Music Covers: A new way to hear your favourite song or a way bands ruin perfectly good music?

Due to concepts such as "Radio 1 Live Lounge", covers have become much more widespread in recent years. The question is has this new wave of covers brought about a different but enjoyable way to listen to our favourite songs, or are these covers creating new, worse, memories of the songs we used to love? In this blog I am going to evaluate a number of these covers and come up with my top and bottom 5.

I have been an avid fan of Radio 1 live lounge since the first CD came out in 2006. The only covers I had come across previous to it being released was the odd one stuck on the end of an album as filler. A number of songs stuck out of that album for me, namely Lemar’s cover of “I Believe in a Thing Called Love”. Now, I was never a fan of Lemar, normally I wouldn’t choose to listen to his music. This meant that I assumed that his cover of this song would ruin one of my (at the time) favourites by The Darkness… it was only when I listened to it that I realised it was a fresh take on an amazing classic, and even though it was done by someone I didn’t really like, that didn’t mean it wasn’t good. However, if I thought this song was good, I had no idea how amazing some of the songs could be when I liked the artist and the song AND it worked. The best example of this in the first volume on radio 1 live lounge was (in my view) Razorlight covering “Hey Ya”.

However, part of the brilliance of the first Radio 1 Live lounge CD was that there were artists covering their own songs. Although these songs were great, a chance to hear artists without all the alterations (the Photoshop of the music industry) this isn’t what my blog today is about. As the Radio 1 live lounge volumes went on there were some great covers, such as Paulo Nutini and “rehab” and Keane covering “with or without you”.

With covers becoming more “fashionable” they began being released by bands more frequently. This brings me to my favourite band for covers – The Kooks. Among their covers have been “Violet Hill” (Coldplay),  Young Folks (Peter Bjorn and John) and “Kids” (MGMT). Out of these only one was done through Radio 1s live lounge.

However, even though I love the idea of music covers, that doesn't mean that I don't realise that some of them are an abomination. After listening to the most recent Radio 1 live Lounge (Volume 6) I found myself having to stop listening to some of the songs before they finished simply because they were so awful. The problem with this is that it can ruin the original version of the song for you. For example, whenever you listen to the original version the cover comes to mind, and you find yourself mildly repulsed… Quite often covers go wrong when artists don’t make the song their own, they just try and sing to the same tune and the same rhythm even though it doesn’t suit their voice at ALL. It’s one thing if a band puts their own stamp on it, so even if it doesn’t sound great it’s often amusing. But when they just sing it, seemingly not putting any effort into changing it, and it sounds bad… it’s just not right.

Overall, I think that covers are a great idea. Even though the odd one will make your blood boil, the fact that so many of them create a new way to listen to a classic song make them worth listening to for me.

Lastly here are my top and bottom 5 covers:

Top 5:
The Kooks – Young Folks (Peter Bjorn and John)
 Maximo Park – (I’m Gonna be) 500 Mile (The Proclaimers)
Just Jack – Love Fool (The Cardigans)
Stereophonics – Nothing Compares To You (Sinead O’Connor)
Starfucker – Girls Just Want To Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper)

Bottom 5:
Everything Everything – What’s My Name? (Rihanna)
Corinne Bailey Rae – Sexyback (Justin Timberlake)
Biffy Clyro – Love Sex Magic (Justin Timberlake)
Little Boots – Beat Again (JLS)
Miike Snow – In For The Kill