Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Four

One more cover version Sunday mix then I'll leave it alone for a while. I've been finding cover versions in all sorts of places since I started the first mix four weeks ago, songs springing to mind at random moments. Most of the ones I've chosen do something with the source material, take it somewhere else emotionally or stylistically. Some rip the original to shreds, some pay their respects but still tear it up. Some nod their head to their influences or pay something back. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Four

• Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End
• Spiritualized: Any Way That You Want Me
• The Kills: Pale Blue Eyes
• One Dove: Jolene
• Galaxie 500: Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste
• John Cale: All My Friends
• Monkey Mafia: As Long As I Can See The Light
• Raz and Afla: Windowlicker

Sonic Boom formed Spectrum after Spacemen 3 split up and his cover of Daniel Johnson's True Love Will Find You In The End is a gorgeous, angelic take on the song. Released in 1992 as a single and later included in two versions on a Sonic Boom/ Spectrum compilation.

Two years earlier Jason Pierce/ J Spaceman flew the Spacemen 3 coop first, releasing the first Spiritualized single, a cover of The Troggs 1966 single. Jason doesn't radically alter it but he makes it a Spiritualized song all the same. 

The Kills cover of The Velvet Underground's Pale Blue Eyes is gloriously ragged and fuzzed up, the guitar stuttering and ripping a hole in the speaker while Alison gives deadpan vocals. It was a B-side to their 2012 The Last Goodbye single.

One Dove's dubbed out, trippy reggae cover of Dolly Parton is a blast, Dot's beautifully off key vocals perfect for the band's blissed out but slightly on edge comedown re-imagining of the song. It came out as one of the B-sides to the 1993 single release of Why Don't You Take Me.

Galaxie 500 recorded several fantastic covers- their take on New Order's Ceremony may be the best NO cover ever recorded. Their cover of Jonathan Richman's Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste is superb, Jonathan's ninety second original stretched to to seven minutes, a thrilling Galaxie performance, the rumble of drums and bass matched by Dean's trebly, overdriven guitar. They only existed for four years, 1987 to 1991, but what a great band they were. 

John Cale covered LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends for LCD's own release of the single back in 2007- it came out as the B-side on 7" along with a sister 7" that had  Franz Ferdinand cover of the same song. Cale's version, piano, clipped krautrock guitars and his lived in, baritone voice give James Murphy's song a new dimension- when Cale sings, 'where are your friends tonight?', it conjures all sorts of imagery. 

Monkey Mafia's cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's was a 1998 single, a late 90s revisiting of a 1970 song, a call out to the weary travelers and wanderers, a song about going home. Pre- millenial tension?

Raz and Afla's cover of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker came out this year, a fantastic synths and percussion Afro- electronic floor filler- well, I can imagine some floors that it might fill. 

Forty Five Minutes of Sonic Boom

Pete Kember's music in Spacemen 3 and afterwards as Spectrum, E.A.R. and Sonic Boom, sometimes looks like one long blissed out haze of analogue synths, shimmering waves, drones and endless repetition. Nothing wrong with that. His back catalogue has a wealth of songs, albums and remixes. The three quarters of an hour below contains nothing from his 1994 masterpiece Highs, Lows And Heavenly Blows, a treatise on meditative, tranced out, hypnotic guitar and synth drones with Sonic's trademark lethargic vocals, and that's solely because I don't have any of the songs from it in digital format. Pete currently lives in Sintra, Portugal which is clearly good for his work rate- he's released two new albums since 2020 and toured to promote them, along with last year's album with Panda Bear, as well as producing albums by Cheval Sombre, Beach House and Moon Duo. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Sonic Boom

• Tremeloes
• True Love Will Find You In the End (Alternate Version)
• How You Satisfy Me
• Just Imagine
• The Horizon (Sonic Boom No Drums Version)
• Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough
• Frozen (Sonic Boom Mix)
• Warmth Of The Sun (Sonic Boom Remix)

Tremolos and True Love Will Find You In The End were both released as Spectrum in 1992, the former a four minute wobbly, two note drone and the latter a gorgeous cover of  Daniel Johnson's most well known song. They were also on a 1997 compilation called What Came Before After which is where this version of True Love Will Find You In The End is from. 

How You Satisfy Me is from 1992's Soul Kiss (Glide Divine), an album that came with a translucent, liquid sleeve. Rare and expensive second hand and prone to bursting/ degrading. 

Just Imagine was the lead song from 2020's All Things Being Equal. Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough was a follow up a year later, with a remix of Just Imagine and some new songs.

The Horizon is by Sinner DC, a Swiss ambient/ electronic/ drone group who have made a dozen albums since the 1990s.

Frozen, not from the Disney film about a snowman of the same name, is by The Insect Guide, a duo from Leeds who formed in 2005 and released two albums between 2007 and 2010.

Warmth Of The Sun is by Pye Corner Audio from last year's Let's Emerge album, a track with Andy Bell on guitar. Sonic Boom remixed three of the songs for an EP titled Let's Remerge.  

Spacemen

I never saw Spacemen 3 play live. I bought Playing With Fire when it came out and was attending gigs in the period the group were active but for some reason our paths never crossed. I have recently got round to reading Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands, the memoirs of Will Carruthers, who spent a few years playing bass and taking drugs with Spacemen 3. The book is a must if you're a fan of the band or of the ones that came afterwards- Sonic Boom/Spectrum and Spiritualized.

Will is a gifted writer and there are two chapters that deal with the Spacemen 3 live experience in lurid detail. The first is a performance at an arts centre in Hammersmith billed as An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar. Will hits the one note groove early on and holds onto it for forty minutes or so while Pete and Jason do their thing. As the feedback rings out to close the set he leans to turn off his amp only to find he is so out of it he hadn't turned it on when starting. The set is recorded and released as one of the tracks on Dreamweapon. The cinemagoers and attendees of the gig are so horrified by the first set that Spacemen 3 are paid not to play their scheduled second set.

The second gig is a show in Chester, re-arranged to a health spa by the promoter, who also gives the group their first experience of E. A bunch of Ellesmere Port football fans turn up, not to beat the band up as they first think but to take drugs with Spacemen 3 and enjoy the music. The spa and it's facilities are thoroughly wrecked by the band and their fans. Will gives an honest, funny and at times bleak account of  outsider life in a small town in the Midlands, of the impact of being open about drug-taking on the band, their families and the people they know. He describes the recording of Recurring, with the band working on Pete and Jason's songs separately, the subsequent break up of the band and the divergence of Sonic and Jason into their post-Spacemen activities. It's out in paperback and available for less than a tenner and well worth picking up.

Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) has had the lower profile career of the two main men but his varied back catalogue since Spacemen 3 is full of one and two chord gems.  This one hits a blissed out organ tone early on and Pete's guitar ripples over the top of some celestial backing vocals.

True Love Will Find You In The End

Jason has gone on to Spiritualized, a group that have  recorded some of the most brilliant music of the last two decades. They can be prone to repeating themselves, but I've come to realise it's a act of refinement rather than just repetition. There's a new album out later this year and the lead song, I'm Your Man, is rather gorgeous.

Electric Sound Of Summer

I pointed you in the direction of Fuxa back in the Spring, who recorded this beautiful, blissed out version of the Fun Boy Three/Go Go's Our Lips Are Sealed. Whispered vox, analogue keys, primitive percussion, effects.



Something reminded me of it the other day and I realised I hadn't gone looking for the album, which came out in May. It's called Electric Sound Of Summer, and that title describes it pretty well. It's got wooziness all over it, the aural equivalent of the sun going down over a beer garden when you've had exactly the right amount to drink and everything feels good. On the other hand there's a sadness about it too. The sun will soon disappear behind the trees, a chill in the air, Autumn's just around the corner. Lovely stuff.

As well as the aforementioned cover there's a ten minute version of Suicide's Cheree, a cover of a Daniel Johnston song (below) and guest spots from Dean and Britta (from Luna and Dean and Britta), Seefeel's Sarah Peacock, and members of Spiritualized, Spectrum and Spacemen 3.

Some Things Last A Long Time