Under The Covers Part Five: I've Forgotten More Stuff

Christ! If I were to contiue the prog-rock metaphor I started earlier this particular point about covers, which I never intended to be this long, is becoming something of a concept album. I'm perilously close to Operation Mindcrime or Tales From Topographic Oceans territory here.

Anyway, it suddenly occurred to me the other day that I completely forgot to mention Hands of Cuba's biggest cover-related failure, although a lot of good did come out of it too.

Just after Hands of Cuba started practising properly - yknow, playing through songs and trying to write stuff just like a proper band - we learnt of a competition, probably through the NME, I don't recall exactly, to cover "Skip To The End" by The Futureheads. The winning cover, as selected by the band, would appear as a B-Side to a future single.

Ever the eager beavers that we were at that stage in our careers we plunged headfirst into the challenge, recorded our composition and sent it off. We were excited. The thing was, though, that our version really wasn't very good. There was simply too much going on. It was a horrible mess of a sound-mulch. Double-tracked vocals courtesy of myself and Pat, our guitarist, were perhaps not a great idea, especially as they were slightly out of tune and completely out of sync.

We never heard back from The Futureheads or indeed anyone else. Mind you I don't recall hearing anything else at all about the competition at all and wikipedia reveals nothing about it appearing on the one and only other single taken from the second album. Maybe with them being dropped from their label and all the whole competition fell through. Who knows.

Anyway we did learn a lot from that recording session, which is handy as it would have been a massive waste of time otherwise. It took ages (quite a few days of solid work) but we learnt a lot about recording, which set us in good stead for when we recorded our own songs. Also by deconstructing the song to the extent we did we realised how little the band had done with the tune and structure and thus realised it wasn't terribly good. We also got some good drum patterns which were to come in lots of use later (especially in "Ted Heath", Cuba fans).

Also we never even attempted to play it live, which shows that lessons had been learnt. I really hope this is the last post about this topic for a while, lest I suddenly get an overwhelming urge to make that album about the Peloponnesian War.