1. Wave Of Mutilation
2. Age Of Consent
3. Eternal
4. I Often Dream Of Trains
5. Killing Moon
6. Love My Way
7. Under The Milkway Tonight
8. City Of Refuge
9. So Central Rain
10. Boys Don't Cry
11. Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
Nineteeneighties is Grant-Lee Phillips' homage to his
musical heroes. An LP of covers in the style of David Bowie's Pin Ups. As the title suggests it's a tour
around the 1980s with a pronounced slant towards old
school indie rock. Now cover versions are odd beasts:
much like plumbing in a sink, they are more complex and
difficult to carry off than they first appear. They are
slippery and it's almost impossible to tell which ones will
succeed and which will fail.
My mate James brings CDs of
covers version to poker night. Once a week he conjures up
an eclectic selection. The versions can swing from
the sublime (Jimi Hendrix's All Along the
Watchtower) via the odd (anything by Nouvelle Vague)
to outright blasphemy (Tina Turner murdering
Unfinished Sympathy). Here Mr Philips serves up eleven
differing takes on the strange art of the cover.
I was intrigued to discover how Mr Phillips would
translate the diverse material he had gathered here. From
the primal scream of the Pixies' Wave Of Mutilation
to the crystal melodies of Echo & The Bunnymen's
Killing Moon to the flimsy early electronica of New Order's Age Of Consent. The artists and songs encompass a
broad church of noise. The originals would make a great
soundtrack, but would the covers flow together or just sound
lumpen and disjointed?
I shouldn't have worried. One look at the track listing
shows that Grant-Lee Phillips has a love and understanding
for these songs. He hasn't gone for obvious choices; the
majority are songs that are buried on LPs, and are not
the hit singles that a casual fan my have picked. It's not
This Charming Man or Love Will Tear Us Apart on
show here.
The fragile nature of the cover version is shown in
stark relief by the opening two tracks. I thought that the
Pixies' Wave Of Mutilation would be a perfect fit for Grant-Lee's towering vocals and dusty Americana. Yet the result
is something of a low slung dirge. It highlights the
shortcomings of the Pixies range more than a failure on the
part of Grant-Lee. The thrill of the Pixies sound resides
in those screaming guitars, poppy baselines and Black
Francis' bug-eyed vocals. In a stripped down form there
appears to be little left to play with.
I winced when I saw that New Order's Age Of Consent was
one of the featured tracks. The song is tied so tightly to
Peter Hook's bassline I thought it would be like cutting
off Samson's hair, that it would lose its power when torn
away from its moorings. Astonishingly, it works - the
bassline replaced by acoustic guitars and a finger picked
melody. The pithy lyric of disgust and anger sounds
wounded, Grant-Lee's voice taking on some of Barney Sumners'
delicate papery grace.
The remaining songs are all successes. The Cure's
Boys Don't Cry has a slowed down, brittle heartfelt edge;
REM's So Central Rain is wreathed in sweet southern
air; Joy Division's Eternal is a lesson in
restrained atmospherics, the vocals teasing out
hidden counter melodies in Ian Curtis' most haunted lyric, a
bluesy harmonica, mournful piano notes and subtle organ
tones replacing the icy synths of the original.
Morrissey's infamous piano intro is cut from
the cover of The Smiths' Last Night I Dreamt Somebody
Loved Me, but the ache, the longing, the weary heartbreak is
retained; the song slowly envelops you like the onset of
sleep. On the version of The Church's Under The
Milky Way, bright acoustic guitars float elegantly above
the dark menace of reverberating electronics.
Often the cover version can often been viewed as an
attempt to escape writer's block. Grant-Lee Phillips has
never struck me as someone short of his own material, and you
can hear the esteem in which he holds the songs on this
record. The personal attachment to the material shines
through. He seems to have climbed inside their very DNA.
They feel personal, lived in and cherished. This record
deserves to be more than simply the soundtrack to my next
night of poker.