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You’ve probably heard Newton Faulkner do his guitar-tappy thing before, but you should definitely watch this. Legend has it he only had half an hour or so before the show to work out how to play it. 

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My favourite part:

“Yeah I’ve got like a kind of bass drummy thing there, and a thing there, and a thing there. I’ve got like a scratchy thing as well, so err what can you do?”

…*plays like a genius*

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In case your knowledge of mid 80s - mid 90s Australian comedy isn’t quite up to scratch, you might be interested to know what Good News Week host, Paul McDermott used to do. Here is your answer:

Love it.

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KS

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‘Tiny Dancer’ was written in 1971 by Elton John, with lyrics by Bernie Taupin. Apparently “the song was written by Taupin to capture the spirit of California in 1970 encapsulated by the many beautiful women he met” (wiki), who presumably, were all under 5 feet tall and pretty good at dancing.

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I reckon Ben Folds actually does an excellent version, considering it’s just his voice and a piano it sounds incredibly full. Also, you’ve gotta love those glasses and the open-mouthed Elton impression.

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Also, this song always just makes me think of this scene from Almost Famous

…and now I’m all goosebumpy.

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KS

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Today’s pick is a Led Zeppelin cover by everyone’s favourite radio-friendly rockers, Train. 

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Now I know what you’re thinking, and no, I’ve not been at the crazy juice. Of course, nothing can beat the Zep original, but if you have a listen (go on, it’s OK…) it’s actually a very respectable cover. Pat Monahan’s voice is really very well suited to the song and it’s also a bit bloody good.

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Interestingly, Led Zeppelin never performed ‘Ramble On’ in its entirety until 2007, which means (according to the date on the video above) Train actually got there first.

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KS

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‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ has got to be one of my favourite songs ever. Not because of any version in particular, you understand, just because it’s a classic, lovely song. The first time I heard it was when it was sung by Marie Bryant in the endlessly cool 1944 short film, Jammin’ The Blues and though I liked it, her strangely staccato delivery never really gripped me. It was only when I heard Billie Holiday’s version that I really got it. It seemed a bit strange hearing Billie sing something so happy (especially as I first heard her version right after listening to ‘Strange Fruit’. Shuffle be damned!), but I loved it. 

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This version by Willie Nelson appeared on his 1978 album, Stardust - a collection of Willie’s favourite pop / jazz standards that was met with near-universally positive reviews on release, despite Columbia Records’ initial fears that a move away from his usual outlaw country sound could spell only doom. The 30th Anniversary Legacy Edition contained another 16 tracks on a bonus disc of standards taken from across Willie’s other albums (this includes another one of my favourites, ‘Stormy Weather’).

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To say the album’s been successful would be to seriously underplay it — Willie won a Grammy award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance for ‘Georgia On My Mind’, the album is on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and, mind-bogglingly, the Stardust stayed on Billboard’s Country Album Chart all the way from its release up until 1988! That’s a whole 10 years on the chart (…and you thought Adele’s album had stuck around a while)!

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KS

11 years ago today Westlife took their version of this Billy Joel ‘classic’ to the top of the UK charts.  They might have swapped Christie for Claudia, the garage for a diner but the old story of supermodel meets millionaire and explodes in to a gleaming ball of perfect smiles and money, stays the same.

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Because I can’t bring myself to acknowledge how old it makes me if Westlife feature on a catalogue music blog…here’s how it sounded in 1983!  I wish taking my car for an MOT at Kwik Fit in Gospel Oak was this much fun.  She rolls in looking like the American dream in her posh chauffer driven Bugsy Malone motor and rolls out with a pint sized pop millionaire!  I roll in with a 13 year old Peugeot 106 with moss growing in the boot and roll out with a £500 bill!

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And here’s a video of Billy performing it live in 2006:

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LM

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‘Man In The Long Black Coat’ originally appeared on Bob Dylan’s 1989 album, Oh Mercy and is one of two songs (the other being ‘Ring Them Bells’) on the album to have its first-take recorded vocals end up on the finished record. 

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“In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my ‘Walk the Line’, a song I’d always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.

[…]

When I first heard “I Walk the Line” so many years earlier, it sounded like a voice calling out, “What are you doing there, boy?” I was trying to keep my eyes wide opened, too.” (Bob Dylan, pages 216-217, Chronicles, Volume 1)

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The lyrics paint a picture of a town in the eerie calm after a storm - “Window wide open, African trees / Bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze” and the notable absence of the woman who is “gone with the man in the long black coat”. You can almost hear the crickets chirping in Daniel Lanois’ consciously simple production, plucked guitar strings echoing like the burst of fat raindrops as they slip off of the leaves they bend, and hit the floor, and Dylan’s voice (in classic story-teller mode) tells a creepy tale about death.

Creepier still is Mark Lanegan’s cover for the slightly bizarro Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. With only one recording on the soundtrack by Dylan himself and the rest being covers, Lanegan’s cover stands out by virtue of just sounding so incredibly haunted. His delivery is less staccato than Dylan’s but retains the storyteller feel. When he sings “There are no mistakes in life some people say / It’s true, sometimes”, his “you can see it that way” almost seems to mock the very notion as his voice descends back into melancholy, growling “She went with the man / In the long black coat.”

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Another notable cover is Joan Osborne’s. People writing about the song often seem to pick out the line “people don’t live or die / people just float” and Osborne’s take on it is filled with the kind of yearning that detached story-telling just can’t access. The way her voice embodies the preacher “in the sermon he gave” is spot on – chastising, imploring, and warning “every man’s conscience is vile and depraved / you cannot depend on it to be your guide / when it’s you who must keep it satisfied”.

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And finally, just to leave you with a couple more offbeat covers - Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s 1994 recording sounds exactly as you would expect an ELP cover of ‘Man In The Long Black Coat’ to sound, and Daniel Bedingfield’s cover (which I apologise for linking to) sounds like one that should perhaps be forgotten sooner rather than later…cruel, but fair.

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KS