Howdy,
Today I thought I'd take some time to give a brief history of all the songs that The Shadowcops have covered. By this I mean the ones we play in our regular sets, as opposed to the legion of songs we've done for karaoke nights, that Star In Their Eyes gig, and Lisa's birthday. Partly because that would take me an eon to write, but also because somewhere in that dense mix is a Wham cover, and I don't really want to go into detail about how that came to be.
This also excludes the great number of songs that we have attempted to cover at practice and either completely failed to get right (Bronksi Beat's 'Small Town Boy', our only venture with keyboards), or decided that we're far too cool to try and play on stage (2Unlimited's 'No Limit').
So without further a do, the five songs that we have covered in our sets:
1) Chuck Berry - Johnny B Goode
This seems like a long time ago now, but for our first few gigs we used to end with a cover of Johnny B Goode. I was never that keen on playing this song, as I only had to play three notes whilst Nat and Owen plastered the room with indulgent solos (not that I'm bitter at all).
However it was still early days for the band, and this was quite unlike anything we were playing, so at least it put a bit of variety into our sets. It also brought a bit of humour as well as it gave us a chance to try and imitate Chuck's moves and the like. For me, the earlier material seems quite dark, especially when compared to the more light hearted material we're writing now (even if we are preparing to record a song called 'Carnage in Carthage'), so on reflection it was a chance for the band to show that we weren't under the funk, and didn't just get our kicks from wearing black shirts and thrashing down-tuning guitars.
2) Husker Du - Do You Remember?
One of our first gigs was a complete set of The Wildhearts covers for a Stars In Their Eyes charity night, and we got a taste for it. Without even having another SITE gig lined up we decided in typical industrious fashion to spend a couple of months getting a Husker Du set lined up. Sadly, most of the songs never saw the light of day, we have yet to play another SITE gig and so far only this song from the setlist we had prepared has ever made it to the stage.
When we were each compiling our list of Husker songs to play, it became apparent that this early number of theirs actually sounded like something we might have written, so it felt quite natural to cover it. Since then we've played it any number of times, but so far the responses we've had have been a bit mixed; that's just what you get from picking lesser known songs. However I love the video we have of us playing in at the Castle in Manchester for Nat's birthday (even though my bass is out of tune), as it's bursting with energy and highlights exactly why this song fits perfectly into our set.
I'm also quite proud that we never gave into temptation and changed the chorus lyrics to:
Do you remember
To check our myspace
Mainly because it's reeeeeally tacky, but also because it's a grammatical nightmare. That's where the line was drawn, people!
3) Replacements - Bastards of Young
Despite the current trend being set by Mr Tarantino, The Shadowcops heartily endorse spelling bastard with two a's. Just don't ask us to agree on a pronunciation of it.
Moving swiftly on, since as far back as I can remember in the band's history Nat has always suggested that we do a Replacements song. I believe originally the idea was to do Takin A Ride, although I've piped in with Dope Smokin Moron and Stuck in the Middle from time to time. However this was the song we finally picked, which actually came after a lull in our desire to cover this great band.
This has probably been one of our better choices as well, the people who know it seem to get a real kick out of it and it really has left me with some great memories: playing a sparsely attended gig in Glasgow and finishing the night with this to rapture from the remnants of the crowd, having Dr David Salmon call out for it at a gig in the Dog & Partridge in Bolton until we caved in, and (there's a video of this one on youtube) having Stu from The Medicine Bow/Dangerous Aces etc. come on stage to sing it and drunkenly ramble through it. It was especially impressive that he gave such a dishevelled performance, considering was that it was about 1pm. He's a man who likes his sauce, and so he's a fitting character to sing this song.
4) Queen - Tie Your Mother Down
This would be the other song I'd say has been our other great choice. Queen are a band that tend to divide opinions amongst people, so unlike some of our other choices this will at least get a reaction, but it's sometimes a shock as to how which way it'll go.
We originally started playing this as part of a set we were preparing for Punk Rock Karaoke (another charity gig with lots of covers, we're easily pleased), and I was arguing with the rest of the band as to how popular it would be. Needless to say we still disagree, but there was a great moment when were outside our practice room and we asked someone from another band to settle the argument for us. I asked him, as a recognised Queen fan, to name the first three Queen songs that came to him, assuming that he'd pick three songs from Greatest Hits Vol I and my case would be crowned victorious. However and the mother hubbard named Tie Your Mother Down as his third choice, much to the delight of the rest of the band.
Regardless of how it goes down with the crowd, I can assure you that everyone in the band is always happy to bust this song out. Queen appreciation is a cornerstone of what we do, and I wouldn't want it any other way. Well, I would have liked to win the argument about how popular the song is, but then I guess we wouldn't still be covering it.
5) Weezer - Buddy Holly
This is another number we originally learnt for Punk Rock Karaoke, but in another blatant attempt at populism we once put a list of ours songs on our local forum and asked people to vote for their favourites. I can honestly say we weren't exactly thrilled to have this win from our long, long list of covers but I guess that only goes to show that you should always ignore your fans, whatever the repercussions.
My favourite anecdote with this song is when we were running through it one night at our practice room, someone from another room came in and said he absolutely loved what we had just done, and wondered what we called it. We figured that when we said Buddy Holly and mentioned the name Weezer, that the penny would drop, but no, he carried on without realising it was a cover. When he realised we weren't the almighty songsmiths behind the tune he went back to coaching the girl band he was with next door, class act.
There you have it, a comprehensive list of all the songs we've played in live in amongst our own material. To me it does seem a quite short list, because over the years we've been together we have learnt close to 50 cover songs for various gigs and ideas we had at the time, but only these select few ever made it to our setlists.
Peace.
Mike A
