Rhino’s Got You Covered: The Flying Pickets, Grand Funk Railroad, T-Bone Burnett, and Tasmin Archer
It’s Wednesday, so it must be time to take another dip into the Rhino catalog and trot out a new quartet of cover songs that you may or may not have heard before. Let’s get started, shall we?
• The Flying Pickets, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1993): This U.K. acapella group had its first and biggest hit single with their 1983 cover of Yaz’s “Only You,” but while the lineup has changed over the years – like, to the point where there hasn’t been a founding member in the group since 1990 – The Flying Pickets have soldiered onward nonetheless. There is, however, an exception to this no-founding-members thing, and that’s their 1994 album, the optimistically-titled THE ORIGINAL FLYING PICKETS, VOLUME 1, which features all of the original members except one (Rick Lloyd) and includes this Nirvana cover. For the record, there has yet to be a VOLUME 2, sadly.
• Grand Funk Railroad, “Nowhere to Run” (1982): Their only album for Warner Brothers and – although they still tour even now (albeit without Mark Farner) – still their most recent studio album, WHAT’S FUNK? features this Holland-Dozier-Holland classic as well as a version of James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s World.” But that’s a cover for another week...
• T-Bone Burnett, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” (1983): You know this guy from his work as a producer, particularly on the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack, but this was his first major-label release, and in addition to the minor radio hit “I Wish You Could Have Seen Her Dance,” it also included this unexpected reinvention of a tune made most famous by Marilyn Monroe.
• Tasmin Archer, “Shipbuilding” (1994): A year after finding significant success on both sides of the pond with her 1992 album GREAT EXPECTATIONS and its single, “Sleeping Satellite,” Archer opted for a stopgap measure to maintain her profile in the UK, releasing a four-song collection of Elvis Costello covers titled after the first song on the EP. (The other tunes, in case you’re curious, were “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror,” “All Grown Up,” and “New Amsterdam.”)
Interestingly, her American label at the time, SBK Records, opted to go in a different direction for the follow-up, instead releasing an 8-track mini-album which was still called SHIPBUILDING but also included an acoustic version of “Sleeping Satellite” and live versions of three tracks from GREAT EXPECTATIONS: “Lords of the New Church,” “When It Comes Down to It,” and “Steel Town.” It failed to chart, and to add insult to injury, by the time her real second album, BLOOM, was released in the UK in 1996, Archer was signed to EMI America, and they refused to provide the album with a US release. It’s on Spotify nowadays, though, so if you’re an American Archer fan and you’ve never heard it, you should go check it out...after you give these covers a spin.
