Listen to Blur cover the classic Rod Stewart song ‘Maggie May’ in 1992
For better or worse, few artists remain as quintessentially British as Rod Stewart. Over the course of more than 50 years in the music industry, Stewart transformed from Rod the Mod to a blues icon with The Jeff Beck Group. It didn’t take long for him and bandmate Ronnie Wood to jump ship over to the fledgling remains of the Small Faces, rechristening themselves as just The Faces and spearheading the hard rock sound that would come to define ’70s rock music. As the face and voice of the band, it was almost a guarantee that Stewart would eventually go solo.
He actually stuck around The Faces until 1975, at which point the band had to be marketed as ‘Rod Stewart/Faces’ due to Stewart’s popularity. Stewart’s initial solo albums were family affairs, recorded with the help of the Faces and a smattering of friends in the British rock scene. But with 1971’s Every Picture Tells a Story, Stewart’s fame eclipsed his band’s fame, and he became the major draw at Faces concerts, ranking bassist Ronnie Lane until Lane eventually quit in 1973.
That’s the story as it usually gets told. The reality was that Stewart and the Faces actually began to rise in popularity in conjunction with each other, and the two parties mutually benefited from each other’s successes. While Stewart was becoming a household name in 1971, the Faces scored their first commercial success with the album A Nod is as Good as a Wink… to a Blind Horse and the hit single ‘Stay With Me’, both of which were top ten hits on their respective charts. In turn, Stewart got to keep his working relationship with his closest collaborators (namely bandmates Wood and Ian McLagen) as he continued his solo career.
While Stewart was able to experience success both inside and outside of the Faces, the tides would quickly start to turn in favour of his solo career. ‘Maggie May’, the first single from Every Picture Tells a Story, jumped all the way to number one on the UK Singles Chart. Featuring both Wood and McLagen on the studio recording (but not Lane or drummer Kenney Jones), ‘Maggie May’ was so popular that it became a part of the Faces live setlist, much to the consternation of Lane. It would have been impossible for Stewart to get through a concert without playing the track, so the band obliged by acknowledging Stewart’s ascending solo career.
‘Maggie May’ quickly became a signature track for Stewart and an emblematic song for British rock music. Everyone from The Pogues to Wet Wet Wet have taken on the classic track, but if we’re talking about ‘Maggie May’ solidifying itself within British culture, there was only one band that could make that happen – Blur.
Blur weren’t exactly the most reverent band of the early 1990s British rock scene. With caustic remarks from frontman Damon Albarn circulating weekly in music papers, Blur weren’t afraid to speak on what they thought was quality and what they thought was rubbish. But importantly, they were also beginning to embrace the history of British rock music, especially in the face of the emerging American genre of grunge. Acts like The Kinks and The Who began to filter into Blur’s sound, and when NME approached the band to contribute a cover to the charity compilation album Ruby Trax celebrating the paper’s 40th anniversary in 1992, Stewart became the latest British icon to influence their style.
The conceit of Ruby Trax was that contemporary artists would be covering classic number one songs from the previous 40 years. That’s who you get an incredibly odd assortment of songs, from the surprisingly on-point version of Willie Dixon’s ‘Little Red Rooster’ from The Jesus and Mary Chain to the clear piss take that is The Fatima Mansions’ avant-rap take on Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’. Blur’s version of ‘Maggie May’ is definitely the former, with the band doing their best to approximate Stewart’s classic track.
Check out Blur’s version of ‘Maggie May’ down below.
