CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project

Tony Tschetter-Breed writes

Anatomy of a cover: "There Goes a Tenner" by the J. Davis Trio

Ten years ago, Chicago performer Tom Dunning decided to create a Kate Bush tribute album. The result, I Wanna Be Kate, covers a wide gamut of approaches to making a cover. Perhaps the most surprising cover is the J. Davis Trio’s reinvention of “There Goes a Tenner”.

When Dunning approached his friend Julio “Stuart” Davis about taking part in the project, Davis said “yes” immediately, even though he’d never heard of Kate Bush. Dunning gave him a selection of songs on a mix to chose from, but steered him towards “There Goes a Tenner”.

“There Goes a Tenner” is the second track of Bush’s 1982 album The Dreaming, the first album or hers to be completely self-produced. The songs are dark, dense, lush, theatrical, and often quite strange. The album is a fan favorite, yet the lowest-selling of all her albums. “There Goes a Tenner” tells, in a cockney voice, the story of a botched bank robbery.

The J. Davis Trio is a Chicago garage-jazz/hip-hip band; the cadence of Bush’s lyrics was not really suited to a rap, so the group re-wrote the lyrics in an American gangster voice. The new lyrics echo the originals most of the time (for example “not until they let me see my solicitor” becomes “and where the hell is my attorney?”), but occasionally they repeat them exactly (“OK, remember”; “we’re waiting”; “treat the gelignite tenderly”), effectively anchoring the new version to the original.

The result is enormously divergent from the original, and ten years ago, it was one of my least favorite songs on the album. It was hard, as a fan of the original, to let go and appreciate the new one on its own merits: a smooth jazzy groove under a mellow rap. But after listening to it for a decade (often out of the context of the album, thanks to my name-brand mp3-shuffling listening device), it’s become my favorite. Give it a listen… YouTube has a version posted from the album release party at the Double Door. Open your mind, and admit it: this cover is awesome.