About

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies, for example” – John Ruskin

Does this therefore mean that the most useless things in the world are the most beautiful?

Bad Cover Versions boldly tackled this philosophical quandary, armed only with a sense of self-loathing and the knowledge that Duran Duran’s cover of Public Enemy’s 911 Is A Joke is the single most useless song ever committed to tape.

This blog is the result.

Cover versions can be a Good Idea – Jimi Hendrix’s take on All Along The Watchtower is the definitive version, and Sinead O’Connor built an entire career on tearfully warbling a Prince song.

This blog finds nothing of interest in those songs.

Bad Cover Versions pauses to deliberate on the moments that pierced the gossamer-thin fabric of pop sensibility: the songs that must have seemed like a Good Idea At The Time; cheap ‘n’ cheerful B-sides that surely no-one would ever remember; and the utterance of those fateful words, ‘Hey guys! How about we do ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ – but with a slap-bass twist?’

Thus, Bad Cover Versions exists as a public service: a glittering, altruistic monument to epic rock folly, to addled decision making and to hopeless, piggy-backing stabs at cool.

Watch with horror and see where others bravely strode, failed horribly and withered humiliatingly, and admire their daring, their devil-may-care attitude, and the haunted “Oh God, this is all going wrong and there’s still the middle eight to go” look behind their eyes.

Bad Cover Versions – we salute you.

Joe Sparrow // June 2010

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When not making his ears throb and eyes boggle in the murky world of Bad Cover Versions, Joe Sparrow spends time removing the excess superlatives from his daily posts at www.anewbandaday.com, the most self-explanatory new music site on the web.