shows the other side – youth can be bittersweet for those too introverted, awkward or simply dull to participate in the normative reckless hedonism that so many pop songs celebrate. Here’s Where The Story Ends is about youthful adventures that end before they begin, with Harriet Wheeler’s clear voice combining perfectly with her husband-to-be’s jangly guitar. 

The Sundays - Here's Where the Story Ends.





LIAM


Leaving pondering this theme till the evening of our get-together was probably not the best idea, and I did struggle to think of songs that are regularly on my mind. I'm not really much of a hummer or tapper you see, and generally have the more recent tracks I've listened to bouncing around my head than those from way-back-when. Eternal Flame was the first track I thought of, but in the interest of keeping my Music Club credibility in the positive (or having any chance of getting into the positive), I racked my brains extra hard to come up with something a bit more... manly!

Elton John - Measure of a Man

My upbringing was quite immersed in the Rocky movies thanks to an older cousin who had all of them on VHS and the soundtracks on tape, playing these regularly when we hung out. The soundtracks are pretty cool, and through the first 5 movies being released over the span of 14 years, have a real sense of time and place. This track from the closing credits of the fifth movie has stayed with me since 1991-92, and although feels like a typical, epic, powerful Elton John track, steers away from some of the cheesyness some of his more commonly played songs contain. Very uplifting!



Gogol Bordello - Start Wearing Purple

This is just fun, and will surely remain in your head for some time after spinning it! I luckily came across a live performance of Gogol Bordello on MTV2 a couple of weeks before they were due to play a festival I was attending. It was this track, and I thought the atmosphere looked amazing. They played the festival at 4pm in baking sunshine, and I made sure to see them. What started off as a crowd of a few hundred soon turned into many thousands as songs like this one drew bleary-eyed festival hippies and soon-to-be-hippies from all around. Do not miss this band if you ever have the chance to see them live.


CARL


For me, earworms come and go but there are some that return time and again. Glokenpop from the album Grand Slam by Spiderbait is one such. The beauty of this song is that it's all self contained. Three minutes and twelve seconds of sage instruction, sound advice and intense mentoring of the budding pop star, all set to an uplifting riff... and yet is that a whiff of artist vs. industry cynicism I detect? In the same vein as Weezer - Pork and Beans or Pink Floyd - Have a Cigar? Surely not. Puts an entirely different perspective on things... like in the video, are they chocolate mousses or shiny dog turds?
(although the video name is Glockenpop I'll stay with the album name)


The second one is floating amongst my current transient jetsam... The group is called WORLD ORDER (yes, all caps) and, like a lot of Japanese groups, there is an important visual aspect to their work. In this case it is choreography. Think synchronised C3-P0 in a suit. If you're struggling with what that might look like then spare a thought for the average unsuspecting Japanese person that may have the misfortune to be caught up in one of their productions... stunned mullet doesn't do justice to some of the reactions. It's leader, Genki Sudo, is responsible for pretty much everything, singing, performing, songwriting, directing, producing... the lot. Not bad for an ex-MMA fighter. It's mostly in Japanese and I'm thankful they, like the English, think nothing of nicking words from other languages and using them as and when. Because of that I get to sing 'Have a Nice Day' three times and 'Everywhere' twelve times in four and a half minutes in a song I don't really understand...

Covers Pt.II


Image result for cover songs





CHRISTIAN

Memories Can't Wait

When one mighty band covers another seminal act, great things can happen. I was introduced to Living Colour way back when I worked on a checkout at the local supermarket. LC had just released Vivid where they completely nailed funk rock with incredible individual musicianship. It's their 30th anniversary tour this year, and I'll be seeing them play in Auckland in May - whoop! I offer up Memories Can't Wait, originally by Talking Heads off of the LP, Fear of Music. I  adored much of their music but spent most of my time wearing out my video cassette of Stop Making Sense. The original is a weird freak out, trippy affair. It sounds like someone reflecting on loosing their marbles, where all the voices and instrumentation are distorted visions and jumbled thoughts. Then Vernon Reid gets his hands on the song and turns it into a vehicle to rambunctiously solo through. Corey and team transform the song from sounding like terminal brain atrophy to a light mental health phase, and everything's going to be alright.



   

Uptown Ranking

This was a massive tune in the late 70's, where two young ladies (Althea and Donna) from Jamaica made it big with a one hit wonder. It was patois heavy but the alliteration and allusions to the Caribbean were a winner. It also has a delightful innocence about it - it's not moody, sexy, aggressive, or any of the marketing memes that A&R execs seem to go for nowadays.

I then discovered Black Box Recorder from the crazy yet amazing dystopian animated show, Monkey Dust. The band's name tells of the only surviving sonic record after a plane crash. Just as cheerily, the music was the backdrop to a suburban nightmare, uniquely of this centuries making: we've apparently never had it so good, while never having had such a gloomy outlook with such little promise. The chirpy tune that was a summer sunshine classic, gets converted into a gloomy trip-hop, monotone, dirge with little hope. It sounds like a middle-class, suburban housewife is mechanically reducing the patois into an nonsensical soliloquy, while staring out the window, doing the dishes. There are heaps of covers that do an honest reproduction of the original but there's something exciting when a song gets completely re-imagined.



 
 

DAVID

Being a 'cover band' is these days considered a serious 'burn'. No one want to be that band but the fact is that everyone loves a good cover version. It remains a hugely popular if somewhat guilty pleasure for all music fans. That's why bands keep churning them out people!

Anyway, enough about good covers, what I focused on were the truly misguided. The ones that really have you scratching your head and reaching for the sick bucket at the same time. The ones that leave you reeling with a 'WTF were they thinking?" aftertaste.

Where ambition becomes overreach and there is no logical way to follow their thinking about how they decided to invest their time and resources into actually capturing this and releasing it upon an unsuspecting public. Tracks that call into question the entire artistic process and mental stability of those involved.

Step forward Britney Spears and her cover of....."I love Rock n' Roll". Yep The Joan Jett & the Blackhearts timeless classic ode to the liberating powers of good ole rock and roll. However where Joan convinces everyone of her heart felt sincerity with her bad-ass straight ahead rock, Britney turns it into an opportunity to work her way through all the cliches of a pin up calendar photo shoot. Fake. Fake Fake. She most emphatically does NOT love Rock and roll. And rock and roll does not love her. Fail.


 


Track two takes the 'poor choice of cover' to a new and borderline offensive level by Duran Duran covering Public Enemy's "911 is a joke". I know. What exactly a bunch of prancing white bread pop boys thought they could add to this epic piece is beyond me. If you have any ideas at all please send them on a postcard.

Most people react to this with frank disbelief. Surprisingly Simon le Bon et al thought it was a great wheeze. This has to be the musical equivalent of 'crossing the streams' and will surely see them condemned to burn in some special hell (soundtrack provided by Messrs Liam and Christian).



 
 

LIAM

I found this theme (chosen by none-other-than-me!) a pretty easy one. I wasn't overly happy with my choices the last time we came armed with covers, suffering from too many options and picking more on uniqueness than quality. Ever since that night, I was determined to have another run at this theme and pick tracks I felt more strongly about.

Juliet Turner - Toxic (originally by Britney Spears)

This cover is from the Even Better Than The Real Thing series of CDs realised for charity by Irish radio station Today FM. Every week, while interviewing an Irish musician or band, the presenter of a popular morning show on the station would put a vote to the listeners. They would choose which of three songs the interviewee would have to interpret, learn and perform before the end of the show two hours later. Typically one option was a modern pop hit, and the antagonistic listeners would inevitably choose this to make it interesting and difficult for the artist. This format produced 4 CDs containing many fantastic cover versions of well known pop tracks.

I could have picked any of about 20 tracks off these albums. I chose this one because Juliet does such a great job of making this super well known track breathy and seductive, and every time I hear it I think how well written the track is, which I would never have thought about the original presentation.



 



Type O Negative - Summer Breeze (originally by Seals and Croft)

Released on their 1972 Summer Breeze album, Seals and Crofts' original version reached No. 6 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart in the US, and in 2013, it was ranked No. 13 in Rolling Stone′s "Best Summer Songs of All Time". Thank you Wikipedia! For the first several years of owning this album I would never have thought this was anything other than a Type O original. To find it was a cover was amazing, and to realise how summery, dreamy and hippy the original was was mind-blowing! Peter Steele (RIP) and Type O Negative find that excellent and challenging balance of making the track their own while staying true to the original, and, in my opinion, improving on it.



 


RAE



My first instinct was to select The Man Who Sold the World, I didn't end up playing this during our session instead I selected the second cover below.  Afterwards, I did notice that both my songs had World in the title (quite unplanned).

This is a David Bowie original, from his third studio album first released in the United States by Mercury Records November 1970, and then in April 1971 in the United Kingdom.  It was also covered by Lulu, who had a UK No. 3 hit with her version in 1974, whilst they all have their merit for different reasons (Lulu's version being my least liked) my favourite version is Nirvana's performed on MTV unplugged in 1993.

Bowie:


Lulu:



Nirvana:






Wild World



Original version by Cat Stevens released in 1970 on his fourth album Tea for the Tillerman and apparently related to the end of his romance with actress Patti DÁrbanville.  This song has been extensively covered by other artists including a version by Garth Brooks as recent as 2013, in my rough count no less than 23 attempts at it thus far....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHXpnZi9Hzs


I specifically chose Beth Orton's version to see how a gender change would play out.


I like the strength at which she tackles this song and it is this version that is my preferred.


TIM


Covers remind me of jazz standards, where every version is a cover. So I chose a rock standard, a song that has been covered so many times that the original version seems almost irrelevant. Iggy Pop’s version may not be the best, but he makes the song distinctively his own, as anyone doing a cover ought.

Gloria – Iggy Pop


For my second song, I went for a jazz version of an Iggy Pop original. But not a noodly lounge-jazz version, a full blast free-jazz version from Danish band The Thing. In place of wailing guitar there is wailing sax, and in place of Iggy Pop’s snarl is an equally aggressive Neneh Cherry.

Neneh Cherry and The Thing - Dirt




DEB



Enya – Sail Away
Frankly, I do not like this song. Words cannot express how much I dislike this song. It is an ear worm song in the worst possible way.
Santana – Sail Away
Saw Santana as Bluesfest. He was playing a reasonable set, warming up rather well. Then he does THIS song!!!!! I exploded at the concert, there was a lot of swearing. I insisted that we had to leave, Santana had fallen that far in my esteem. Santana will not be the same for me.

CARL


(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - Rolling Stones / Devo
If Art isn't Science then you have to accept the occasional failure on your way to greatness... and so it is even for the Greatest-Band-Of-My-Early-Adulthood... DEVO. These guys from Akron Ohio were students at Kent State University at the time and one was involved in the protests that ended with the shooting of unarmed students by the Ohio National Guard (two of the four people killed were friends of his). This event led to the main theme of De-Evolution of US society that permeated DEVO from then on.

This cover of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" appeared on their first album "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!". The lyrics certainly fitted with the mindset of the band even though they took a markedly different approach to the arrangement. Also note in the video that the team are wearing Club Devo catalog items "Yellow Suit YS7891 - Protect yourself from dangerous human elements and stay cool during meltdowns in this official DEVO suit. A classic in formal attire. (Features Non Corrosive Snaps.)" and "3D GLASSES 3DG 477- The Real McCoys, As seen on Saturday Nite Live (and elsewhere). Adds a new dimension to your 2-D life!". Sadly, neither of these items are currently available on the Club Devo website any more...
 
The Lunatics have taken over the Asylum - Fun Boy Three / Collide
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the variety of music coming out of the UK in the 70's and 80's was phenomenal. A real melting pot... And Fun Boy Three were typical of that. Three ex members of The Specials that continued to distill SKA in their own unique way. I've always liked the original but at the time didn't really connect with it as a social statement... hindsight is a wonderful thing and when you remember that this was released the year after Reagan was elected President of the USA you can see the relevance of what was being said.
Collide is an American based duo in the Industrial genre that have been active since 1995. They run a mix of original and industrialised covers and produce an album every 3-5 years... not prolific but definitely professional. I think they've done the song justice to the point where I'll play it over the original more often than not. On the homage side of the covers equation... they respect the original but add their own unique touches.
Fun Boy Three