tommy james

Cover Versions of #1s – Billy Idol and Sweet

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‘Mony Mony’, by Billy Idol

Two different cover versions today, starting with a remake that made #1 in the States but only got to #7 in the UK. Similarly, the original ‘Mony Mony’ had been Tommy James & the Shondells’ only British hit, despite the band racking several more in the USA. Billy Idol first recorded ‘Mony Mony’ for his debut solo EP after leaving Generation X, in 1981. It didn’t chart, and is a bit more poppy than the live version, recorded in 1985 but not released until two years later. That is much more indebted to hair metal acts like Bon Jovi and Motley Crue, who were ubiquitous at the time. It’s fun, but then I have a soft spot for the days when rock stars looked more poodle than human, and probably kickstarted gobal warming with the amount of hairspray they released on the world. Interestingly, Idol’s cover of ‘Mony Mony’ was replaced at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 by Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, which was originally recorded by… Tommy James & The Shondells.

Here’s the ‘original’, studio version…

‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, by Sweet

I love Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’, so much so that I named it as one of my twenty-six ‘Best’ chart-toppers. One of the reasons I like it is that the synths are so clanking and tinny, and the pace so relentless, that it could easily work as a hard rock song. Enter glam legends the Sweet, who recorded it for a 2012 album of cover versions. Sweet weren’t the first rock act to take the song on, as this nu-metal version by Dope attests (think Limp Bizkit on poppers), but I’m featuring them as they were cruelly deprived of chart-toppers back in the ’70s (five #2s alongside their only #1, ‘Block Buster!’)

What I want to hear now is a whole album of SAW covers by rock and metal acts… Black Sabbath doing Kylie, Mel & Kim’s ‘Respectable’ reimagined by Pearl Jam… It would be a best-seller, surely.

Another two covers tomorrow!

603. ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, by Tiffany

/ UK #1s blog / 7 Comments

Continuing the pop bangers run that we’ve been on in the deep midwinter of 1987-88…

I Think We’re Alone Now, by Tiffany (her 1st and only #1)

3 weeks, from 24th January – 14th February 1988

I love the juddering intro, with the choppy chords and the synthesised hand claps. It sets the tone for a song that, depending on your tolerance for all things ‘80s, could be as brilliant as it is cheap and tacky. It’s an interesting meshing of big and bold American production with the Euro-pop style that was dominating across the Atlantic. A bigger-budget SAW, if you will.

Children behave, That’s what they say when we’re together… Apparently Tiffany had no idea that the song was about teenagers looking for a place to have sex. Trying to get away, Into the night, Then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground… You do have to wonder how she didn’t know, until you realise that she was just fifteen when she recorded it. Then you have to wonder about the ethics of having a child record such low-key smut…

It’s a cover of a sixties hit by Tommy James and the Shondells, which had made #4 in the US in 1967 but hadn’t charted in the UK (their big smash would come a year later, with ‘Mony Mony’). Tiffany had to be persuaded to record a cover of a song written long before she was born but, once she did, it became a worldwide hit… Just in time for this writer’s second birthday.

In my last post, I commented on Belinda Carlisle’s girl-next-door image, at least in her music video. Well, Tiffany Darwish outdoes her on that front, being a literal girl. This is not as hard-edged as ‘Heaven Is a Place on Earth’, but I’d rate it just as highly. You do have to suspend your… What’s the musical equivalent of suspending disbelief? Suspending taste…? You have to suspend something, certainly, and forgive it some of its more flagrant eighties excesses (the solo, for example… what in God’s name is that?) but it is fun.

The video really ups the teeny-bopper vibes, with footage of Tiffany performing in shopping malls across the USA (it opens in Ogden City, Utah) spliced with her goofing around in recording studios. Like many teen idols, Tiffany’s career didn’t stretch much past two albums and a few more Top 10 hits. Though she did find time to cover/desecrate (delete as appropriate) another sixties classic: the Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. It’s one of the least respectful Beatles covers of all time, and for that I kind of admire it…

Before we go, I’ll repeat a well-worn piece of pop trivia. In the US, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ was knocked off top spot after two weeks by Billy Idol… and his cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ ‘Mony Mony’. The only time two cover versions of songs originally recorded by the same artist have replaced one another on top of the charts…?

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254. ‘Mony Mony’, by Tommy James & The Shondells

/ UK #1s blog / 9 Comments

When I first listened to this song – the preliminary listen after writing my last post – I jotted down three words that immediately came to mind. Exuberant. Throbbing. Soulful. Welcome then, to an exuberantly throbbing, soulful record.

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Mony Mony, by Tommy James & The Shondells (their 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 31st July – 14th August / 1 week, from 21st – 28th August 1968 (3 weeks total)

It’s another number one with that 1968 sound – that fusion of Beat pop, Motown and soul that’s cropped up a few times now, in records by Love Affair, The Union Gap, The Foundations and now The Shondells. An American sound, to my ears, even though two out of the four bands just listed were British.

This one starts off with a chugging riff, like a car struggling to start or a tribe banging drums in the jungle. There are handclaps, and some nonsense lyrics: Here she comes now sayin’ Mony Mony, Well shoot ‘em down turn around come on Mony… It’s a record that can’t wait to get to the chorus: You, Make, Me, Feel, So, Good…! and the accompanying call-and-response Yeah! Yeah! Yeahs!

Just who, or what, is ‘Mony Mony’? I imagine the song as a slightly more raucous update on ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’, in which Roy Orbison saw a hottie walking down the street. Apparently, though, Tommy James was inspired to write it by a billboard in Manhattan that read M.O.N.Y, and was advertising a bank (the Mutual of New York.) So, not quite as sexy an origin story…

But they took the acronym and ran with it, and with lines like You gotta toss and turn and feel alright, yeah… it’s safe to assume that they weren’t thinking about the bank’s mortgage services. I love the funky little piano breakdown, before it rises into the final chorus and fade out, with what sounds like a Gospel choir joining in with the yeahs. It sounds like an amazing party right there in the recording studio.

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I really enjoyed this song – a chorus that I knew from ‘Best of the 60s’ compilations, but which it’s been great to get to know in detail. It’s nearly three minutes long – a perfectly average runtime for a pop song – but it feels far too short. It’s a record that you can’t help tapping your feet to, a disc that is simply in love with being alive. Amazingly, it was Tommy James & The Shondells only Top 30 hit in the UK. They had two #1s in their native US (they were formed in Michigan) neither of which were ‘Mony Mony’, but for some reason never seemed to catch on over the pond.

Tommy James and co. will, though, enjoy one more #1 by proxy, when Tiffany’s cover of their 1967 hit ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, reaches the top in 1988. In the US, her version of ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ replaced at #1 Billy Idol’s live-version of… you guessed it… ‘Mony Mony’. How’s that for symmetry…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTtGYl_O86A

Listen to every #1 so far here: