The art of the cover version as stripped down reconstruction. In which stiff upper lip English public school takes on Atlanta GA’s funkiest and comes home with a surprising away point. 

In fact, the Flying Lizards were most famous for their 1979 chart hit cover of ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, dismantled and then reassembled in similar robotic fashion to ‘Sex Machine’. But it’s the much less famous and far more difficult to find, James Brown cover that demonstrates the art of the Flying Lizards cover version at its best. 

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Probably the first and last time Slovenian Art-Rockers, Laibach will appear on ABON. In their pure un-remixed form Laibach often sound almost militaristic in their Central European stomping style. But that’s part of their subversive act – taking well-known, usually innocuous music and words and placing them in surprising and disconcerting contexts that create anything but innocuous new sounds and meanings. Not surprisingly therefore cover versions of popular mainstream songs make up a major part of their recorded output.

But this remix of their cover of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ is about as different from their usual output as the unmixed Laibach version is from the Rock Opera original.

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By James Brown standards 1967 wasn’t a particularly prolific year – he only released five new albums and eleven singles.

But it was a critical year for the future of dance music because it was during 1967 that James evolved from leading R’n'B star with a side-line in funky singles to full-blown Funkateer No.1.

By 1967 James Brown had already been a leading R’n'B star for eleven years. He’d had hit after hit every year since his first in 1956. But in 1965, with ‘Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag’ he effectively invented Funk and created a whole new dimension to the James Brown phenomenon. He’d followed that up in 1966 by continuing to release his, by now regular handful of R’n'B hits. But he’d also begun to throw in the occasional Funk classic single just to show that ‘Papa’ wasn’t a one-off.

But it was in 1967 that the Funk thing really took off and became the centre of gravity of his output rather than an intermittent punctuation mark in his series of R’n'B classics. It was in 1967 that he finally got into the groove of releasing incredibly funky single after incredibly funky single in a series that continued at the same manically prolific pace and almost impossibly consistent level of brilliance until the mid ’70′s – creating almost single-handedly what would become the entire DNA of dance music for the next forty years.

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Iggy Pop as John The Baptist to Johnny Rotten’s Jesus. Discuss.

At the beginning of the ’70′s a new genre in Rock started to develop and became accepted as the ‘way forward’ out of the ’60′s. Ever more complicated, and often technically very difficult to play, music; an obsession with instrumental solos; frequent changes of tempo; lyrics that were based in fantasy or science fiction rather than the here and now; concept albums and the avoidance of singles; the complete absence of any rhythm you could possibly dance to. I could go on. Overall it felt like a ‘baroque-ing’ up of Rock that would eventually lead to the phenomenal popularity and album sales of acts like ELP, Yes, Genesis, Rick Wakeman and a hundred others.

But there was a voice in the wilderness warning against such folly. And that voice was Iggy Pop’s. A voice that understood that all the over-complication of the Prog Rockers was taking Rock away from the guttural power and ability to move people and their feet that it once had. You don’t need to think too hard about great Rock, you feel it. And Iggy understood that instinctively.

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So here it is then. The best beat ever invented by white guys. And they’re German. Just what was the World coming to in the early 1970′s?
Neu were 1 of 4 crucial bands that emerged from Germany in the late ’60′s/early ’70′s while most people were looking and listening elsewhere. Can, Faust and Kraftwerk were the other 3.
A complete antidote to the over-the-top, overly complicated and unfortunately over here UK Prog Rock at the time, Neu’s beat was so hypnotic and – there’s no other word for it – interesting that they didn’t even need to embellish it with much else. Words, tune, melody, Roger Dean cover art, Tales From Topograhic Oceans, Lambs Lying Down On Broadway all a little unnecessary.
Neu were to become infinitely more influential on contemporary electronic music than anyone could possibly have imagined at the time. And to pass the test of time better than most of their UK and USA contemporaries. Never charted though.
In reality not many were listening in 1975 but Brian Eno was. He once said “there were 3 great beats in the ’70′s; Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! Beat”. Klaus was Neu’s drummer and alongside guitarist Michael Rother created the phenomenon we now call Motorik.
Of course nowadays it’s difficult to read a music mag without Neu being referenced somewhere. And quite right too.
Recorded 1975.
E-Musik is from the album Neu! 75. Available in many good record shops but Rough Trade have a particularly good Neu section: RoughTrade