A single that’s good for one thing, at least: “Which group got to No.1 with Take On Me?” is a reliably sneaky pop quiz question. Beyond that, it’s tempting to dismiss A1’s version as irrelevant. Doubly tempting if you were 12 in 1985, and the clean surge of that keyboard riff still sounded like the bright world of life and youth and adventure opening up in front of you. It’s not that a cover version is any kind of sacrilege – just that you can’t update the eternally young. But listen again and A-Ha’s original sounds stuck in its time: the synthesisers thin, the drum sound hollow and deadened. That doesn’t make it less glorious to me, it just reminds me of the work memory does in making songs great. Why not give new 12-year olds a chance for memories of their own?
That’s the logic of the pop micro-genre “Take On Me” reminds me of: not cover versions so much as reboots. Sweden specialised in them: the A-Teens, four perky kids who mixed ABBA numbers with bouncy originals. Or West End Girls, two girls tasked with bringing a teenpop gloss to the Pet Shop Boys. If “Take On Me” wasn’t by A1, you could imagine it as the launch single for A-Half, three jaunty, bright-eyed miniatures of Morton, Mags and Pal. The approach is identical: dusty 80s synths and beats swapped out for slightly clubbier, zippier 90s ones, and a match of proven songs with eye candy for tweens. It was good business, cheerful, and certainly cheap. And – for all you might sniff at it – actually quite hard to really fuck up from a musical perspective.
So yes, A1’s “Take On Me” can’t be the Proustian H-bomb of associations the original is for me – the pop memory is acutely attuned to texture and nuance, the detail of a track, which is why cheap re-recordings, Top Of The Pops Orchestra versions, and covers by “The Original Artists” can be so close and so wrong. But even so it’s still the same song, the same alchemising of a brief fling into a fairytale epic. It has much of the melodic joy, some of the enthusiasm, even a bit of the charm. But it falls down badly on the singing – A1 are anaemic gerbils against Morten Harket’s theatrical falsetto. (And in place of the romance of A-Ha’s landmark video, A1 give us an excruciating cyberpunk riff, which makes no difference to the record but you should see anyway, just because it’s funny.)
Still, their “Take On Me” is a creditable try. No shame on anyone involved. What it doesn’t do is make the case for A1 as anything other than a lower-tier boyband. There was room for a tween-appeal group alongside Westlife’s broader church, and A1 had already notched several hits, but Autumn 2000 was the peak for them. They came with two different marketing angles that didn’t really work together – they had the wholesome cheek of early Take That, and they wrote their own songs. But writing your own songs only matters if you’re good at it, and “Take On Me” was the first memorable record the band put out, even if the memories were all borrowed.
Score: 5
[Logged in users can award their own score]
The original is my pop lodestar – unwillingness to commit to any worldview that would require renouncing it has steered me well over the last 30 years.
This is largely alright – the blitteration of the attempt at the high note at 2:03 is a decent tactic, letting whoever it is at 3:00 have a crack is … not so much.
In before dinner time.
Oh man, this video has everything! Tron and Matrix references, weird futuristic bondage trousers and an extra incongruously wearing a sex pistols t shirt!
I was certain “Caught in the Middle” was going to be a future bunny but apparently it only got to number two. This seems to be a fairly common thread from the last few years of reading this blog though…
as someone familiar with the original, this is the aural (and with the video, the visual) equivalent of a designer knockoff – Chan3l No S – superficial similarities to the original but nothing like the original fragrance, just an underwhelming generic perfume.
I associate A1 with a former, rather awkward, pupil of mine who was a huge fan. This might have been socially acceptable if she had been 11 or 12 but as she was 17/18 she was treated with derision by her peers who had learned to be enthusiastic about more credible rock or dance acts – at least in public.
Reel Big Fish. (4)
4: ha! I vividly remember my wife telling me about this record on one of our earliest dates. Thankfully, it caught me right on the cusp of realising that all my years of learned credible rock-talk amounted to not a great deal, and that in the real world A1 were more significant than just about any of them.
For that, and the fifteen splendid years since: (11)
I have a soft spot for A1. They were very much on the B-list as far as pop bands go, but their jaunty Scandi-produced pop tunes were a welcome antidote from Westlife’s bland balladry. This was a bit of a desperation move, and a rather cheap way to promote themselves (briefly) to the big leagues in time for the launch of their second album (the first having been modestly successful but no blockbuster). I can’t imagine why anyone would feel the need to play it now with the original still so much a part of pop culture. Still, it’s less dreadful than 5ive’s take on We Will Rock You, and they did have a bona fide Norwegian in the group which I presume is what gave their management the idea.
Their next bunny and Caught In The Middle are where they peak for me. Both really excellent pop songs.
“VIRUS LOCATOR
LOCATING VIRUS”
I also note that 2:10 – 20 of the video appears to have been shot on a Microsoft Lumia (topical now, yes, but…).
The song? What’s the point, though? None of them look as good as Horten Market and perhaps just as importantly none of them sing as good as him either. Tempted to give low marks for pointlessness. “B-b-but it WASN’T pointless, they didn’t have access to the original back in ye olde days, they couldn’t just use YouTube like you can, you entitled swine!” Yeah but I’m living (and marking) in the moment, maaaaan [3]
C. (5)
This is actually a pretty generic cover. If you ignore superficialities like the more of-that-time keyboard sound and the r-n’-b-lite end to the chorus, it’s not drastically different to the original arrangement.
The thing that bugged me most about this version at the time- and which still does- is the part where they *did* mess with the original song itself, i.e. cutting out the first few bars of the middle eight. Minor, but cheap and nasty, and it never fails to jar.
That aside, this is too “meh” to hate. Probably helps that the original was never my favourite A-Ha single- bit too bright and synthpoppy- and has been overplayed since.
“The Sun Always Shines on TV”, OTOH, was fantastic- by far my favourite from the parent album (and possibly my favourite by them full stop). A-Ha may have only ever had a single UK #1, but if that had to be the case, who can argue that the more deserving song didn’t win?
Meanwhile, A1 may have got “Take On Me” to the top when A-Ha didn’t, but nostalgic mid-twentysomething women aside, I suspect this is an “oh yeah, I vaguely remember that” cover for most people.
Fails the basic rule of cover versions: do it better or do it differently, or ideally both.
Once upon a time this might have been categorised – overoptimistically – as “music for pleasure”. A Poundstretchers knockoff would be more accurate. An entirely pointless record, although the fact that is basically a poor quality carbon copy of the original means that some of the songs’s better qualities remain intact, but really: why bother? 2
Try to distance yourself from the over-worn context of the original you can hear in your mind with the original original. Here’s the first earlier stab at it as mixed/produced by Tony “New Musik” Mansfield that was released in Norway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZhrZqWaOwA
There’s only been one decent a-ha cover version:
http://youtu.be/tlLi3zbSEMU
You don’t get any more mid-90s than this and there’s something touchingly gauche and charming about their vocals and pronunciation. And they’re adorable too, which helps.
As for A1, their cover of no importance didn’t trouble the charts or the general consciousness for too long if I remember correctly.
#13 oh this is great. There is something a bit Felix ‘Don’t You Want Me’ about that big-room riff isn’t there?
#14 Dead right – there’s more than a bit of Felix so what’s not too love!
A1 were a decidedly rum bunch.
Smash Hits were always trying to push Ben as some kind of heart-throb what with his curtains and all but there was always something slightly bovine about him. Whereas Christian had both the curtains and the cheekbones.
Hang on, that’s it – the last time I saw Jane Suck[‘s name in print] it was the very end of 1977, everyone was wondering what would come next now that punk was so obviously dead (ha!), and she was championing an artistic movement called “New Musik” – which as far as anyone could tell consisted entirely of Kraftwerk and Space (the French band). According to Wikipedia the band New Musik first formed in 1977, so maybe that was what was going on – they/she stoking up the wave that she/they could ride. Didn’t work out, clearly. Mind you, Tony Mansfield seems to have done all right – wonder what became of Jane?
#15 – curtains?
Quite a bit to discuss here.
Firstly this was the last of the record breaking run of twelve one week wonders. The top spot now stabilises with a couple of two week runners before the 2000 madness begins again so it may be worth taking stock and noting that of the twelve acts involved; only Black Legend can be dismissed as one hit wonders (Spiller were never heard from again but their featured vocalist was) and only the Corrs and Sophie Ellis Bexter were scoring their only number one.
A1 were slightly lucky to make the top as they sneaked in with a low sale. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for them because like 911 before them they made a little go a long way. Their first brace of hits were so tinny and pathetic to be almost embarrassing and yet they seemed to move a little up the pop league table each time. And yet Take On Me seemed to sum up everything that was wrong with pop music at the time although it’s debatable as to how much of it was actually their fault.
I’ve got no problem with boy bands or anybody else doing cover versions. Not everybody can be a songwriter and for every million selling classic a thousand equally good songs have fallen under the radar. And yet A1 (okay, and their puppetmasters), needing a cover version, went for something obvious in order to score an easy hit. Given that it didn’t come close to the original and nobody for one minute suggested it did, one wonders whether A1 could have scored a number one single with anything. Maybe, maybe not. If they’d gone a bit more leftfield and covered (plucking a completely random example from the hat) Maps And Legends by REM would we be discussing it here? I honestly don’t know. The fact is that I’ve always detested obvious cover versions as much as I’ve hated film adaptations of best selling novels made for the purpose of a cheap buck. It’s the lowest common denominator of the arts in my opinion.
#17 Curtains was a type of hairstyle where the hair was combed in a centre parting and flopped down across the face like curtains. That was how my hair looked in 2000.
This one’s new to me (as is A1). Urgh, redundant cover will never be played again by me! As for a score, well, I tend to ask myself things like what tracks I’d rather have written or performed at the time, and which I’m indifferent between being imaginatively deleted from pop-history, and which I have marked preferences for on that front. The latter way of thinking in particular automatically pushes highly redundant covers near the bottom of the pile, and makes giving this track the same score as ‘Brass in Pocket’ or ‘Message in A Bottle’ or ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or ‘All You Need Is Love’ or ‘Something In The Air’ as Tom does seem certifiable. So be it:
1 (possibly a 2 if in a very good mood)
Hmm, weren’t A1 named after the London-Edinburgh road, or am I just trying to project my geographic interests on everything again?
I’ve made my aversion toward pointless covers known before, and despite some minor synth updates, that’s pretty much what this is. Since they’re being so obvious about it, they should’ve done a more direct remake of the video too: girl in Starbucks gets pulled into CGI-world through her laptop screen. In 2015, she’d instead get pulled into a Youtube video via her smartphone.
Scary thought I just had: we are now as far away from 2000 as 2000 was from 1985! Time for pointless remake of an NSync song?
It seemed like this was a favorite for pop-punk bands to cover at the time (both Reel Big Fish and MxPx did versions), and I’m probably imagining the existence of a few more due to memories of misattributed Napster files. (Did Me First and the Gimme Gimmes ever do it?) So though no quality of this was particularly notable, I think I just shrugged it off as another version of what seemed to be a modern standard.
A1 always seemed like the most generic-by-design boyband around, from their name to their composition of “cute one” “buff one” “other one” and their halfhearted claim to write their own songs, and it’s no surprise that they peaked with a pointless cover of an 80s pop song. For me this is the ultimate example of d-grade cultural detritus sneaking to the top in this torrent of one-week wonders. Presumably there are people out there to whom the existence of A1 is important in some way, but it’s harder than ever to work out how and why.
#19 – I don’t think I’ve seen curtains in the wqild for the last decade or so – are they one of the rare fashion and styling choices that has never undergone a revival of any sort, banished only to the Dead Lands of Culture that is the top of professional footballers’ heads?
#20 – might have to ask you to walk me through the “as for a score” sentence again?
#21 – Frankly this strikes me as more likely.
#23 “Presumably there are people out there to whom the existence of A1 is important in some way, but it’s harder than ever to work out how and why.” – a recurrent theme (which I think gets worse as time goes on) is that when the people for whom a track is important are presumed to be girls/young women, the obvious answer (ask them, and take their answers as honest) seems to drop off the list of available actions.
#23 A1 deserve a bit better than to be written out of history completely. This discussion probably belongs to their next self penned bunny but they would eventually make a wild tint at credibility with a single (an almost bunny, denied by a four weeker but we’ll get to that in due course) that anticipated the sound that would return Take That to the stratosphere almost five years later. Ben Adams would have a modest solo career and they are still performing today; perhaps more than that they seem genuinely interested in making music.
#21 and pointless cover versions of NSync songs? It is interesting that nobody is doing that and indeed the stuff in the charts in 2015 seems to be largely self penned. Is it a case that a) the market for cover versions has dried up or b) stuff from fifteen years ago isn’t worth covering?
#25 FLAHR touched on part of the answer above – there’s much less percentage in doing an identikit cover when the original is a click away. I also think that the ubiquity of covers on YouTube and reality TV shows (and as Spotify spam) have lessened their impact a bit. The stretch of Popular we’re on now is the commercial heyday of the cover.
#20 the metric I most often use for marking these days is “how happy would I be to hear this again right now”. I don’t strictly use that, since it would place this quite far above “All You Need Is Love”, among others. But it’s the method that best lifts the weight of critical propriety, which I’m as prone to feeling as anyone. I think my relative tolerance – mark-wise – for shonky covers is a side effect of that, creating a loophole where a record can have no need to exist, or be listened to, without actually being bad.
@16: I didn’t know Jane as Jane Suck in the 70s, but I did know her as Jane Solanas in the 80s at NME, where she wrote quite a lot (she’s archived under both names at Rock’s Back Pages) (which is a subscription site, tho the sub’s worth getting I think).
I don’t know if she still writes, and if so what name she now uses. She was on my long list to track down for the conference on rockwriting that I’m running at Birkbeck in a couple of weeks. Which reminds me, I keep meaning to write an FT post abt same…
Did we ever play this at Club Popular, by the way? Pointless it may be, but I can’t imagine that mattering much at 12.30 AM on the Club P dancefloor.
#24 I guess where I’m coming from is that I connect to music personally, and if I don’t then I try to stretch out my tendrils to try to imagine how I could connect. Some boybands I actively like, others are not for me, others I dislike but can at least see the appeal of (Westlife just about fit in this category.) I don’t see how not understanding this particular boyband makes me some sort of sexist – if fans of A1 or any other group / artist whose appeal I find inexplicable (RHCP, Van Morrison, UB40 and Nickleback all spring to mind) wants to come forward and explain then I would be more than happy. I rarely see any “ask them” going on for fans of any act, doesn’t mean anyone is shutting them out.
Given my heartfelt response to “The Sun Always Shines on TV” and the 10 I gave it, I expected to use this entry to wax lyrical about the original rather than the cover. But there’s not much to add other than that a-ha’s “Take on Me” and its video caught my attention at the time as it did so many others, and I still rate it highly today. I don’t even think it’s dated too badly (though of course it has dated); the original original linked by Alan @12, while fascinating to see and hear, sounds far more stuck in its 1984 moment.
But while I agree that this cover sounds utterly redundant to 2015 ears, I like Tom’s point about giving the kids of 2000 their own version to love. I remember cover versions in the early ’80s doing the same for teenage-me: one that sticks in my mind is Forrest’s 1982 cover of “Rock the Boat” less than a decade after the original. The Hues Corporation took their song to the top in the US in 1974, which certainly put the remake in redundant territory, but they might as well have done it in 1874 for all I knew.
So, points for keeping a great song alive. I don’t even mind the 2000 production touches, which work perfectly well with the song, though they’re less striking than Alan Tarney’s 1985 take. The video is hilariously dated, but that’s boybands for you. No, the main drawback here is the severe absence of Morten Harket, who lifted just about everything he touched to another level.
For the greatness of the underlying song, and for the cover’s harmless production, I’ll stretch my instinctive pointless-cover/dull-vocals score of three all the way up to Tom’s 5. I may have been influenced by listening to too many “covers for kids” CDs in recent years.
(A1’s version peaked at number 46 on the Australian charts, unlike a-ha’s chart-topping original, so you won’t find a studio band’s cover of their cover on that kids’ album. 2000 is present and correct with “Who Let the Dogs Out”, though.)
#24 re: #23 yes this is disheartening to see e.g. also at #10 – are nostalgic twenty-something women’s opinions irrelevant? Okay, we’re considering why and how things are popular so the fact that a fanbase is small is pertinent (and a1’s ‘Take on Me’ looks more like a fanbase hit than a massive crossover) but there does seem to be a recurrent element of dismissiveness to young women.
I thought a1 were pretty good; certainly more spunky and lively than Westlife, less obnoxious and tiresome than latter-day 5ive and closer to the pop shore than end-of-the-pier 911.
Their early singles ‘Be the First to Believe’ and ‘Summertime of Our Lives’ wonderfully embody my memories of Smash Hits circa summer 1999 (I was 12 at the time, and probably one of the few people I knew still buying Smash Hits) – dayglo, carefree sun-drenched pop, not hugely inventive or ambitious, but certainly as enjoyable as the best of Steps and S Club 7.
‘Ready or Not’, meanwhile, is one of the best examples of Fauxtown: http://www.popjustice.com/briefing/right-then-lets-test-out-this-spotify-play-button-thing/86717/
Early ballads ‘Like a Rose’ and ‘Everytime’ and the r&b-ish ‘No More’ were pap, however.
Their cover of ‘Take on Me’ is a nifty and likeable update with a more bombastic production than the a-ha original, and 15 years certainly wasn’t too soon to revisit a classic in 2000. Nowadays I think the Spotify generation have less need for hits of yesteryear to be covered in order for them to discover the songs – the originals are there at listeners’ disposal, and there is less stigma in listening to ‘old music’.
The bunny and ‘Caught in the Middle’ were, as JLucas indicates upthread, a1’s best work.
As with many of the bands on The Big Reunion, the fact that they’d been quietly getting on with a resumed career for five years already by 2014, to some chart success in Norway and plenty of student-type PAs in the UK, was deliberately overlooked (presumably for narrative purposes).
‘Interestingly’ (not that interestingly), both a1 and a-ha are stylised with a lower-case ‘a’ (yep, really not interesting, sorry).
Jane Suck was Jane Solanas – wow! Another name on my list of rock writers who might drive me mad but would always be worth reading (it’s a short list, and I guess it’s just got one shorter).
As for this record, it is just awful. Apart from the falsetto, the singing is actually better than the original (and not just because it’s autotuned) – at that early stage at least, Morten wasn’t much good at the whole hitting-notes-and-holding-them side of singing (he’s multi-tracked on the demo). But it’s much less expressive. Revisiting the original, I actually choked up midway through the first verse – I don’t know what – I’m to say, I’ll say it anyway… Amazing video too, of course.
Any cover version refers back to the original – why cover a song otherwise? – and when the result lacks precisely what was best about the original, I think it deserves to be judged on those grounds. In this case they’ve taken the words, the tune & most of the arrangement, taken out anything spikey or difficult (the tempo shift on the chorus, which they use in the last verse instead), and then duplicated the whole thing with higher production values.
Awful. 1. 2 for the sheer daftness of the video (it’s the Trontrix!), revised back down to 1 for whoever heard the words ‘flight simulator’ and didn’t bother to find out what one is.
#31 – Absolutely agree that this exists as a thing, don’t agree at all that it’s a description of *my* motivations though, and a bit annoyed that I’m being taken as an example of something I completely disagree with.
#33 not my intention; apologies!
I think Under The Bridge makes a better pub quiz surprise.
As someone young enough to have avoided the original (which sounds thin and very eighties in comparison) this is fine. Not great, but serviceable; I put A1 in the 5ive category of cheap and cheerful.
I suspect with straight-up cover versions (as opposed to PSB-style “do something different” covers), there’s an inherent bias – with myself included – toward assuming the original is better than the cover. Interesting, if impractical, experiment: Get a statistically significant number of listeners who have never heard of “Take On Me”. Have them listen to a-ha and A1 back to back. Ask which they prefer (assuming they don’t hate both). Would a-ha win? Maybe, maybe not.
@36. Illustrating this effect, I was reading an old ‘which decade’ recently where someone (I think possibly Swanstep) wonders why everyone is so keen on Adamski’s lame remake of Seal’s superior Trevor Horn original…
It would be an interesting experiment! Though the effect is more pronounced on tracks with ‘different’ cover versions – a good example is “Heartbeats”: for people who got to know the Knife version, the Jose Gonzales one sounds wrong, and vice versa. In my experience, obviously – I’m sure some commenters will disagree…
#38 Yazoo’s ‘Only You’ and the Flying Pickets cover is a good one too.
I’m just going to put this out there. I prefer the Louise version of Average White Band’s Let’s Go Round Again. Cast your stones.
#31 (Andrew); Think you’re reading more into my post (#10) than was said, or conflating it with the other comment you disagreed with.
The reference to “mid-twentysomething women” was because they would have been the closest fit to the typical boy band following target audience (i.e. tween/early-teen girl) when this came out fifteen years ago. It was an implicit acknowledgement that if you were an A1 follower in that group at the time- or were simply too young to remember the original- this may well have legitimate personal value for you as part of growing up and associated memories.
(If we were talking about (say) a song by Kiss, the demographic in question would be mainly fortysomething American males, but the same principle would apply.)
Nostalgia is legitimate, and fine up to a point- we’ve all been there, and I appreciate that personal associations are very significant with pop music for most people- but it doesn’t necessarily say that much about the song itself, or whether this is a great cover or not.
My original point was that- beyond understandable nostalgia I’d expect from people who were the right age at the right time for it- A1’s version doesn’t appear to have been as well-remembered or as culturally significant as the original, for the reasons I gave in my original post.
If we’re talking intergenerational conflicts, then there’s a bunny in the not too distant future that also qualifies; think early 80’s imperial phase solo artist vs…well you probably know already.
I don’t think there’s a single person who, while stood in the queue at Millets on a Saturday afternoon, would hear the original A-Ha version and think to themselves ‘Wish this was the a1 version…’
#41 apologies.
#43 I bet there are at least some a1 fans who would!
Behold my conference about rockwriting!
@37, Pink Champale. Yes, that was me who had to have it pointed out that the Seal/Trevor Horn version of ‘Killer’ was quite a bit later. I guess I don’t find the Horn recording highly redundant in that case though; indeed it strikes me as standing to the Adamski version much more as the hit version of ‘Take on Me’ does to the Norway-only version linked @11 (but I know that less slick Adamski original has its partisans).
@24, Andrew Farrell. I just wanted to explain (since I was going to be giving an especially low score, wildly diverging from Tom’s) how I tend to think of and arrive at my own scores: reflecting the fact that (like a lot of people here) I was in bands for a few years, wrote a couple of (bad!) singles, etc., I tend to score from the perspective of how much would I like to have written/performed this rather than as a pure listener/consumer. The further idea is to articulate that writer perspective by asking of each pair of tracks which I’d rather see deleted from pop-history (I should prefer to have written/performed the track I’d prefer not to see deleted from pop-history if one had to be.). If I give two tracks the same score then I’m indifferent between which should be deleted if it came to that. And so on.
Thinking some more about the A1’s cover, I guess I find their drums and synths just as thin and hollow and deadened as A-Ha’s, only without the fizzy charm of the original (A-Ha lets you really feel the high bpm of the song whereas somehow A1 manages to lose that). So this isn’t a case like Joan Jett doing the Arrows’ ‘I Love Rock and Roll’ or Bauhaus doing ‘Ziggy Stardust’ where the original record is supercharged (by adding monster drums, more metal guitars, and lots more bottom-end generally). Tom asks ‘Why not give new 12-year olds a chance for memories of their own?’ but I just can’t hear anything here that a 12-year old would prefer.
A better case perhaps: the Labelle cover bunny coming up next year in Popular-time. I fricking hated that on principle at the time, but reflecting now, I have to admit that it translates the Labelle original into a bunch of then current styles and voices in a way that I accept probably a teen in 2001 would take as irresistably supercharging the original (much as Joan Jett and Bauhaus worked on me).
@46 Oh wow, yeah, the Labelle bunny was def revelatory to me as an 18 year old in 2001. I’ve come round to the original, but I still probably prefer the updated version. (Then again, I also prefer the Neptunes remix of “Sympathy for the Devil” to the original.) And, hells, just to push back against the canonization of A-Ha: contra what many people older than myself are saying here, I don’t hear anything special about “Take On Me”; it’s synth-pop of a variety that was done much better by many of its contemporaries. The A1 version is probably inferior, but I don’t hear anything wondrous in the ’85 take that was lost in the ’00 version.
For me as I think with many the original is so interlinked with its video, more than any other 80s hit I can think of certainly (in the innovative visual effect stakes ‘Billie Jean’ comes close, ‘Money For Nothing’ too perhaps). The video’s an obvious 10 in itself but I always did prefer TSASOTV the song as I probably said on that post’s comments. Similarly I prefer A1’s follow-up to this, but by a far greater margin.
@47 The Neptunes SFTD is awesome! Thanks for alerting me to its existence.
They should have got Godard to do a sequel to One Plus One, with Pharell at the controls.
@36 The most shocking example of that for me recently was hearing the King Harvest version of Dancing In the Moonlight for the first time. The Toploader version I find excruciatingly annoying, but the (sort of) original is utterly charming.
Another example, like TOM, where modern production techniques can crush all the spirit and joy out of a song.