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| September 8th, 2006 by Eric K (Permalink) Add Comments |
Strapped for funds? Not talented enough to write your own music? Why not cash in on the success of others with a tribute album? It is, dear readers, the sure-fire marketable gimmick. To be sold alongside the single-use cameras, lifestyle magazines and Dan Brown ‘novels’ at airport duty-free. Relying mostly on its sales pitch, they rarely require any actual talent on behalf of the creators. There are exceptions, however. Eureka moments when opposite poles of music’s rich diversity are combined breathing new life into familiar songs. Here we examine the many tributes to one of this generation’s most profitable brands: Radiohead.
Quick disclaimer: Excluded from assessment are compilation tributes like the Plastic Mutations electronic tribute, the Anyone Can Play Radiohead comp or the recent Exit Music: Songs for Radio Heads as these are really just a bunch of covers by different artists packaged together (although Mark Ronson’s Just on the latter almost justifies their inclusion). Neither will we be considering remix/“versus” albums like Panzah Zandahz’s Me & This Army or the Greenhouse Effect versus Radiohead. They are both crap anyway so we needn’t mourn their exclusion too much. Clearly, you’re noone in Indie if you haven’t butchered one or two ‘head classics and more pop artists than you can count on the NASA mainframe have sought saleable ‘credibility’ with the ‘alternative’ crowd with the obligatory cover. But we’re looking for artists that have taken it that bit further devoting an entire album to appropriating everyone’s favourite gloom-mongers.
NB: Worth mentioning here is the only (yes only) one-off Radiohead cover version worth your time: John Mayer’s acoustic reworking of Kid A turns an already paranoid beast into a stripped-down schizophrenic.
Otherwise its abundant, if not always rich, pickings.
Christopher O’Riley - True Love Waits and Hold Me To This
Generally regarded as the king of the Radiohead tribute, O’Reily realised early that being a pianist these days is about as lucrative as selling Jonathan King Pez-heads (with detachable jock-strap). There’s only one of you in the orchestra and nobody goes to recitals anymore. Piano-playing, no matter how accomplished, does not put bread on the keyboard, and thus the savvy ivory-tinkler must saddle a more lucrative bandwagon. Cynicism aside, however, O’Reily clearly has genuine love for his source material. Brad Mehldau has arguably done Piano-head better with his Exit Music (For a Film) but failed to go for the whole hog concept album in the way O’Reily has; twice. Of course, many of these tunes being first composed on Yorke’s own grand, they are reducible back to this singular instrumentation relatively painlessly (think of the beautiful Like Spinning Plates version from I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings). Reily’s interpretations are not mere Satie-esque wallpaper, however. He demonstrates his knowledge of the band with faithful but not simple carbon copies of a well-selected bunch.
Richard Dodd, The Section, Enigmatic: The String Quartet Tribute to Radiohead:
By far the most overt capitalisation comes from this orchestral Radiohead-by-numbers production. Play it backwards and you can hear “Drink Coke” and “Just Do It” whispered in demonic tones. Like Metallica’s infamous orchestral switch the totality of what is achieved is a part-for-part duplication on strings. Thus, the very life of the original records’ spirit is wholly drained of the merest morsel of humanity like a Kodak image of Boticelli’s Venus. In faithfully replicating the originals note-for-note, they mathematically gloss over that which made the songs so affecting in the first place. Enigmatic, in other words, omits the enigma. The ‘translators’ (because that is the sum total of what their contribution amounts to) just flat-out miss the point. Ask them to clone a sheep and they would, no doubt, make one that was inedible and bald. Useless. There is a great classical-crossover album to be made out of Radiohead’s musically astute back catalogue. This, sadly, is not it.
Various Artists - Strung Out on OK Computer: The String Quartet Tribute to Radiohead
Once again, the orchestral mimic is in full-effect here with another phonographic transcription of some perfectly decent Rock. Using a formula about as original as Newton’s 3rd Law of Motion (is there any even middling successful stadium rock band that hasn’t been subjected to the string quartet treatment), this still tops Enigmatic if only for its attention to the little details and more coherent whole. Turning its bows and horsehair to any rock band with a following greater than the Andorran elephant polo team, the String Quartet tributes have been pouring in like stone soup. Nevertheless, fans seem to lap it up. More devoted than most, fanatic ‘heads crave anything connected with their idols like pregnant ladies and are usually about as rational and discerning as if they were in the 3rd trimester. Truth be told, you probably know if you are going to like this or not already. Its tasteful, but then so is Martha Stewart. The Guardian Guide no doubt loved it and you can’t get a more damming indictment than that.
Corporate Love Breakdown - A Bluegrass Tribute to Radiohead:
Tributes live or die by the concept. At first glance, Bluegrass and Prog Rock seem as incompatible a couple as George Bush and Naomi Klein. Would’ve thunk it then, that this actually works. The arrangements are simple but affectionate. Unconcerned with perfect translations, the originals are re-imagined as classic blues records of a time that probably only exists in your grandfathers cloudy memory. Corporate Love Breakdown succeeds because it isolates a specific element of Radiohead’s music - the harrowing, gloaming-wandering melody; neurotic post-silicon age menace - and re-imagines it, often on little more than a mandolin and acoustic geetar, yosemite.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given its walking bass, Myxomatosis is a highlight - a good example of the tribute working well by virtue of the fact that both it and the original share a common heritage - but generally the tracks are carefully constructed and original. You and Whose Army? is also imaginatively re-examined as a Dirty Three-esque lament. The cotton-pick of the bunch, then. There’s enough electricity in this, if not to light up a whole city at least a sizeable ant hamlet whose government recently passed a series of stringent energy cut-backs.
Easy Star All-Stars - Radiodread:
The All-Stars reached international status with their mildly amusing Dub Side of the Moon, a reggae-fied simulacrum of Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic. Given that OK Computer is another Prog-Rock behemoth, you’d forgive the All-Stars for thinking they could repeat the success again. Like all good tribute albums, this smacks so strongly of a 2am closing time ‘Hey, I’ve an idea!” moment you can practically see the hazy lightbulb forming over their dreadlocked noggins. In reality, some tracks work, some don’t. Paranoid Android and Kharma Police are probably immune to re-imagination anyway (O’Riley sagely avoids the former) being so infused with their creators. But whether its because the originals are still quite fresh in our minds or that the music just doesn’t fit with the reggae beat the album comes across as a valiant but misguided attempt. Some stellar guest appearances from luminaries such as Horace Andy and Toots & the Maytals lively up proceedings for a speel and drag it into the ‘worth checking out’ category. As does the hilarious Jamaicanised Fitter Happier replacing the dystopian Speak & Spell of the original for a Lilt-advert style parable. There’s another dub/reggae Radiohead mutant out there (I’m Not the Only Record For You) but it’s an elusive beast so I can’t vouch for its quality, bad or good. Seemingly onto something fairly popular, the Stars will, no doubt, try and blow out this soap bubble for as long as the balance sheet lets them but eventually it has to burst. Too often, they find themselves having scraped through the barrel to be now scratching their nails along the barren undergrowth.
DJ Gyngyvytus - Skeet Spirit: A Crunk Tribute to Radiohead
2 + 2 = 5? ‘Crunk’ = ‘Crazy’ + ‘Drunk’. Radiohead have always thrived on equations and the ingredients in any experiment have to be well-measured if you don’t want the whole concoction to boil over. The Crunk version of Radiohead eschews chemical formulations, for full-on funky-assed fun Of all the tributes on show this is the one with the least pretensions to be anything other than a damn good party and that’s not something you can say about a Radiohead record very often. In fact, booty-shaking Radiohead are a surprisingly amusing lot. Criticising this on a musical level would be an exercise in futility. Like criticising Timothy Leary for failing to provide adequate drug advice to youngsters: Why bother when you’ll only be faced with a third-eyed, grinning smile as wide as the punch bowl simultaneously extended. At its low it’s a trivial slice of turntablism that you’ll listen to once and probably never again. At its peak it causes everyone to cut rug more franticly than Santa’s upholstery elves on Christmas Eve.
Muse - Showbiz
They may have since transcended the initial accusations that greeted their introduction to the music world but there’s no denying Matt Bellamy and co. had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Complete Works of Yorke and were determined to put it to use. Not so much a doff of the cap, Showbiz was a bent-double donation of the cap and all future cap-doffing services. But to quote another great master, “a good artist borrows, a great artist steals.” A great artist also turns an already genre-defying masterpiece into a brooding, elegiac monster of a record. Half the tracks easily equal any from their inspiration making it one of the most mind-bendingly brilliant debuts of the ’90s.
The Neo-Beat Generation - Early Demos:
Lacking any individual song-writing skills, the Eric K-featuring Neo-Beat Generation (that’s right, kiddos, I was in a band) produced some of the most disturbing Radiohead doppelgangers this side of Madame Tussauds. Much of our previously discussed titles have been born out of the spark of an idea. A moment of, alcohol-inspired foolishness that actually made it past the brainstorming session. None embody this spirit of thoughtlessness than these works bracketed intriguingly as ‘Early Demos’ Neither have they equalled the sheer audacity of the flamenco re-styling of Paranoid Android (for five guitars) or the post-grunge screamo Pyramid Song. Unfortunately (read: thankfully), none of these ‘new-and-improved’ recordings survive after the master copies were burned in the great Quality fire of 2001 but their legacy lives on in bad cover versions the world over. An insult to music.
And the winner is…
It’s invariably hard for any die-hard fan to stomach the (mis-)appropriation of their beloved but sometimes you have to let your elitist scruples go and embrace change. O’Riley’s efforts are as painless an execution as one could hope for but my tribute rosary goes to Corporate Love Breakdown for re-awakening my love of the originals and giving me some relief for the come-down when I tire again.
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