Bumble Boogie – an interpretation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1899 composition Flight of the Bumble Bee – was arranged by pianist Jack Fina for Freddy Martin and his Orchestra in 1946. Reaching number 7 in the charts at the time, it was later used in the 1948 Disney movie Melody Time.
Liberace’s version of Bumble Boogie is taken from his TV show which ran from 1952 until 1969. I’m guessing this clip is from one of the fifties shows when he was still in his thirties. Liberace once stated, “I don’t give concerts, I put on a show,” and boy, does he. I love the little winks he gives to camera and the way the violinists pop up one by one in the middle segment – I believe one of them is even his brother, George.
Often listed as one of the greatest songs of all time, Smells Like Teen Spirit is the opening track on Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind. Although it is the only track on the album to credit all three band members as writers, the original idea and lyrics were Kurt Cobain’s, inspired by a phrase written on his wall by Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill: ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit’. Although intended as a reference to a deodorant brand, Cobain had interpreted it as a revolutionary slogan and remained unaware of the true meaning until months after the single was released.
Cobain said of writing the song: “I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band—or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”
Asked by the BBC to make three short films about the synthesiser, Scottish musician Angus McIntyre had the idea of re-imaging New Order’s classic Blue Monday without synthesisers and featuring only instruments that would have been available in the 1930s. These instruments included a theremin, musical saw, ukulele-banjo, tongue drum, piano strings, lap steel, harmonium, clavioline, singing glasses, double bass and drums.
New Order’s Blue Monday was released in 1983 by Factory Records and is the biggest selling 12″ single of all time, although the original artwork designed by Peter Saville, was so expensive to produce that the label lost money on every sale.
New Order’s Bernard Sumner later said of Blue Monday: “I don’t really see it as a song. I see it as a machine designed to make people dance.”
In 1997 The Williams Fairey Brass Band covered the KLF’s What Time is Love? on the Acid Brass album, a collaboration with Turner Prize winning conceptual artist Jeremey Deller who saw a connection between the genres of acid house and brass bands, viewing them as “two authentic forms of folk art rooted in specific communities”.
Upon hearing the Williams Fairey track, the KLF incorporated it into their epic 14 minute single Fuck The Millenium, released in 1997 under the moniker of 2K.
The KLF released three key versions of What Time is Love? as well as multiple remixes and the What TIme is Love? Story compilation featuring remixes and covers by other artists.
What Time is Love? The Pure Trance Original was released in 1988, What Time is Love? Story in 1989, What Time is Love? (Live at Trancentral) (which added vocals and a new bass line) in 1990 and America: What Time Is Love? in 1992 (which uses guitar samples from Motörhead’s Ace of Spades). Each version took elements from its predecessors to create a new interpretation in a distinct musical style: from acid house to stadium house and finally rock-heavy electronica.
The KLF (also known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The JAMS, The Timelords, The K Foundation, 2K and other names) were formed in London in 1987 by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. Known for their pioneering of stadium house and ambient house, in 1991 they were the biggest selling singles act in the world.
The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays was inspired by the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego, California which took the lives of two adults and injured eight children and a police officer. The shooter, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer said, when asked by a reporter the reasons for her actions while she was still barricaded in her house, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”. For Christmas a few weeks earlier she had asked her father, an alcoholic who she was forced to share a bed with, for a radio but instead he had bought her a .22 calibre rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition.
Bob Geldof said about writing the song with Rats co-founder and keyboardist Johnnie Fingers:
“I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with Johnnie Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said ‘silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, ‘Tell me why?’ It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy.”
Geldof later admtted that he regretted writing the song because he had made Brenda Spencer famous, saying “[Spencer] wrote to me saying ‘she was glad she’d done it because I’d made her famous,’ which is not a good thing to live with.“
I Don’t Like Mondays was released as a single seven months after the shooting. Brenda Spencer was charged as an adult for the crime and a day after her 18th birthday in 1980 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She is still currently incarcerated, 40 years later, having been denied parole several times.
The London Symphony Orchestra’s re-imagining of I Don’t Like Mondays runs at more than twice the length of the original and was recorded for their Classic Rock – Rock Classics album, released by K-tel in 1981.
The London Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1904 and is the oldest of London’s symphony orchestras, also claiming to be the world’s most recorded orchestra; it has made gramophone recordings since 1912 and has played on more than 200 movie soundtracks, including Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Royal Choral Society is a London based amateur choir, originally formed in 1871 and still active today.
Founded in 1962, Canadian company K-tel began life selling household consumer products through informercials and live demonstrations. Their first product was a Teflon-coated frying pan. Diversifying into LPs, often prominently advertised on television, their sales increased from $23 million in 1971 to $178 million in 1981.
This East meets West interpretation of John Coltrane’s arrangement of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s My Favourite Things was performed at The Marciac jazz festival in 2013.
In the 1970s and 80s, the military dictatorship of Pakistan resulted in the rapid obliteration of art, culture and tourism. The Sachal Jazz Ensemble, an offshoot of the Sachal Studios Orchestra, was formed with the intention of bringing together some of Pakistan’s most established classical musicians, many of whom had been forced into menial work as a result of the countries political climate. The ensemble found new audiences in 2011 with their tabla and sitar-infused cover of Dave Brubeck’s 1959 composition, Take Five.
Wynton Marsalis is an American trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Marsalis has won multiple Grammy Awards, and composed the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The first Wynton Marsalis Quintet was formed in 1982.
My Favourite Things was composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the musical The Sound of Music, which debuted on Broadway in 1959. The film version, sung by Julie Andrews did not appear until 1965, four years after John Coltrane had recorded his 1961 arrangement for his seventh studio album. Inspired by Indian classical music, Coltrane described the track as “my favorite piece of all those I have recorded”.
In 2019 Ariana Grande based her song 7 Rings on the melody of My Favorite Things. 7 Rings topped the charts in fifteen countries.
Swiss reggae band Booost covered The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony on their eponymous 2013 album.
The string loop of Bittersweet Symphony, released by The Verve in 1997, is sampled from the 1965 Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s instrumental cover of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 song The Last Time, itself inspired by This May Be the Last Time, a 1954 recording by the Staple Singers which was an arrangement of a traditional song.
The Verve negotiated rights to use a six-note sample from Oldham’s recording from Decca Records, but they did not obtain permission from former Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein, who owned the copyrights to the Rolling Stones’ pre-1970 songs. Klein refused to grant a licence for the sample, leading to The Verve relinquishing all royalties from the song and the songwriting credits being changed to Jagger-Richards. In 1999, Andrew Oldham successfully sued for his own royalty share which he had never received, and for many subsequent years all songwriting royalties from Bittersweet Symphony went to Jagger-Richards-Oldham.
It would be a further twenty years before an agreement was finally reached, with The Verve receiving a share of the royalties to Bittersweet Symphony from 2019 onwards.
Neither the late Shirley Joiner, the arranger of The Staple Singers’ This May Be the Last Time, or her estate has ever received any royalties from any of the songs inspired by her original arrangement.
The K Foundation’s cover of Que Sera Sera/War is Over was conceived of as a concept single which would only ever be released when world peace was achieved (i.e. never). However, in 1993 3000 copies were made exclusively available in Israel and Palestine in acknowledgment of the steps each side had taken towards a peace agreement. The recording was also intended to play at the end of each night of the 1993 Glastonbury festival but organiser Micheal Eavis refused saying the song was “simply dreadful.”
Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) was first sung by Doris Day in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much, and won a 1956 academy award for Best Original Song.
Happy Xmas (War Is Over) was released as a 1971 Christmas single protesting the war in Vietnam by John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir.
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