Surprised there hasn’t been any discussion of this yet. I listened the other day. Some songs are good, others terrible, but all interesting.
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Thanks for pointing this out - wasn’t aware of it before!
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Totally escaped me. Many thanks for the tip. I‘ve wanted a Shaken & Stirred Mk II for many years now - this seems at least to come close in spirit.
EDIT: Five songs into it this is really a jamboree bag of songs, totally unpredictable what you‘ll get. Some songs are slaughtered - but in a lovely way. You can really tell some artists liked their chosen pieces before they took the chainsaw to it…
Seriously, love it. Perhaps a bit underproduced though, I can easily see Arnold or Danger Mouse pulling the stops out of this, turn up the volume and vibrato, slap a stylish 007 logo on it and the thing would have torn right through the feuilletons.
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Another recent cover album is this one:
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Listened to the whole album now, main takeaways: Nothing could ever damage On Her Majesty’s Secret Service instrumental or We Have All The Time In The World’s schmalz. Otherwise some splendid discoveries, indeed every song is at the very least interesting. The Ukrainian version of Die Another Day is particularly…Ukrainian.
Great fun all over!
EDIT: There even was a launch event on YouTube with interviews and an exclusive video premiere.
EDIT MkII: Here’s the Campaign Against Living Miserably’s website, a suicide prevention group to which all profits from this album go.
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How magnificently eccentric. Good cause, though.
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The Wedding Present have always intrigued me, ever since they made the decision to release 12 singles, one per month, in the calendar year of 1992.
However, I have just had a listen and it’s mostly dreadful. The only one that was ok was The Man with the Golden Gun.
Bonkers… in all the right ways… but the Bondness still shines through in each of them, except All Time High, which is surely a step too far!
Jim nailed it with ‘eccentric’, which is probably the spirit in which it was done. It took Gedge seven years to do the compilation - and he gave his contributors entirely free rein with their covers so it was bound to be all over the place.
Had this been an official thingy all the edges would have been rounded off, everything streamlined, the weak voices pumped up and the schrammel done away with. It would have appealed to the market and the critics - but would also have been a rather bland affair. As is it’s much more niche and memorable. And eccentric.
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