Heart of a Punk Soul of a Rasta

Now there are going to be a lot of words dispensed on the subject of this particular release so for those with the attention span of a kumquat this is for you:

Eeeks! A cover version album by those one time Hoo Ha men long time Supergrassers Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey (Yeah Dan Goffey or as we know him Uncle Violet see Tom Waits and perhaps we won't get sued).

So what COVERS do you get for your KA$H? Well there's tracks by Velvet Underground, Elvis Costello, Gang of Four, The Doors, The Kinks (yes it does seem rather a US orientated product) Sex Pistols, Squeeze etc. It's a fun thing, mainly, and something not to be taken too seriously I suppose, and also an ideal way for Goffey & Coombes to get out of the house and playing live in the way the immortal Randy Hoo Ha and Duke Diamond once did.

Mostly The Hot Rats are able to skew the originals just enough to keep things interesting and so able to "Pull off" the "Turn Ons" So before we exhaust the musically crippled amongst you we at HOAP SOAR give the album 4 out of 5 and say download tracks 14, 89 & 72. [Yes I have just been sick in my mouth having to write 4 out of 5 - marking music what a load of bullshit! - Download tracks blah and bleh, sorry I've just been sick again]

That's the nastiness over now let's talk a bit more about "Turn Ons" and the deadly world of the "COVER VERSION"....................

Did you know there is a lovely big sparkly door somewhere on the road to Rock n Roll and on that big sparkly door there is a big sparkly sign which says "COVER VERSION"? No? Well there is! You'd know all about that door if you could remember the beginning, you know the days when you were still spotty and playing in a school music room, or a boys club, or a village hall, or a church hall, or in a bedroom, or anywhere you could. Can you remember the COVERS you did, they were f**kin great weren't they? Remember how good it felt (for a fleeting moment) to feel like those geezers you saw onstage at the Top Rank (Academy) last Saturday night? Yes the COVER VERSION is a lovely place to start and a bloody good laugh, but once you've made it, once you've struggled through the shit pipe and fashioned something of your own, should you really go back there? The purist would say no! But the COVER VERSION for some musicians is hard addiction to shake; sometimes the itch can be satiated by throwing a COVER or two into a live set, but sometimes only a fully fledged foray will do. But beware you so called established muzo's cos the music journo (spit) is programmed to hate all COVER VERSIONS however good. If you're thinking of passing through the portals of that big sparkly door once more be prepared cos this time they'll be a big sparkly bucket of shit tittering on the top waiting for you to enter. The moral of this tale is, if you're thinking of doing an album of COVER VERSIONS you better make sure its f**ckin good!

Whether you're a beginner or a big boy if you're going to get serious about doing a "COVER VERSION" (i.e. you want us poor punters to like it) you've got to be aware from the outset it's quite a slippery Mother to pull off. For me COVER VERSIONS fall into three categories SUBLIME (1%), BLAND or unnecessary (9%) and SHITOLA (90%) - sometimes it's hard to discern which is worst the bland or the shitola. To get into the SUBLIME category it does help if you're a musical genius and also a musical genius with an extremely defined, original, unshakable, inspirational and unique style. If you are all these things you are usually going to be called Jimmy Marshall Hendrix and if you are Jimmy Marshall Hendrix then taking ownership of someone else's song is a piece of piss - "All around the Watchtower", "Sunshine Of your Love", "Sgt Pepper", "Star Spangled Banner" it all seems effortless, yep Hendrix is the master of the COVER VERSION.

But if you are lacking in the genius department and unable to lend or infuse the original with something new or particular your COVER VERSION is going to be pure karaoke and destined for the SHITOLA pile. There are exceptions of course - Sinead O'Connor did something different on her "Throw Down Your Arms" reggae album. She decided to be as faithful to the original recordings as she could. She did her homework, she met and enlisted some of the original protagonists and even though it seemed that she was simply trying to recreate the originals she actually ended up producing something worthwhile. She nimbly side stepped the SHITOLA and BLAND repositories - but this recreation route is a pretty daring route to take and surely can't be held up as the best way for most mortals to go.

So to "Turn Ons" and The Hot Rats, the band name taken from the Frank Zappa Hot Rats album I suppose. Coombes & Goffey have got previous form when it comes to Zappa pillaging, for those who were looking elsewhere at the time, Zappa's 1968 album was entitled "We're only in it for the Money" (yeah the one with the Sgt Pepper sleeve) and Supergrass's 1997 album was of course called "In it for the Money" - nah just a happy coincidence surely.

So armed with a Zappa derived band name why no Zappa why didn't they do "Bobby Brown Goes Down" for God's sake? And why with a Zappa band name do they kick off the album with a Lou Reed track? Irony I guess. You see back in the day old Lou Reed and old Frank Zappa didn't get on (understatement). I always used to think of them as Enoch Powell and Anthony Wedgewood Benn, poles apart and yet both so far up their own arses they were a lot closer than they thought - I'll let you decide which is Benn and which one is Powell. The mutual animosity of Reed and the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa & The Mothers stems from an anonymous and ambiguous comment made on the '68 "We're only in it for the Money" album (go find out for yourself - the truth is out there). Still the silliness rumbled on, years later Lou Reed was still swinging with comments like "Frank Zappa is the most untalented musician I've ever heard... He can't play rock 'n roll because he's a loser..." Meow & kapow!

No Zappa then, instead to start there's a rollocking re-imagining of the Velvet Underground "I Can't Stand it" done with all the style and finesse of a tight arsed garage band - nice start. The Kinks to follow and "Big Sky" (swiped off "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society" album). This too is ramped up several notches higher than the original, there's a NICE mellow Coombes moment in the middle, and a little nod to Jack White thrown in for good measure. [Why is it that Ray Davies & The Kinks only reside in my record collection by proxy - The Stranglers "All Day and All of the Night" The Pretenders "I go to Sleep", Madness "Lola" etc. and now The Hot Rats? - If you have the answer for me please shove it on a postcard to the usual address].

The sixties montage continues with "The Crystal Ship" by the Doors (snipped out of The Doors eponymous first) there's less goth and more grundge & distortion to be had here and something strange occurs the psychedelia of the Doors bleeds out of "The Crystal Ships" and into the almost unrecognisable version of Beastie Boy's (yawn) "Fight for Your Right to Party". How did that happen? Beastie Boys with a rich psychedelic sixties veneer whatever next! Somehow Gaz Coombes finds a melody in this Beastie Boy song and Uncle Violet thrashes his kit insanely and isn't told to go to his room! Good work!

Four in and all is well, each COVER has been "captured", given a good shake and had a fair sized dollup garrulous grundge laden garage guitar. Result! Proceed in a similar vane then? Well no, just when the sixties thing was banging along nicely the train falls off the rails with a plop. Why? Because of the running order, it's quite simply PANTS and I for one can't stand it.

So forget what's written on the sleeve, next up is "Bike" a bit if quirk from the pen of Syd Barrett, it's OK. But let's be honest there's not much you can do with "Bike". I'm guessing that the producer geezer Nigel Goodrich's wanted this one after all he has been producing the prog rocking Gilmore & Walters version of Pink Floyd for some years now. To complete side one there's Bowie's "Queen Bitch". Come on Coobes had to do at least one track by either Bowie or Bolan, and "Queen Bitch" is the right one. So with the modified running order of I Can't Stand it/Big Sky/The Crystal Ship/Fight for you Right/Bike/Queen Bitch Side One now makes perfect sense and bangs along nicely with just enough subversion and reinvention to MAKE IT. Beastie Boys aside we will now refer to Side One as the PRE PUNK side.

Side Two is now the "PUNK & POST PUNK" side. To start things off we've plumped for Elvis Costello's "Pump it Up". - hey it's nice to be able to hear the lyrics for a change, I'd always thought Declan sang "I've been to Judie Zukes taking downers & ticksy licks". [Immediately mark Gaz Coombes up here for good diction Mr Chipps]. Then on our revised running order comes "Love Cats" by the Cure - I think they told Goffey they were going play "Lust for Life" by Iggy Pop cos that's what it sounds like on the intro - he soon twigs though. The Futureheads did a COVER VERSION of "Love Cats" on last years NME Cure tribute giveaway thingy? I like the Futureheads version and I like The Hot Rats version but I can't decide which is better. There's only one way to find out. FIGHT!

Now as well as re-jigging the running order one track MUST be overlooked "Love is the Drug" by Roxy (shitehouse) Music. The original is an offensive piece of rubbish and there's not much that Goffey, Coombes and Goodrich could have done to make it anything else, except leave it alone. So what could we put there instead? Well they could have shoe horned in their COVER of the Beatles "Drive My Car" (royalties allowing), but that would have ruined the flow. "Even better than that" would have been a version of "Next to You" by The Police. Supergrass did it live on their last tour so G&C must still have a copy of the lyrics lying around somewhere and it would have kept the POST PUNK thing going.

And so to round things off there's an "acoustic" driven version rather than a "Wilko Johnson by proxy" driven version of "Damaged Goods", originally by Gang of Four, and to follow a "skiffle driven" version rather than a "punk fuelled" version of "EMI" by the Sex Pistols. Then a Goodrich "treatment" segue out of "EMI" and into "Up the Junction" by Squeeze. Difford's dry lyrical realism was thrown away cheaply by Tilbrook's fey delivery on the original. Coombes aided by a revised slow mood framing injects the song with the emotion Squeeze version seriously lacked - touchingly poignant and probably the best COVER on the album.

NICE WORK "HOT RATS" - COULD HAVE MADE IT EASIER - TURN ONS PULLED OFF - JUST

Now go and buy "Turn Ons" like we did, from a shop!
And then TURN OVER, TUNE IN and TURN ON.