What is the greatest cover version of all time? Jimi Hendrix's blazing version of 'All Along The Watchtower'? Rachid Taha's 'Rock el Casbah'? Richie Havens balearic version of 'Goin Back To My Roots'? OMM, in association with Audi TT Remastered, have picked the 50 greatest covers ever. See if you agree...
Cover versions have come back into vogue recently writes Garry Mulholland. In an echo of the wacky punk covers of the late Seventies new wave era, it's become de rigueur for 'serious' artists to have a stab at mainstream pop hits, usually for radio sessions, or live encores, or B-sides. These covers are, almost without exception, gut-wrenchingly awful. Partly because rock musicians aren't as good as pop musicians, but mainly because they don't understand the original, and are forced to hide their bewilderment behind irony. Check out, say, Snow Patrol butchering Beyonce's 'Crazy In Love', presumably for 'a laugh' or some such excuse, and it's easy to forget that pop was built on innovative young singers and musicians recording definitive versions of other people's songs. The great cover is about interpretation, and interpretation is an art equal to writing a song.
The OMM team has made its choice of the 50 greatest covers ever and they're drenched in that art. All of them are examples of an artist getting beneath the layers of their chosen material and working out what they feel the song is really about. From there - whether you improve and expand and re-focus the original's music and themes, as Aretha Franklin famously does to Otis Redding's 'Respect', or deconstruct the original, as the Flying Lizards and Devo do to the Beatles and the Stones - you can take the song to places its composer never imagined their baby would visit.
Our 50 choices do that... and always bring the kid back in one piece.
Check the full list and let us know if you agree, or if you think we've made any glaring omissions...
