Surreal sounds: The five strangest The Beatles covers
The Beatles’ voluminous body of work has inspired huge swathes of popular music’s biggest stars to tackle the John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison songbook.
When pouring over any list of artists who’ve covered the Fab Four it’s astonishing to see the breadth and diversity of renditions out there. From synthpop, DC punk, electronica, and even hardcore hip-hop boldly taken stabs at The Beatles‘ hefty oeuvre, the disparate array of covers in existence reflects the band’s own dazzling mixture of genre stylings.
Some covers have become classics in their own right. Stevie Wonder’s ‘We Can Work It Out’ is a core part of the Motown canon, Joe Cocker’s ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ injects his own Midlands-grit soul into the song’s original affectionate sentimentality, and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ dreamy jangle take of ‘Dear Prudence’ (featuring The Cure’s Robert Smith on guitar) thrust the piece to higher reaches of sun-bleached psych. The Beatles continue to inspire bold interpretations like Aussie eggpunks Snooper’s elasticated lo-fi twist on ‘Come Together’ from the excellent G.T.R.R.C III compilation.
With The Beatles’ work being among the most covered of all time—’Yesterday’ alone is a Guinness World Record winner with over 1,600 recorded versions—there exist alongside the more conventional attempts some distinctly weirder and more interesting handling of the Fab Four’s distinguished compositions, and here we explore them.
The five strangest The Beatles covers:
Colin Newman – ‘Blue Jay Way’
During their first hiatus, Wire frontman Colin Newman released a string of solo releases that expanded on the textured post-punk established on 1979’s 154 in pursuit of deeper depths of spikey, ice-cool introspections. Musing on his relationship with The Beatles in a 2020 Pitchfork interview, Newman states, “When the Beatles started, I was 7—too young to understand the subtlety and the sex appeal. I didn’t get what the screaming and hysteria was about. I just thought they had good tunes. There was a moment that I realized: This is now.”
Armed with an intrepid penchant for music off the beaten track and a healthy irreverence for ‘Beatlemania’, Newman’s haunting take on the George Harrison-penned ‘Blue Jay Way’ captures all the cerebral mysticism from the Magical Mystery Tour cut but suffuses chilly synths and backwards strings to push the piece away from meditative rumination to a distinctly more menacing space of sonic abrasion. Serving as the finale to 1982’s Not To album, Newman’s ‘Blue Jay Way’ ensures you’re left with a disquieting residue long after the record’s over.
Hybrid Kids – ‘Get Back’
Composer and keyboardist Morgan Fisher is predominately known for his black suit piano jacket and for providing keys for Mott the Hoople’s classic mid-70s period. Fisher also had a foot in the world of the avant-garde, producing the famous Miniatures – a sequence of fifty-one tiny masterpieces, a 51-track album of one-minute songs featuring an eclectic mix of artists such as Robert Wyatt, Ivor Cutler, and even The Damned, and contributing deeply unsettling electronics on the creepy synthpunk side-project The Witch Trials, featuring Dead Kennedys provocateur Jello Biafra.
Recorded entirely in his Notting Hill bedsit, Fisher produced and played every instrument on the deeply bizarre ‘compilation’ of fictitious bands playing Residents style art-punk deconstructions of the era’s big singles, and The Beatles’ ‘Get Back’ is ruthlessly taken prisoner on the Hybrid Kids’ ’79 LP. Adopting a Dadaist approach to the classic Let It Be cut, ‘US Nerds’ inject radio jingles, cut-cup audio clutter, and a gleeful fuckaround with the tempo to create an intensely odd miasma of inside-out concrète-pop.
Laibach – Let It Be
Yugoslavian industrial outfit Laibach has been playing with political subversion since their very inception in 1980, rankling Tito’s communist state with their ironic appropriation of fascist imagery to explore themes of totalitarianism and militarism. Appropriating pop music and hammering them into regimented marches of neoclassical might is a satirical feature that smatters throughout their discography, from recording an album comprised of multiple covers of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, to the seizure of Austrian pop-rock Opus’ ‘Live is Life’ for their signature Opus Dei LP.
For their 1988 effort, Laibach decided to tackle the entire Let It Be album, transmogrifying the rootsy rock of the source material into a martial pastiche of industrial muscle and iron-cast theatrics. Some of the cuts retain some semblance of the original’s melody, ‘I Me Mine’ abandoning Harrison’s soft vocals for Milan Fran’s bellowing baritone, and ‘Two of Us’ slack country rock is bent into a dramatic pummeller of rallying awe. Others are covered in title only, with producer Bertrand Buragalt confessing, “I composed the music for ‘Dig a Pony’ entirely from the lyrics without having listened to the original. Even today I’m not sure if I know the original.”
Zeus B Held – ‘Drive My Car’
Teutonic synthpop shouldn’t lend itself so well to a Paul McCartney piece, but German synth producer Zeus B Held crafted an ingeniously innovative take on Rubber Soul‘s ‘Drive My Car’.
Appearing on ’81’s Attack Time, gone is the dizzying rock energy of Macca’s original, and replaced with jerky guitar, eerie vocoder chants, and spartan, mechanised sequencers amounting to a stiff but oddly catchy number.
The Better Beatles – ‘I’m Down’
In an audacious act of gleeful iconoclasm, the short-lived Nebraska post-punk act named their project in the antagonist spirit of puncturing The Beatles’ lofty stature. Members Dave Nordin and Jean Smith felt their “oppressive influence” needed taking down a peg or two, and so founded The Better Beatles in an effort to “strip the songs of their sacred status”.
‘Paperback Writer’, ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’, and ‘Penny Lane’ were all besmirched, but their caustic twist on ‘I’m Down’ illustrates their jovial contempt most bitingly. A foggy synth line lurks behind nervous drums and indifferent vocals, presenting an anti-septic alternative to the ’65 single’s original rock ‘n roll beat. Perhaps The Better Beatles ultimately is a testament to the Fab Four’s creative body of work, where even if born from disdain or irreverence, their songs still inspire intriguing art.
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