With typical ebullience, BBC Oxford’s Tim Bearder and David Gilyeat have chosen to recreate The Bends, with each track performed by a different local band. The occasion is the fifteenth anniversary of Radiohead’s miserabilist classic, and proceeds from the sale of the album go to Children in Need, so you should all go out and buy it, regardless of its inevitable unevenness.
In the main, the performances make me want to go out and get hold of an album by the artists concerned, rather than revisit the originals. This doesn’t hold truer than opening cut ‘Planet Telex’, by local folk heroes Stornoway. Their caprice is to pretend that the song came from the confusing mid-period of ‘Amnesiac’ rather than the early nineties, so there’s lots of ghostly looped vocals, syncopated drumming and sighing Rhodes’ piano. I don’t like it very much, but then again I found the original obvious and laboured.
In contrast, ‘The Bends’ is an unequivocally great song, encapsulating a Dionysiac musical ecstasy which easily trumps Thom Yorke’s schoolboy-who’s-just-read-his-first-Camus lyrics. Sadly, Ute, a band I’ve never rated, manage to rob the song of all its Byronic grandeur, replacing it with a turgid acoustic whine.
Far better is Jessie Grace’s very free re-working of ‘High and Dry’, which is only really recognisable from its lyric. Jessie has basically recomposed the whole thing to highlight her creamy, sensuous voice and endlessly inventive vocal melodies. It’s a little ungainly towards the end, but she has taken a first-rate song, and made something new and memorable with it.
Little Fish’s ‘Just’ doesn’t take too many liberties with the original, Jules and Nez concentrating on what they do best, namely rocking enough for a (seven nation?) army. They’ve remembered that Radiohead are a great rock band, rather than just a collective of talented boffins. Like their predecessors, Little Fish breathe fire into the equations.
The album proceeds with various near hits and near misses. The Winchell Riots’ ‘Nice Dream’ is (like Handel according to Stravinsky) beautiful and boring, all massed choirs but no drive. The Scholars’ ‘My Iron Lung’ is too ploddingly reverent and keyed too low for Adrian Gillett’s voice. Family Machine’s ‘Black Star’, sumptuously pretty, reminds us that we haven’t had an original album from the band in years: get cracking, lads! Alphabet Backwards turns the not-very-memorable ‘Sulk’ into a spangly disco soufflé. But the best cut is the very last.
‘Street Spirit’ is one of the loveliest, most haunting songs ever written. It’s easy to murder a masterpiece, but The Evenings have, by essentially changing one note in that eternal guitar pick, produced an extraordinary change in tone and meaning. Instead of the grim minor-key death-fear of the original, we now have a serene major-key acceptance. Comprehending Mark Wilden’s intelligent choral counterpoint, a gorgeous violin solo and that quiet, hypnotic rhythm (now transferred to synthesiser), this is a cover version that deserves classic status alongside the Radiohead version. Wilden has made the past new.