How the whole-album tribute came back into fashion
Benjamin Gibbard has released his cover album of Teenage Fanclub's 1991 'Bandwagonesque' and Django Bates has managed a jazz makeover of 'Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'
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Your support makes all the difference.It is one of the most profound, and occasionally controversial, gestures of respect from one musical act to another – covering not just a favourite number, but an entire album. The latest comes from Death Cab For Cutie bandleader Ben Gibbard, who has delved back to his formative teen years by taking on Teenage Fanclub’s acclaimed 1991 release Bandwagonesque.
It follows in the wake of a more tangential tribute, British jazz artist Django Bates’s collaboration with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band to mark the 50th anniversary of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The appearance of both projects suggest a revival of the whole-album tribute after the wrong turn that was Ryan Adams’s quickfire homage to Taylor Swift’s 1989.
Then again, the track-by-track tribute has always had a chequered history. One of the earliest and least impressive attempts comes from Booker T and The MGs’ horribly bland appraisal of the Fab Fours’ Abbey Road. The Stax studio band are best known for such tight grooves as “Green Onions” and playing behind the likes of Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. Their cover album McLemore Avenue, though, is a limp, essentially easy listening, effort that pales in comparison to more committed soulful takes, namely Nina Simone’s Here Comes The Sun and The Supremes’ cool Come Together.
The concept only began to take off in the early Noughties, thanks partly to the genius of New York-based reggae outfit The Easy Star All Stars, who have recorded some of the most accomplished and inspired cover albums. They hit the ground running in 2003 with the Pink Floyd tribute Dub Side Of The Moon, which includes such witty touches as the sound of a bong in use to introduce “Money”. The collective followed that up with regular three-year instalments: first came Radiodread, a spacious tip of the hat to Radiohead’s OK Computer, before Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band and Thrillah – a Jamaican-infused take on Michael Jackson’s world sales-record album.
Psychedelic crew The Flaming Lips joined the party in Christmas 2009 with their sinister, darker Floyd tribute titled The Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs with Henry Rollins and Peaches Doing The Dark Side of the Moon, notable for the Canadian provocateur’s ululation on “The Great Gig In The Sky”. Three years ago, Wayne Coyne’e colourful outfit gathered a disparate group of collaborators for the inevitable With A Little Help From My Fwends, a Sgt Pepper’s rerub notable for highlighting his unlikely friendship with Miley Cyrus, beguiling on “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”.
Often, such projects appear as limited-runs, tying in with such initiatives as Record Store Day, suggesting one reason cover albums may have caught on. The interest in celebrating classic long players coincides with a threatened place for the form, barged out by streaming and playlists. While Flaming Lips corralled their team for Floyd, Beck embarked on his Record Club, which involved filming his carefully selected crack teams as they reprised entire albums in just one day, featuring as guests the likes of Feist, Devandra Barnhart and St Vincent. The series has ranged from INXS’s Kick to Songs of Leonard Cohen and included an intimate take on The Velvet Underground and Nico.
The most successful, but also most lambasted, album tribute came in 2015 when Adams dropped his version of Swift’s mammoth 1989, itself released the year before. The prolific Americana artist’s vulnerable takes on “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off” were greeted as revelatory, his album actually charting just ahead of the original, then still in the Billboard parade 40-odd weeks after its release. Then came the backlash, one directed as much at male critics who seemingly used Adams’s authenticity to poo-poo Swift’s pop veneer. Shocked at what he saw as gross misrepresentation (he is a big Swift fan and her breakup tunes hit home as he was going through divorce himself), the male performer pledged never to cover an album ever again, though other examples continue to come thick and fast.
Gibbard’s contribution to the genre appears on Seattle-based online label Turntable Kitchen, behind a series of vinyl-only cover albums, so far featuring a tremulous mirroring of a Vashti Bunyan’s Diamond Day from Mutual Benefit, Foxygen co-founder Jonathan Rado’s spirited take on Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run and Kiwi ex-pats Yumi Zouma’s coolly delivered, inspired synth-pop reboot of Oasis’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? The alternative rocker, by contrast, chooses to stay relatively faithful, while providing the additional gloss of his regular band’s richly textured musicality.
When Bandwagonesque originally came out, Gibbard was in high school in Washington State and claims to have instantly fallen in love with the Fannies’ Big-Star harmonies, saying the record remains his “favourite record by my favourite band of all time”. Indeed, many of his fellow countryfolk fell for such indelible tunes as “The Concept”, “What You Do To Me” and “Star Sign”, with the album ending the year beating Nirvana’s Nevermind to Spin magazine’s best-of-year accolade. Bates, meanwhile, shows how The Beatles’ oeuvre is amenable to translation into unfamiliar genres.
Following the previously mentioned reggae and southern soul Fab Four tributes, the British multi-instrumentalist has marched Sgt Pepper into the world of big-band jazz, though its a more eccentric style than might be expected. While the original masterpiece stretched contemporary studio technology to its limits, Saluting Sgt Pepper focuses on The Beatles’ melodies, while replacing their trickery and experimentalism with unexpected sounds and quirky rhythms. Bates was invited to helm the project by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, but does wonder if the appearance of such projects has to do with the recent demise of so many influential stars, causing us to look back at their pomp and the iconic albums they produced.
“Last year there was a trend of musical heroes dying, both expectedly and unexpectedly; I think there’s a connection,” he says. “The artists that were able to build enormous audiences before the fragmenting effects of YouTube and Soundcloud are reaching the end of their time on Earth, or the end of their artistic productivity. I don’t think there is the possibility for any emerging artist to become a Bowie, Elvis or Prince.” More alarmingly, he also cites the number of times Ed Sheeran – among others – has been accused of plagiarism. Could current artists be running out of the space to be original, he muses.
“Pop music continues to be nearly all in 4/4 [time] and to limit itself to eight or fewer pitches of a diatonic scale. So people working in that world are running out of pleasing possibilities,” he suggests. To be fair, Adams, bounced back from the 1989 farrago with his own well-received break-up album Prisoner, but despite his experiences, the attraction of the classic album seems yet to have reached its limit.
Ben Gibbard’s ‘Bandwagonesque’ is out 28 July on Canvasback Music/Turntable Kitchen. Django Bates and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band play Ronnie Scott’s, London, 4 to 9 September. Their ‘Saluting Sgt Pepper’ is out now
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