The grand old men of songwriting — the likes of Bob, Neil, Van and Len — sometimes seem to occur in packs. Not since January 2006 have we had so many in a single month.
I played this on the car a couple of days ago as we headed up the M40 to see my parents, and I teased Lucy with one of her least favourite parlour games: name the artist. Every guess was either R.E.M. or Nick Cave. Eventually she had to be right, but it took some time, and by then she had failed to recognise The Pixies, supposedly her favourite band. You can imagine why she doesn't like the game. She always makes a half-hearted guess or two (see above), says she gives up, then, as soon as I give her the answer, exclaims, "I was going to say that!"
There's a similar kind of game at work by the performers, it seems to me, as they decide the degree to which they can stamp their own identity on a song, or find a new interpretation, or stay faithful to the original.
Lloyd Cole makes Chelsea Hotel sound like something he wrote himself; it could easily be a track from one of his early albums — quite an achievement. Tim Booth adds his own lyrical improvisations, to good effect, on So Long Marianne, and Andy Diagram's trumpet is very well-placed. After Robert Forster does a fairly straight Tower of Song, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds goof about a lot with the same song, creating a throwaway mess. It's amusing but literally throws away some of Len's best lines. It's nowhere near as good as Cave's version of Avalanche, which isn't on this album, but blows spots off the version that is, by Jean-Louis Murat. Translating the song into French was fascinating on paper, a failure in practice.
£6.99, second hand, in November 2001, from The Polar Bear in Sheffield.
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