petercreasey wrote:Oh come off it Jim, a cover is a performance or recording of music previously recorded by someone else, you can't call something a cover just because you don't like it and it's not a cover if you do. It seems that the description "cover" is used in a derogitory manner. Music is music and open to interpretation and arrangement and there can't be anything wrong with playing "other people's music" can there? If there is then there would be no proms, no Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, no brass bands oh and no Shadows version of" Sleepwalk"
The term "cover" never used to mean a recording of a song that someone else has recorded at some time or other. It meant only one thing: a record issued simply to compete with, and cash in on, a contemporary hit, or record by an established hitmaking artist whose records could be expected to be hits.
Just recording, say, a Beatles track on an LP (as has been done by Wes Montgomery, Johnny Smith and Barney Kessel) cannot credibly be described as "making a cover version".
The term was later corrupted so as to acquire the additional meaning - but essentially, it is one that is meaningless. It's a definition which would make Apache a cover version, when it was nothing of the kind. This seems to have come about as a result of an industry expectation that recording artistes will either write their own material, or will source it from a contracted writer with the predictable result that even any recording of a standard is regarded - mystifyingly - as a "cover" (though of what is never explained).
As it happens, I have nothing against the recording of established songs at all. As I said last time, I'd like to hear a Shadows or HBM version of Hit And Miss. If such a recording were released (it won't be), you wouldn't hear me complain - even if it were a slavish copy of John Barry's version. In fact, I wouldn't mind a cover version of anything else that (crucially) suits instrumental treatment. Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder doesn't cut it.
My contention is that when the average lifelong Shadows fan winces at a "Simply Shadows" track, it isn't ONLY because the song was a hit for someone else. It's because the song was a hit for someone else AND doesn't work as an instrumental, with the second characteristic being the more important by far.
Do I complain that My Resistance Is Low was a cover of Jim Dale's semi-hit? No. Do I demur at the Shadows doing a Ventures hit with Perfidia? Or Bill Justis with Raunchy? Of course not. But these are a far cry from most of the 1980s stuff.
