Is It A Cover Version, A Reinterpretation Or Just A Plain Copy?
Why remake old songs, shows or movies if you've nothing new to add?
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This month Dolly Parton and Duran Duran released new albums. Both artists are hugely successful creative songwriters so it was interesting to see that their albums featured a selection of cover versions. This got me thi about the process of creatives reinterpreting existing work - whether that be in pop music, theatre or movies - and why a hugely successful creative would delve into someone else’s work.
I started with pop music which is a genre built on cover versions. Traditionally songwriters wrote songs and singers performed them. Sinatra, Ella, and Sammy sung the songs, interpreted them and made them personal. Nobody considered Sammy Davis Jr less of an artist because he didn’t write Mr Bojangles and Sir Cliff Richard has had a career lasting 70 years without writing a single song. The best singers could take a ballad and make it swing by taking it up tempo like Sammy did with Hey There or bring a new mood and nuance to a song like Sinatra did with the achingly lustful Night and Day on Sinatra and Strings. Audiences accepted that each performer had their own way of presenting material and the creativity was in the interpretation. Clearly nobody predicted Michael Buble´!
Duran Duran’s new album Danse Macabre has a Hallowe’en theme. It features a creative return to form for the band with new, fresh and exciting material alongside some very choice cover versions and collaborations. The whole album is unquestionably ‘peak Duran’ with ‘peak Duran’ producer Nile Rodgers working his magic and keeping the whole thing tight and glamorous.
Queen Dolly of Parton’s new album is a 30 song epic collection called Rockstar. Back in the day this would have arrived as a heavy package triple album with limited edition boxed set and booklet! Rockstar features some great new Dolly compositions, together with a ton of cover versions and collaborations with artists including Linda Perry, Miley Cyrus and Simon Le Bon.
While both albums have lots to recommend them, they both raise the question of why cover someone else’s material when you are more than capable of creating your own? On Danse Macabre Duran Duran give their cover versions the requisite sexy and funky sheen that made the group so successful. Even The Specials’ Ghost Town makes sense translated from raw ska into a smooth more driven composition. For Billie Eilish’s Bury a Friend, Duran Duran lift Mick Karn’s Japan bass sound and deliver a version of the song would sit easily with anything on Rio. And surely this is the point of a cover version: to show the audience something new that only you can show. Sinatra sung the songs in his way!
The cover versions on Rockstar don’t have much ‘Dolly’ in the mix and sound oddly generic. The part that is Parton is purely vocal which gives the sense of songs that are haunted by a star rather than interpreted by her. This creative choice makes little sense because Dolly Parton has (and is) a unique musical talent. We also know that Dolly Parton’s own songs have enjoyed huge success when covered by others which ends up making Rockstar a creatively confusing album. We know that Dolly Parton is a creative artist so the album makes us ask why there is so little of her creativity in the songs. How we would have loved a country mountain version of Heart of Glass instead of the almost total recreation of the Blondie classic that we get here - complete with guest vocal from Deborah Harry.
Although cover versions have traditionally been associated with pop music, it is worth considering that they now exist in ever greater numbers across film, tv and theatre. For what is a movie remake, a tv series reboot or a new stripped down version of a beloved theatre show but a cover version? The creative team is taking existing work and ‘covering’ it by making their own version.
In every case I think the same question has to be asked: why are you covering this?
In some cases such as Jamie Lloyd’s award winning Nicole Scherzinger-led Sunset Boulevard or Daniel Fish’s hot, sexy Oklahoma the reason is clear: The Director is giving us a new understanding of familiar material (Check out my review of Oklahoma here) In the same way that Sinatra gave us sex in Night and Day where there had previously been only romance. If we look at the current glut of movie to musical remakes, we know that they make commercial sense but creatively it is hard to understand what is added to Pretty Woman The Musical that we didn’t get from the Pretty Woman The Movie.
Last year I saw the umpteenth revival tour of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. It was a production that could literally have been re-produced from the play’s1930 premiere. I had previously seen Emma Rice’s adaptation of another Noel Coward classic: Brief Encounter at The Watermill Theatre in which Ms Rice and Director Robert Kirby brought new elements to the performance by integrating some of Coward’s music, injecting new levels of creative vision to the design and adding physicality and movement to the piece. This gave us new insight to the characters’ desperation, the gender distinctions and class divisions of the time. It felt that the creative team had intuited more from this story and felt that they had more to say about the piece that could be developed, exposed and played. This contrasted with the approach taken by the creative team at the preserved in aspic Private Lives who had stuck to a brief of playing to the strengths of the lead actors’ posh credentials and making some money. This way of creative producing is only ever a short term fix of diminishing returns which services an existing crowd .rather than developing a new audience.
Cinema has been remaking its movies since the form’s conceptions. There are 13 versions of Brewster’s Millions (seriously?) and it must only be a matter of time before Lucasfilm has no more characters or prequels left to invent and goes back to a 21st century remake of the original Stars Wars movie!
When Stephen Spielberg remade West Side Story we got bigger and better technical brilliance that dazzled and dizzied. The movie also included elements that were not present (or maybe not possible) in the 1958 Broadway version or the 1961 movie: The Sharks spoke more Spanish, the role of Doc was re-gendered which gave the film added piquancy during the rape of Anita, while gang member Anybody’s was correctly gendered with a non-binary actor performing the role. The movie is a wonderful piece of cinema but it does not really tell us anything different from the original. It could generously be interpreted as telling us the same things but in a new way. Spielberg is renowned as a consummate storyteller and we are left wondering what else could he have discovered in the material?
The Walt Disney Company has released a whole series of cover versions of its own work with live action remakes of some of its most beloved animated features. Aladdin tried to give a clearer sense of ethnicity and place whereas Beauty and the Beast had Emma Watson giving us a Belle with a touch more 21st century. Both films are enjoyable but just like West Side Story they do not draw out new drama, or offer fresh insights or viewpoints that we might have been missing in the original beyond giving female leads a bit more agency which ends homogenising both stories. I would love to understand better Belle’s potential Stockholm syndrome or see Aladdin as a bit more conflicted and rough. But what we get with Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast is like the cover versions on Dolly Parton’s Rockstar album: they appear to be a little updated but don’t deviate too far from the original.
Some of the most creative cover versions of the last few years come from the creatively rigid world of ballet and specifically from the visionary genius of Sir Matthew Bourne. It is hard to imagine a more groundbreaking and spectacular (cover) version than his production of Swan Lake with its male corps de ballet made up of aggressive, virile and very masculine swans. They strike out from the traditional shimmering white female en pointe cygnes. Bourne did not change a note of Tchaikovsky’s magnificent music but by recognising that there are, in fact, male swans as well as female swans in nature he was able to create the most iconic ballet of the last 50 years.
By asking himself ‘why am I doing this’ and ‘what am I bringing to this piece?’ he was able to take the best known ballet in history and make into the new best known ballet in history. Together with Adam Cooper he gave audiences a new artistic vision and used this artistic vision to create new audiences for dance.
When Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake opened it challenged our pre-conceptions and swept away what had gone before in the same way that grunge swept away hair metal and rock and roll swept away the big bands. Swan Lake attracted approbation from balletomanes, and walk outs from audiences who were not ready for a change to their idea of what Swan Lake ‘should be’. Outside the stuffy and stilted world inhabited by a few snobs the general public fell in love with the show precisely because it was not the classic ‘girls in white tutus’ romantic ballet that they felt disconnected from. New Adventures’ Swan Lake did exactly the opposite of the Private Lives tour: it developed a new audience for dance rather than servicing an existing crowd.
As creatives when we look at reinterpreting the work of others we need to ask two questions:
Why Do I Want to Do This Piece?
Am I Creating Something that Only I Could Do?
If our answer to question one is purely commercial ( which is totally valid) then question two becomes less important. But if our answer to question one is something more personal or emotional then question two will guide our creative process.
Our own work is a reflection of our personal creative truth and vision and the same rule should apply when we reinterpret someone else’s work. After all, wouldn’t we prefer to create the next Swan Lake rather than a company karaoke party?!
Check out Duran Duran’s Danse Macabre here:
Check out Dolly Parton’s Rockstar here:
Find out more about Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake here:
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Please let me know your thoughts on this piece by leaving a comment below
What an interesting discussion. I have no firm view on this. I am instinctively a little resistant to remakes of movies because if something has already been done well I would rather watch something else, but then I like the Coen brothers' "The Ladykillers", a brilliant remake of a brilliant film. I suspect that there are lots of reasons why a long-established artist might do a cover album, from wanting to record music they have loved themselves to wanting to put an album out when they have run out of ideas for writing their own material. I suspect that it's often just for the money. In the theatre it's a bit different - "remakes" are a constant and plays are always being reinterpreted. It keeps things fresh. I don't like gimmicks, but then one person's gimmick is another person's creativity. It's good to have your boundaries challenged and to try new things.