These days it seems you can't move for tribute albums. But I think this was one of the first. It also comes from a period — 1988 — when Johnny Cash wasn't particularly fashionable, before he was invited to do guest appearances with U2, and before his first American Recordings.
And it's not like those tributes where everyone turns up with their own band and cuts the cloth of the original to suit themselves. Here there's a 'house band' on all the songs, giving the album a coherence. Marc Riley and Jon Langford are the prime movers. Tim Strafford-Taylor told me he played bass on the album, under the pseudonym of Chet Taylor.
Of course, the coherence comes at the expense of not fully tapping the eccentricities of some of the performers, like Steven Mallender from Cabaret Voltaire. The real highlight is Marc Almond doing Man in Black (the sort-of title track), because he's so different in every way from Johnny Cash, and he really manages to make the song his own.
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 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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