all that she wants

Cover Versions of #1s… Indie Rock Edition

/ UK #1s blog / 4 Comments

In 2007, to celebrate their fortieth anniversary, BBC Radio 1 released an album of cover versions, featuring the big pop and rock acts of the day.

(For anyone not of a British persuasion, Radio 1 is the youth-oriented national radio station, which plays all the pop, rock, dance, and hip-hop hits of the day, as well as the Top 40 on a Friday afternoon. Radio 2 is for the middle-agers. Radio 3 plays classical and jazz. Radio 4 is news, documentaries, plays, and so on. And Radio 5 is for sports. They’re the five main ones that I grew up with. There are others, especially now in the digital age. Here ends today’s lesson on British radio stations.)

Anyway, the remit for the album was to include one song from every year that Radio 1 had been broadcasting, covered in a modern style. Interestingly for us, this coincides (almost) with the very point we are at in our countdown, and so we can feature some of the big indie rock groups of the day that we aren’t going to meet at #1. I’ve complained a bit that the mid-00s indie rock revival – Arctic Monkeys aside – hasn’t been represented on top of the charts. There are a few more indie number ones to come in 2006 and 2007, but not by these acts below.

Here then, are three old number ones, covered by hip new beat groups for Radio 1’s ruby anniversary. Well, hip and new sometime around 2007, anyway…

Kasabian – ‘Too Much Too Young’

One of the very biggest groups to come out of the 2000s, Kasabian are still going strong. All but one of their albums have made #1 in the UK, while on the singles chart their biggest hit was 2009’s #3 ‘Fire’. For this album they covered the Special’s 1980 punky, spiky, two-tone ‘Too Much Too Young’. And they did it in a very faithful, punky, two-tone style. It’s fine. I just wish they made it sound more Kasabian, as they were one of the more unpredictable-sounding of the landfill-indie era, especially their trippy, space-rock inspired debut album.

Gossip – ‘Careless Whisper’

In the mid-’00s I was a big reader of the NME. And for a year or so, between 2006 and 2007, it felt like the Gossip and their front woman Beth Ditto graced the magazine’s cover on a weekly basis. Like so many before them, they never quite lived up to their ‘next big thing’ tag, but their one Top 10 hit – the clattering, protest anthem ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ – is a certified classic of the time. Their take on George Michael’s eighties smoocher is cut from the same dance-punk cloth. Unlike the Kasabian cover above, it does do something new with the source material, and it’s quite nice to hear an over-played tune (that I’m not overly fond of) sound so different.

The Kooks – ‘All That She Wants’

Ah, the Kooks. The poster boys for ‘landfill indie’? Or one of the mid-00s more enduring acts? They’re still together, still touring and making music, and their signature song ‘Naive’ seems to have gained popularity with the TikTok generation. I did buy, and enjoy, their debut album ‘Inside In/Inside Out’ – especially the bouncy ‘You Don’t Love Me’. But there was always the whiff of art school (they formed at the BRIT school) poseurs about them, and lead singer Luke Pritchard always gave the impression that he thought he was Pete Doherty, minus the heroin.

But their cover of Ace of Base’s 1993 #1, ‘All That She Wants’, is serviceable enough, translating the original’s reggae lilt into a very 2006 indie riff. Of the three I like Gossip’s cover the best, but this is a decent second.

I hope you enjoyed these three covers. This ‘Radio One Est. 1967’ album is good for at least three more chart-topping covers, so I’ll return to it in the new year.

689. ‘All That She Wants’, by Ace of Base

/ UK #1s blog / 11 Comments

Enter Sweden’s 3rd biggest-selling pop act… (Answers for 2nd place on a postcard… I’ll reveal it at the end of the post!)

All That She Wants, by Ace of Base (their 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 16th May – 6th June 1993

And in the grand Swedish tradition, it’s a male-female combo – two men, two women (though as far I can tell no marriages) – Ace of Base. With what I’ve always thought to be a deeply strange pop song.

There’s the sparse, ghostly intro, for example. And all the empty spaces in the song, where it’s just nothing more than a drum machine and a lumbering synth riff, and the low-key ending. It’s not your normal pop smash, even if it has more than a hint of dub-reggae – soon to be one of the dominant chart sounds – in the steady, hypnotic beat. And that’s before we dissect the lyrics…

All that she wants, Is another baby, She’s gone tomorrow boy… They tell the tale of a femme fatale, who prowls an unnamed beach looking for men… She’s the hunter, You’re the fox… And in that respect it’s great. Girl power! Fifteen years ago Brotherhood of Man told the story of a holiday resort lothario in ‘Figaro’, but Ace of Base flip it on its head. If it were sung by men it might be a bit cliched, but no. Go girls!

The problem I have with the lyrics is the fact that, as a kid, I took them literally. All that she wants, Is another baby… I thought she was wandering the beach looking for a man to get her pregnant. Which is weird, and I apologise; but having done some research I find I’m not alone. “As far as I can remember, ‘All That She Wants’ by Ace of Base is the only hit single ever to talk about a lady who uses men for stud service so that she can become an unwed mother,” said LA Weekly at the time. I like to think Ace of Base knew what they were doing, keeping the lyrics intentionally vague and menacing. Either way, I feel seen.

‘All That She Wants’ is definitely a grower. Even now, on my fourth or fifth listen, I’m remembering why it is such a good pop tune. I’m not sure what the hooks are – or perhaps it’s because there are so many it’s hard to pinpoint them – but it worms its way in and stays there. Just like Sweden’s biggest pop group, the one it’s impossible not to compare Ace of Base to… It’s not out of the question to imagine that, had ABBA been around in 1993, they might have been making records like this. And, like Agnetha and Frida, the girls here have similarly accented, idiosyncratic, but still very alluring, English.

This was only Ace of Base’s second chart hit, and what a hit. A number one across Europe, presumably unavoidable at beach bars from Faro to Faliraki in the summer of ’93, and a #2 in the US. It set them up for a run of Top 10s through the 1990s, including US #1 ‘The Sign’ and a cover of ‘Don’t Turn Around’, which Aswad had taken to the top in 1988. But permit me to give a shout out to my favourite Ace of Base tune, ‘Always Have, Always Will’, which takes everything you love about ABBA, Motown, sixties girl groups, and serves it up in pop perfection. Its #12 peak be damned!

This would be their only visit to the top of the charts, but they remain Sweden’s 3rd most successful act. ABBA are obviously the 1st, but what of the runners-up…? Well, it’s Roxette (another male-female act!), who never made it higher than #3 in the UK. Personally I’d have named garage rock loons The Hives as my second favourite Swedish act, but they’ve never come close to troubling the top of the charts.