How Baby Charles turned an Arctic Monkeys indie classic into a funk floor-filler
No song sums up the sight and sound of mid-2000s British indie quite like Arctic Monkeys‘ trailblazing and much imitated 2005 single ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’. Years after its cultural peak, though, the single found itself rendered in an entirely different atmosphere, swapping alcopops and drainpipe jeans for the flared trousers of the funk realm.
Arctic Monkeys have always attracted their fair share of cover versions; there hasn’t been a teenage indie band since 2005 who haven’t, at one stage or another, run through a version of one of their many classics. Given the all-encompassing indie power of the Alex Turner-fronted outfit, though, the majority of those covers never stray too far away from the indie sleaze sound that they embodied so brilliantly.
Cover songs, generally, are a tricky art to master. Stick too closely to the sound of the original and your cover is rendered entirely superfluous, but at the same time, you also risk losing the entire spirit of the original version if you switch up its sound too drastically. Hence, there has been a deluge of awful cover versions over the decades, particularly within the indie world.
That is where Brighton-based funk masters Baby Charles differed, in their 2009 cover of ‘I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor’. Adding an extra 90 seconds to the runtime of the original, the fatefully underrated group completely transformed the iconic indie sound of the original recording into something that could quite easily have been lifted from an obscure compilation of 1970s jazz-funk gems.
Stripping back the tempo of Turner’s furious guitar intro, the beginning of the track is instead punctuated by wailing horns and a jazz club backbeat, so different from the source material that anybody listening to the song in the wild would surely take a few bars to clock that it was, indeed, an Arctic Monkeys cover. Arguably, it is the Arctic Monkeys cover.
Inevitably, as with the vast majority of Baby Charles’ tragically short discography, the highlight of the single – recently reissued by Milan’s Record Kicks – is in the vocal performance of Dionne Charles, who in another life might have been the premier songstress of Atlantic or Stax’s golden age. She brings the song a timeless kind of appeal in those incredible jazz-styled vocals, a far cry from the adolescent South Yorkshire tones of the original vocalist.
While Baby Charles’ version of the track never ended up matching the commercial powerhouse of the original version – nor, admittedly, did it try to – it remains one of the most underappreciated gems of modern British funk. You could even take the argument one step further and claim that their 2009 rendition of the indie classic is among the greatest cover versions of recent memory.
Not only is the funk-fueled ‘I Bet That You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ an excellent cover, though, it is also an excellent example of the universality of Alex Turner’s songwriting during that time. While it might be impossible to remove the original version from that very specific period in time, and the indie sound that came along with it, Baby Charles’ masterful offering shows beyond any doubt that the song is applicable to countless different styles and eras of music.
Perhaps the entirety of Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I Am Not could be re-recorded in the spirit of 1960s Motown, or psychedelic jazz, or any number of disparate styles while retaining its core appeal.
Arctic Monkeys might have boasted the defining sound of mid-2000s Britain, but their appeal stretched far beyond the parameters of youthful indie rock, thanks in no small part to Baby Charles.
