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More 90′s retro revival – love this beautiful cover of Robin S via Sea Punk Gang from boy kid cloud, available for free download or purchase.
More 90′s retro revival – love this beautiful cover of Robin S via Sea Punk Gang from boy kid cloud, available for free download or purchase.
Anything Fleetwood Mac related is pretty much a shoe-in for this blog, although covers can be a sore point – so often they add so little, and lose any magic the original had in the translation. One that does add a modern sense of ghostly folktronica (?) to an already haunting FM track is Julia Holter’s cover of Gold Dust Woman – part of Mojo’s Rumours Revisited cover CD. In some senses it’s hard to ruin a track this great, in others it’s easy to fall into the trap of replication. Although starting fairly traditionally by the end of this track it’s pretty clear it’s far from a pure copy, linking it more into the song’s psychedelic folk roots with a modern acid-folk / almost chillwave production.
I need to listen to the rest to see if it’s better than the patchy FM covers album (I echo the comments from The Guardian about that compilation) from earlier in the year, but this cover is a good start.
Lovely this – Fiddy’s In Da Club performed George Formby style by Ewan Wardrop as part of a Fringe show about him. It’s funny but not as incongruous as it seems, George was the bad boy of his day, even getting banned by the Beeb he was the OG of the Ukelele 
(via Pomdeter)
There’s been a lot of hype over Fleetwood Mac recently – a new covers album by the likes of Lykke Li, J.Mascis, New Pornographers, MGMT and Antony amongst many others – and the great news that FM themselves are reforming and touring next year (yay! Hope it’s the mostly-complete lineup although I’d also love Christine to come back).
The covers I’ve heard so far as a fairly rabid FM fan are mainly so-so, including Best Coast’s take on Rhiannon, a track that needs a sort of brooding dark intensity that the laid-back rockers can’t provide, maybe? Although it’s nice to see less famous tracks like Before The Beginning, Oh Well, Think of Me, Angel, Straight Back and ‘Future Games’ (written by Bob Welch) get covered and given some love, I like MGMT’s take on that…and also shows how influential FM of all eras still is. Rumours is just the pinnacle. Srsly if you’ve not checked out Peter Green era ‘Mac or the post-Green Welch era I really recommend you do.
But it seems actually Best Coast kept the best FM cover for their own album – a cover of Storms…which as you can see on their Jimmy Fallon appearance is chills-down-the-spine good. Another song that takes no prisoners, it suits the stripped down nature more and Beth just brings the emotion that song needs – not channelling Stevie, more doing her own take on it, but that song has so much Stevie embedded in it it’s impossible to completely separate the two. Anyway, watch it…it’s one of the best live covers I’ve seen very long time.
Oh and RIP Bob Welch…without him as Mick and others of the band have said, Fleetwood Mac would never have survived to even record Rumours and their later success. He kept them going – although it was his departure that led to Nicks and Buckingham joining the group. As Rolling Stone pointed out, his best track other than Future Games is Hypnotized which I’ve loved since hearing it in prep for the Fleetwood Mix mashup album – a massive influence on ‘Yachtrock’ and if you like those bands yet don’t know Welch’s work, you should pronto.
