Friday, January 07, 2005

Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel

Bizarrely, I was in the process of scouting on Limewire for the Cockney Rebel track "Come Up And See Me," and decided to listen to a couple of Wedding Present tracks that my roommate had downloaded, one of which turned out to be a cover of that exact song, though it was titled "Make Me Smile." (It turns out the correct title is a combination of both) Reproduced for your listening pleasure...

Cockney Rebel - Make Me Smile.mp3

At about the 2 minute mark, the flamenco guitar solo hits in, backed by a flush of synthesizers and one is transplanted way, way beyond the realm of guilty pleasure to a more stately pleasure dome of pop.

The Wedding Present - Make Me Smile.mp3

The Wedding Present version is decidedly more caustic and less enamored of production wankery or back-up singers, preferring to augment the chorus with a god-damn octave chord. Pffft, reminds me of Leatherface. Ahh, but then, I'm not a fan of the Wedding Present, preferring Primal Scream and err, uhh, the Soup Dragons on the one NME C86 tape that I do have.

I'm going to put up a song from Atlas Strategic's now out of print second album and if I can get it fixed up in cubase or something, a couple of songs from their final performance, at Logan's Pub in Victoria. (For those unaware, Atlas Strategic was the band that Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade fronted and was also scouted by Isaac Brock for SubPop before unfortunately disbanding...)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

no speakers in this dusty ancient machine in this cold barnyard but i seem to recall this song credited to simply steve harley (from cockney rebel?) on the velvet goldmine soundtrack.

i remember listening to it while in a wooden chair on some strange camping trip on an island where i had no friends because it was really my fathers trip. i was maybe 15 and had gone along with him during summer break. but there was a group of 10 or so girls who i swear to god were so mean to me and would laugh at my voice or something like that.

i remember some of them were nice and invited me into this giant old military tent that they were all sleeping in. the tent was on an island of its own and when the tide came up it meant that all the parents couldnt even bug us if they wanted to. it was fun and some of them were even wearing nothing but thier underwear.

in any case other then that i didnt hang out with them much but i do remember sitting on that wooden chair, listening to that song and wishing that, in fact, some of them would indeed "come up and see me" because they were all down at the beach.

also i played board games with one or two of them.