Burning Groove

Everyone loves a cover version, don’t they? In 1987 Mike Watt, suffering from depression in the aftermath of fellow Minuteman D. Boon’s death, pitched up in New York and stayed with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore for a while, playing bass on some of the sessions that would become the EVOL album. To try to get Watt active and enthusiastic about music again they hatched a plan that become Sonic Youth offshoot Ciccone Youth. Watt covered Madonna’s Burning Up (as Burnin’ Up) playing all the instruments (except for a Gregg Ginn guitar solo). Watt’s cover is rough and ready, fuzzy and lo fi, a thing of beauty in many ways. 

Madonna’s original dates from 1983, early 80s New York dance pop that has buckets of charm and some key Madonna tropes already well in place.

Burning Up

The sessions Watt played with Sonic Youth resulted in this cover of Madonna’s 1985 smash Into The Groove.

Into The Groove(Y)

Like Watt’s cover it’s lo fi and sounds made for ghetto blasters and C90 cassettes, with grungy bass, a hissing drum machine and handclaps and Thurston’s ultra- drawled vocal. When playing in the studio Sonic Youth would play the original version through one of the channels and fade it into and out of their own version. Yes, I’d love to hear a recording of that too. In the meantime here’s Madonna’s Desperately Seeking Susan associated single. if you get both playing at the same time on your computer you might be able to recreate Sonic Youth’s experiment. 

Into The Groove

When Ciccone Youth’s album The Whitey Album came out in 1988, a few months after their landmark Daydream Nation, many people assumed they were taking the piss or covering Madonna ironically. Thurston says this was most definitely not the case, that they loved the song, danced to it in NY clubs and were paying tribute to the woman who’d played in two No Wave bands, including one (spinal Root Gang) that eventually transformed into Swans. Sonic Youth loved that someone from their downtown scene had broken out and become huge. 

The Whitey Album probably overdoes it, fifty minutes when it could have been a really good twenty minute EP but Sonic/ Ciccone Youth were into sprawling records in 1988. The album includes the track Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu, a track with J Mascis on guitar and the first time I was aware of Neu’s existence and Ciccone’s cover of Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love, a cover with a vocal recorded by Kim in a karaoke booth and the video filmed with her lip syncing, looking cool as fuck in cut off jeans, while footage of the Vietnam War is projected behind her. 

Bizarrely, Robert Palmer had already crossed over into the US 80s indie- punk scene with his cover version of Husker Du’s New Day Rising, played live at San Diego University Amphitheatre in 1987.  

Songs For Isaac 5

Sifter’s Records on Fog Lane in Burnage is a second hand record shop immortalised in the Oasis single Shakermaker (‘Mr Sifter sold me songs/ When I was just sixteen/ Now he stops at traffic lights/ But only when they’re green’). It is about half a mile from where I grew up in Withington and a regular haunt for me until recent years. Sometime back when Isaac and Eliza were both pretty young, around 2008, I hit upon the brilliant plan that if I took them into Sifter’s and gave them a fiver each, they could choose a record each while I browsed the racks. The plan only had two flaws: 1) it was high risk. I could easily end up walking out with a copy of Tango In The Night and a 12″ of Whitney’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody and 2) my attempt to get them crate digging didn’t occupy them for very long at all, they both committed to records quickly and then got bored and wanted to leave. 

On the other hand, they both randomly came up with the goods. Eliza, round about five years old, chose a copy of Into The Groove on 12″, Madonna’s 1985 Desperately Seeking Susan smash hit. Nothing wrong with a bit of Madge, classic 80s dance pop (and covered by Ciccone Youth but that’s for another day). I suspect the mid- 80s Madonna and Rosanna Arquette on the sleeve, all hair and bangles, may have influenced her choice. 

Into The Groove

Isaac’s eyes and hands had picked out a 12″ single too, There’s A Ghost In My House by The Fall. 

There’s A Ghost In My House

The Vinyl Villain recently wrote about this 12″ as part of his weekly ramble through The Fall’s singles and you can find his post and the singles B- sides here. What drew Isaac to it I don’t know- the sleeve isn’t exactly child friendly but it’s another piece of 80s dance music, The Fall approaching accessibility with Brix in the group and a cover of one of my wife Lou’s favourite Northern Soul hits (R. Dean Taylor’s original came out on Motown in 1967). As for the song’s title taking on new meaning now,  well, I don’t know about ghosts but Isaac’s presence is all over our house from his coat and bobble hat still hanging up in the hall as you come in through the front door to the hundreds of cards we’ve received since he died last Tuesday. Thanks again to all of you who have left comments here or elsewhere. It means a lot.