From the sublime to the outlandish – and all stops in between. 85 covers of Beatles songs from Cherry Red/ Strawberry Records – for your lasting entertainment.
Release Date: 24th November 2023
Label: Cherry Red/ Strawberry Records
Formats: 3CD Boxset
The world, it seems, is passing through one of its periodic Beatle Revival phases. Only this month, Now And Then, the latest – and very probably the final – reworking of John Lennon’s 1970s demo tapes into a new Beatles song has saturated airwaves and social media alike (actually, I like the song and I love the accompanying video…) and Kenneth Womack’s exhaustive transcript of roadie/ driver/ bodyguard Mal Evans’s memoir, Living The Beatles Legend, recently arrived in the bookshops. So, either by accident or design, it’s happily appropriate that this latest Cherry Red/ Strawberry Records compilation, an extensive collection of covers of Beatles songs, should appear right now.
It’s a massive collection, of that there’s no doubt, and, lurking within the three discs that comprise We Can Work It Out, there’s just about every kind of interpretation of The Beatles’ music that anyone could possibly want to hear. Note-for-note copies, soulful reworkings, folky interpretations, jazzy experiments, big band re-imaginings and psychedelic workouts – they’re all here, from fellow Merseybeat travelers, serious musicians, Tamla and soul artists looking to repay the compliments that The Beatles paid them and contemporary and future stars.
There are also lots of quirky surprises to enjoy – outlandish versions of well-known songs by people you could never have imagined getting involved. OK, so there are songs amongst the 85 tracks spread over these three discs that you’ll want to hear once – and once only – but there are also lots of splendid moments where – dare I say it? – an artist takes hold of a Beatles song and turns it into something very special indeed, comparable or maybe even better than the original. And, everywhere, we’re constantly reminded of just how thoroughly The Beatles turned popular music on its head, almost from the very first moment of their arrival.
The covers don’t just come from the UK and the USA either. We Can Work It Out includes versions of Beatles songs by artists from France, The Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, Hungary and Puerto Rico. Some are very clearly opportunistic cash-ins, but there are loads of well-considered, worthy interpretations here too.
The album’s running order is interesting – the tracks are sequenced in the order that they were released by the Beatles, and not according to the date that each particular cover was made. In general, the earlier the cover version, the more likely it is to be a fairly faithful reproduction of the original, whilst the later recordings tend to be somewhat more imaginative or even experimental
There are a few unintentionally comical interludes, it has to be said… I’m a dedicated Francophile, but even I have to admit that Beatles songs don’t sound quite right when they’re sung in French, and I found it rather difficult to stifle the odd giggle as I listened to tracks like Love Me Do (Je Suis Fou) by Dick Rivers, It Won’t Be Long (Le Temps Est Long) and No Reply (Ne Ris Plus) by Les Lionceaux, I Want to Hold Your Hand (Laisse-Moi Tenir Ta Main) by Claude François or A Hard Day’s Night (Je Me Bats Pour Gagner) by Frank Alamo. Perhaps I’m being unfair because, other than the language, most of the above cover versions have their merits; Love Me Do, It Won’t Be Long and No Reply are all fairly faithful to the Beatles’ originals and François’ I Want To Hold Your Hand is refreshingly jazzy. Only Frank Alamo’s Hard Day’s Night falls a little short – the drama of the iconic opening G7sus4 (or whatever else you might believe it to be) chord just isn’t there, and the twelve string guitar solo is a bit pedestrian, but perhaps I’m nit-picking…
As far as Beatle lyrics are concerned, the Italian language is an altogether more comfortable fit, and Dino E I Kings’ take on I Should Have Known Better (Cerca Di Capire) is actually very good, despite the slightly bizarre female backing vocals.
The cover versions served up by The Beatles’ Merseybeat contemporaries will be familiar to most listeners. Billy J Kramer, Cilla Black, Tommy Quickly and The Fourmost were all managed by Brian Epstein so they obviously had first dibs at any likely candidates for recording as they emerged from Lennon and McCartney’s febrile scribblings. Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas took Do You Want to Know a Secret to the very top of the UK singles chart in June 1963, although, from this distance, their version sounds a little tame, and not a patch on The Beatles’ original that appeared on their debut Please Please Me album. Tommy Quickly, meanwhile, tackles Tip Of My Tongue, a lesser-known Lennon/ McCartney effort; it’s a bit twee, maybe, but it works, whilst The Fourmost’s reading of Hello Little Girl – one of Lennon’s earliest compositions (it was performed during The Beatles’ notorious Decca audition) – is textbook Merseybeat.
But, perhaps the most interesting song from the Epstein stable is Cilla Black’s Love Of The Loved, an early McCartney number that was also played at the Decca audition. It was Cilla’s debut single and there’s still a rough-around-the-edges feel that her phenomenal success was about to banish forever.
It is, of course, common knowledge that The Beatles were early champions of American Rhythm and Blues (and particularly material from the Tamla Motown camp) and the band’s early albums and live sets were peppered with songs like Please Mister Postman, Money, You Really Got A Hold On Me and Ray Charles’s I Got A Woman. And, as The Beatles’ fame grew and the quality of their songwriting increased in sophistication, some of their favourite R&B artists took the opportunity to return the compliment by recording versions of Beatles songs that were often stunningly good – as the examples included on We Can Work It Out readily testify.
In autumn 1964, The Supremes released their A Bit Of Liverpool album. Purportedly their tribute to the Merseybeat phenomenon that was, by that time, sweeping the Western Hemisphere, it includes souled-up versions of five Lennon/ McCartney songs (and, inexplicably, versions of House Of The Rising Sun, Londoner Dave Clark’s Bits and Pieces and Do You Love Me, a Berry Gordy song taken into the charts by Dagenham-born Brian Poole. Not a scouser amongst them…). The version of You Can’t Do That, included here, is delicious – one of the highlights of the entire collection and an easy match for The Beatles’ original.
Likewise, Tamla chanteuse Mary Wells had long been admired by The Beatles; she was a star guest on The Beatles’ 1964 UK tour and, in 1965, she paid the ultimate compliment by recording a whole album of Beatles’ songs – Love Songs To The Beatles. Her two selections included on We Can Work It Out – Please Please Me and Help! – are both as smooth, sophisticated and wonderfully soulful as anyone has any right to expect.
Elsewhere, The Ventures – themselves hugely influential on the guitar styles of a generation of pickers, including George Harrison – chip in with a stunningly good instrumental version of I Feel Fine, The 5th Dimension add yet another dimension to a slowed-down, brassed-up Ticket To Ride and Madeline Bell gives glimpses of her future promise with her 1967 soul-laden interpretation of You Won’t See Me.
Listening to We Can Work It Out, I gathered an increasing sense that some of the artists included were taking their Beatle bashes a little more seriously than others. The Rattles – early compatriots of The Beatles from their Hamburg days – contribute a passable version of P.S. I Love You, recorded live at Hamburg’s Star Club and TV personality Kenny Lynch offers up a smooth rendition of Misery (incidentally, the first-ever cover version of a Beatles song). Rock and Roller Duffy Power enlisted the services of The Graham Bond Quartet – featuring Bond, Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and John McLaughlin – for his cool, jazzy I Saw Her Standing There, The Crickets, newly released from the service of Buddy Holly, repaid a huge compliment to a band that admired them so much with an almost note-perfect From Me to You, whilst Canada’s Five Man Electrical Band’s version of You’re Going To Lose That Girl is imaginative and respectful.
Elsewhere, renegade folk-jazzer Davy Graham’s treatment of I’m Looking Through is surprisingly poppy yet lacking in passion, whilst American outfit, Brotherhood, formed by ex-members of Paul Revere and the Raiders – one of a very few American bands to offer up any real resistance at the height of the British Invasion – dish up an incongruously psychedelic version of When I Get Home – possibly the most otherwise innocuous song that The Beatles ever recorded. Tempest deliver Paperback Writer as a trumping rocker with an Ollie Halsall guitar solo that ventures into prog rock territory and Birmingham ‘Brumbeat’ combo, The Applejacks feature here with a bright, poppy take on Like Dreamers Do, another early song that was abandoned by The Beatles after that Decca audition. The Applejacks released the song as the follow-up to their chartbusting debut single, Tell Me When, but it flopped, and we heard very little of The Applejacks thereafter.
It’s so very clear that many established stars saw The Beatles as a means of keeping themselves in the public eye, and also that many aspiring stars of the day realized that covering a Beatles song made good business sense – and there are some notable contributions on We Can Work It Out from many artists in each of those categories. José Feliciano’s version of In My Life – indisputably one of Lennon’s greatest achievements – is soulful, sublime; delightful, even. Count Basie’s Hold Me Tight is cool, deliciously jazzy and full of big-band swing; Alma Cogan, another long-term Beatle associate, reinterprets Eight Days a Week as a slow, sexual, widescreen ballad and Jackie Trent’s Got to Get You into My Life is every bit as sassy and raucous as Paul McCartney must have imagined it. And, it wouldn’t be a collection of Beatles’ covers without Peter and Gordon’s World Without Love.
But some of the established and aspiring stars featured on We Can Work It Out don’t really pull off their contributions with quite so much aplomb. Adam Faith – one of the many home-grown pop idols to be knocked off their perches by the arrival of The Beatles – seems to be trying a bit too hard with his comically interminable rendition of I Wanna Be Your Man, The Mamas and the Papas’ take on I Call Your Name is a bit nondescript, surf duo Jan & Dean make the mistake of enlisting a bunch of children to provide the “Hey” call in their version of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away – and it’s almost unbearable, and Mark Wynter’s And I Love Her is just plain soppy. Joe Cocker’s 1964 version of I’ll Cry Instead was his debut single and features a young Jimmy Page on guitar, but it offers no clues as to the soul colossus that Cocker would become, whilst Noel Harrison’s jazz-flecked She’s A Woman sounds like… well… Noel Harrison.
But, perhaps, it’s the quirky and thoroughly unexpected interpretations of Beatles songs that leave the most lasting impressions of We Can Work It Out. For instance, a band with the unlikely name of The Baconeers deliver an acceptable She Loves You. The band’s leader, Frank Bacon, went by the real-life moniker of Ross MacManus (I can’t, for the life of me, understand why he saw fit to adopt his stage name, even though it was 1963…). You might have heard of Ross’s son, Declan…
Glyn Johns is better known nowadays as a record producer with such names as The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Kinks, Fairport Convention, Bob Dylan and, yes, The Beatles, in his portfolio, but, in the early 60s, he’d also tried his luck as performer. He’s featured here with a version of I’ll Follow the Sun that emphasizes the folky origins of the song. He sings it well and there’s a marvelous oboe solo – it’s just a shame about the excessively sweet backing vocals. And Mae West and Petula Clark offer shocks to the system with, respectively, a semi-pornographic Daytripper and an MOR take on Lennon’s early psychedelic adventure, Rain.
I’ll close out with mentions of two tracks that stand out for completely different reasons. You’ll find The Four Preps’ A Letter to The Beatles – the only non-Beatle composition of the collection (although that’s not quite true) to be either hilariously bad or a comic masterpiece, depending on your outlook. The Four Preps were famous (in their day) for their parodies of popular performers like The Fleetwoods, The Kingston Trio and Dion so, when The Beatles made their American breakthrough, it was only to be expected that they, too, would become ‘victims’ of The Preps’ humour. The song actually made it into the US chart, but it had to be withdrawn because The Preps had included snippets of I Wanna Hold Your Hand in the song, without obtaining the necessary permission from the song’s publishers. But, with lines like: “Ya gotta send 25 cents for an autographed picture, a one dollar bill for a fan club card – and – if you send it right away, you’ll get a lock of hair… from a St. Bernard,” it certainly justifies its inclusion in this collection. Priceless.
And this entire offering is made thoroughly worthwhile by the inclusion of jazz saxophonist Steve Marcus’s stunning reinvention of Tomorrow Never Knows – a song that I would have considered impossible to cover. Marcus takes Lennon’s psychedelic masterpiece on a freeform jazz odyssey of 11 minutes’ duration. It works a treat and it is, without any doubt whatsoever, the most outstanding track in this vast collection.
I’ll admit it: I was dubious at first, but We Can Work It Out is a highly worthwhile venture. It’s entertaining, enjoyable, interesting, often amusing and ultimately impressive. And you can always skip the cringeworthy bits.
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