An "Original" Sleep Walk ???

[Lensor]

Hi All

Has anyone heard the ‘Sleepwalk’ "re-mix" from Basement Jaxx? I heard it in a music store today in Melbourne. It sounded like a sampled section of the Shadows version though I didn’t get to hear all of it over all the other sounds that were in the store at the time. Basement Jaxx are, as some may know, a UK house music duo, consisting of Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe. They have been around since the late 1990s. They re-mix quite a bit of material from other artists. I hope they got permission from the Shadows or Santo and Johnny if the latter are still around. Maybe they don’t need it these days. This version had vocals pasted over the top of it. I didn’t know that there was a vocal version of that tune which of course, was not written by the Shadows but by Santo and Johnny Farina and was originally a hit for them.

The re-mixed version is on the Basement Jaxx ‘Scars’ CD and the track is called ‘A Possibility’ and really sounded nothing like the original version except for the repeated Shadows like riffs with (as best as I could tell) reminiscent echoes. Though I didn’t get to hear all of it as it was constantly interrupted by sales announcements, I thought at first that the vocalist sounded like the lead vocalist of Cold Play. It reminded me of the recent settlement (details not disclosed) between Cold Play and Joe Satriani over one of Joe’s tunes that he had claimed that they had ripped off. There is a ironic twist to all this. Joe Satriani has also done ‘Sleepwalk’ (also Larry Carlton and others too possibly).

Has anyone else heard this version/new (????) composition? Maybe if you are from the British Isles, you will have as I suppose Basement Jaxx are well known there. Perhaps this is not exactly Manilli Vanilli, but does anyone have further comments on the above or the common modern occurrence of re-sampling. Perhaps “re-mixing” is a better term as it almost implies some form of originality (LOL). Does anyone have something else to share even on the subject of 'originality' in general? Perhaps we can have some discussion here about this.

Len