Under The Covers Part 1.

Right, weekend and essay-crisis are over so now I get back to the blogging (if anybody is reading it, that is). I may even do two today to make up for the lack of posts recently. Imagine that!

So the first band practice went pretty well, I reckon. Was a little awkward at first but I was really getting into it by the end and was pretty excited about making music again afterwards. And none of my stupid fears came true, believe it or not.

An interesting thing that happened is that we spent around 15-20 minutes at the end discussing what song we should cover.* We have our (I say "our", I didn't write any of it) own stuff to work but I always think covers are good things to do for a band starting out. You can play complete songs relatively quickly, and get used to playing together as a band.

But it can be a tricky business choosing what to cover. Ideally you want nothing too obvious and something you can stamp your own identity on. "Love Will Tear Us Apart", for example, is a song which fails on both counts: as well as being done to death already none of the myriad cover versions seem to have done anything interesting to it, though I think that's somewhat down to the nature of the song.

Also, for god's sake stay clear of "ironic" covers. They're never funny and always make you look like a twat. Certainly when the above discussionm was going on the temptation to suggest something really stupid, especially when real ideas were thin on the ground, was great. But you must relent! I once saw a guy covering "I Believe I Can Fly" at an open mic night and it was excruciating. Similarly the Ghostbusters theme or anything of that ilk is also forbidden (in my big book o' rules) because it makes you look like a nostalgia-hungry moron.

I'm going to post some real-life stories about songs that bands I've been in have covered later, because I have to dash off and see a friend's band play at the Oxford Indie Music Sosciety clubnight. Toodles!

*for the record, we chose "Sugar" by Ladytron.