Adam Sweeting

A thoroughly enjoyable book that anyone interested in popular music will find a whiz to read

Singing Other People's Songs

Girls Aloud record the Pointer Sisters' 'Jump'; Atomic Kitten record Blondie's 'The Tide is High' and Kool and the Gang's 'Ladies Night'' Westlife record Billy Joel's 'Uptown Girl', Phil Collin's 'Against All Odds', Abba's 'I Have a Dream', and Barry Manilow's 'Mandy'-Thanks to the boom in TV-created pop stars, ancient pop classics have never had it so good, with 'Unchained Melody' massacred afresh by Gareth Gates and 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' eviscerated by Hear'Say. But back in pop's early days, every record was a cover version. Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald were famous for interpreting other people's songs, and the closest Elvis Presley ever got to writing one was when his manager, Colonel Parker, arm-twisted the rights away from the original songwriters. The balance of power shifted when The Beatles and the Stones wrote all their own material, yet the great tradition of the cover version never died. In this elegantly-tooled volume, Adam Sweeting gets the lowdown on cover versions - the worst, the most popular, the most frequently recorded, the most successful, the stupidest, the most tasteless, the most influential, and the ones nobody got around to yet.

Cover Versions

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

sectionTitle

isEnabled

anchor

anchorLabel

prhuk/featured-book

prhuk/praise-section

maxBooks

showViewMore

prhuk/books-section

hideAuthorAlert

formName

iterableDivision

iterableBrand

buttonText

description

heading

legalText

successHeading

successText

image

alignment

variation

prhuk/email-section

prhuk/series-section

prhuk/biography-section

prhuk/articles-section

prhuk-authors

The perfect gift? A Penguin Shop gift card

East of Eden

Wuthering Heights

White Nights

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Boxed Set: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov

Adam Sweeting

Praise for Cover Versions

A thoroughly enjoyable book that anyone interested in popular music will find a whiz to read

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter