Wednesday 5 September 2012

LIST 91 - 07/09/12 (Ruby Trax 20th anniversary special)

Hello again everyone,

As promised and threatened last time, this week's List has an NME bent to it - not something that happens on here very often by any means as I'm no particular fan of the paper overall, though of course the 25th anniversary of its C86 cassettte was quite happily featured last year (List #57).

Ruby Trax doesn't occupy anywhere close to the status of legendary, musically significant compilation that C86 does, but this 40-song collection of cover versions, originally released in autumn 1992 to celebrate the paper's 40th anniversary and to raise money for the Spastics Society, is well worth a revisit exactly 20 years after its original release.

No compilation of this magnitude and ambition is ever guaranteed to be 100% successful, and frankly this set of ears can go a long time before having to hear, for example, The Farm destroying The Human League's Don't You Want Me (along with Dannii Minogue's cover of The Jacksons' Show You The Way To Go, also absent from this List, one of a couple of rather weak choices of single).

The project threw up many absolute treats, however.  The Wonder Stuff's folky stomp through Slade's Cos I Love You makes perfect sense but is no less wonderful for that; ditto Curve's augmentation of Donna Summer's I Feel Love with Toni Halliday's customary sighs and swoops, Dean Garcia's industrial clanks, etc.   

Elsewhere, Baby Come Back by Karl Bartos's Elektric Music (two years older than Pato Banton's chart-assaulting attempt) is surely the closest anything made by a Kraftwerk member past or present has come to exhibiting tangible human emotion; Marc Almond sounds absolutely to the manner born in soaring over the sympathetic arrangement of Like A Prayer given to him; and all of The Fatima Mansions, Ned's Atomic Dustbin and The Fall score highly for delivering pretty leftfield cover versions that actually warrant repeated listens (a far cry from EMF's risible reading of Shaddap Your Face, another omitted here).

J xx





THE WONDER STUFF – Cos I Love You

FATIMA MANSIONS – Everything I Do (I Do It For You)

BOY GEORGE – My Sweet Lord

RIDE – The Model

THE FALL – Legend of Xanadu

ELEKTRIC MUSIC – Baby Come Back

THE BLUE AEROPLANES – Bad Moon Rising

BLUR – Maggie May

WELFARE HEROINE – Where Do You Go To My Lovely?

NED’S ATOMIC DUSTBIN – I’ve Never Been to Me

SUEDE – Brass in Pocket

MARC ALMOND – Like A Prayer

KINGMAKER – Lady Madonna

CURVE – I Feel You

TEENAGE FANCLUB – Mr Tambourine Man

BILLY BRAGG – When Will I See You Again?

JOHNNY MARR & BILLY DUFFY – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

MANIC STREET PREACHERS – Theme from M*A*S*H
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRZpPnF-k_E