‘It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.’ And I think, ‘F*ck you, you little tosser!”
David Bowie’s brilliantly wicked reaction to kids who would come up and congratulate him on his song cover choice after hearing him play The Man Who Sold The World.
He made the mould and then he broke the mould.
And then he did the same thing all over again.
His songs are complex and not an easy cover.
When Rick Wakeman who played piano on Life On Mars heard it for the first time he was astonished by the chord changes throughout, but particularly on the lines “But the film is a saddening bore” and “Sailors! Fighting In The Dancehall”.
There’s a good reason X-Factor auditionees don’t cover him.
But many great artists have taken on the challenge and here are seven pearls
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Seu Jorge is a massive Bowie fan and has covered several of his songs. Turns out Bowie liked what Jorge did and wrote, “Had Seu Jorge not recorded my songs acoustically in Portuguese, I would never have heard this new level of beauty which he has imbued them with,” he wrote in the liner notes for Jorge’s 2005 album The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions.
Bowie really dug this cover as well saying, “”I was simply blown away when I found that Kurt Cobain liked my work, and have always wanted to talk to him about his reasons for covering ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.”
He was less enamoured by the “kids that come up afterwards and say, ‘It’s cool you’re doing a Nirvana song.’ And I think, ‘Fuck you, you little tosser!”
Legend has it that Commander Chris Hadfield had to chose between Space Oddity and Babylon Zoo’s, Spaceman for the first music video recorded from space – aboard the International Space Station. That choice only happened inside my head but all the same, Commander Hadfield chose wisely…
Bowie sang backing vocals on Province from the band’s 2006 album Return To Cookie Mountain. The Thin White Duke requested they cover Heroes and you don’t turn the great man down.
In 2007, while still studying at DCU, Armagh artist, Paula Flynn recorded a version of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance which found its way into the hands of Ballygowan advertising executives. The whispery vocal delivery made its way onto the advert. The inevitable “Who’s the girl singing the Bowie song?” soon followed and after EMI released it, it went on to top the Irish charts.
Backed by a 157-piece orchestra conducted by his own father, the composer and arranger David Campbell, Beck produces an epic nine minute cover version of the 1977 Sound And Vision. Not for the faint-hearted.
Blondie covered the Bowie classic in concert in 1980 and released it as a single in Germany the same year.
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