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The AV Club is an interesting web site that does a lot of things, one of which is the Undercover Project each year, in which a band covers a song by a different band. As soon as a band covers a song, it is removed from the list of songs to be covered. One of the choices this year was the They Might Be Giants song Birdhouse In Your Soul, which was covered by Titus Andronicus. Some folks didn’t like that version, but many did, including John Flansburgh, who dragged his band into the studio to cover yet another song on the Undercovered list, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping. If you didn’t already know, John’s band is They Might Be Giants. There were a ton of other great bands doing covers there as well (what a surprise). Another kick ass song from a great band is Whirring from The Joy Formidable; Enjoy!


They Might Be Giants covers Chumbawamba

BBC Radio 4 is replaying the three Torchwood episodes that preceded Children of Earth this week in their Afternoon Play segment. That means that on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 14:15 GMT (that’s 2:15PM London time) you can listen to them in real time, and probably play them back for the 6 days after that. Note that this is on BBC Radio 4 proper, rather than BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly BBC Radio 7). Over on that channel we have Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama on Sunday, and another brand new Doctor Who story, The Whispering Forest, with Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough joining Davison’s Doctor. That one started yesterday, but you have 5 more days to listen to the first episode, with the story continuing Monday.

My favorite BBC Radio station was always BBC7’s 7th Dimension, their science fiction and fantasy showcase which sadly got shut down a while ago, at least as a separate entity. It didn’t just go away, though; they folded it into BBC Radio 4Extra, where it joined up with some other quality radio plays and book readings. Last weekend, they aired Terry Pratchett’s Only You Can Save Mankind, and they are running J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World this week, James Follett’s The Destruction Factor, and the outer space comedy The Laxian Key. While the Pratchett episodes have mostly evaporated (just one left at the moment), you can still listen again to the others. But the exciting bit is what is coming, starting with a brand new Doctor Who radio play, Cobwebs, which begins Monday at 6PM (GMT/UT, adjust for your local time zone) and runs each day for 4 episodes through Thursday. This one stars Peter Davison as The Doctor, Janet Fielding as Tegan, Mark Strickson as Turlough, and Sarah Sutton as Nyssa; I can’t wait. While I am still heartbroken that the Tom Baker/Elisabeth Sladen new radio plays will now never be made since we lost Lis (Tom will still be doing new ones), it is good to know there continue to be new Who stories being created by our old friends.

Nor is this phenomenon unique to Doctor Who. According to this SFX story, they are wrapping up production on Torchwood this week, and are about to go into the studio to record three new Torchwood radio plays. The first one they did, Lost Souls, was aired on the day CERN fired up its super collider in September of 2008, referred to as Big Bang Day by a lot of people who wondered if they would blow up the planet (and don’t you feel silly now?). Then in 2009 they did three more, called Asylum, Golden Age, and The Dead Line. These stories took place between seasons two and three, airing consecutively on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of 2009, followed immediately by season three, Children of Earth, which ran for 5 consecutive nights, July 6th through the 10th. These are all excellently done radio dramas, and if you haven’t heard them yet you can buy the disks from Amazon or download them from iTunes, and they are worth every penny. The three new episodes will be broadcast on BBC4 sometime this summer, which you can listen to online.

This is a fun little destination; the Library of Congress yesterday fired up its National Jukebox, primarily filled with audio recorded between 1901 and 1925. The event yesterday had Harry Connick Jr. putting in an appearance to sing a song from the Jukeox, and it blew him away. They have a huge collection of Jazz, Blues, Ragtime, Bluegrass, and many others, mostly recorded by their own teams of engineers who went all over the country to get it; a lot of this music exists no where else and hasn’t been heard for 50 or a hundred years. But up until now you had to actually go in person to the LOC to hear any of it. Thanks to this project by Sony and the LOC, anybody in the world now has access to it, or at least the parts they have gotten into the jukebox so far.

Just as the Space Oddity variations grew, so did the sequel song, Major Tom, again focusing on the intrepid space wanderer. Here are a few of the choices, starting out with the Shiny Toy Guns flavor, from LA, and I love the footage that was pulled together to make up this version.

From Germany we have Peter Schilling’s 1983 version:

And then I Hate Kate‘s style…

Still with me? Then here is your reward, a truly unique version of the audio with a world-class build of the video for this song. Extra points for anyone who can correctly identify the band and the language they are singing in!

And the final entry in this segment…

David Bowie’s Space oddity is one of the truly definitive Sci-Fi songs, bordering as it does both inner (mental aberrations and chemical dependencies) and outer (rocket ships and planetary exploration) space. So it should be no surprise that even though Bowie wrote and performed this masterpiece originally, many other artists from many other countries have paid tribute to it over the years. I figured I should present a few of my favorites, just to make sure awareness of these artists got whatever small increase my mentioning them could induce. First off, from Japan, we have Atsushi Sakurai, with his brilliant 2004 live presentation:

Next up, we have the short version of Emilie Simon’s amazing variation. This one has what may be my favorite rhythm structure of any of these, even if the editing that shortened the length cut off noticeable chunks of the song. Of course, you can always hear the full version here.

Bet you didn’t know there was a Natalie Merchant version, did you?

For comparison, here is Bowie’s first live presentation at an awards ceremony for this world class song…