![]() ![]() But I suppose they were the image of the perfect Fifties tract-home nuclear family.' I guess I relate to them because I grew up in the same area, and they put a band of siblings together and so did we - though I grew up 20 years after them, and our neighbourhood was completely decaying by the time I was aware of my surroundings. 'It was only later on that I appreciated them on more levels. When I was a kid, it used to scare the shit out of me, the way she sang so low - it was like the Doors doing 'Riders on the Storm'.'įor McDonald, who was four or five years old at the time, the Carpenters were one of youth's guilty pleasures, to be hidden at all costs from his older brother. She could sing lower than my brother Jeff: when we did 'Yesterday Once More', we had to mess around with the key, because she could sing lower than Jeff, and higher than Jeff. She had a really warm voice, with an androgynous quality. ![]() 'Songs like 'Superstar' and 'Rainy Days and Mondays', they have a very melancholy way of hanging this message on you. The covers range from the ingenuous pop spirit of Shonen Knife's 'Top of the World' to the orgiastic melancholy of American Music Club's 'Goodbye to Love' and Sonic Youth's downright spooky reading of 'Superstar', which will provide the first single taken from the album. It's called If I Were a Carpenter, but, surprisingly, few choose the obvious tongue-in-cheek option, and the result is an album that is actually quite listenable, even if you wouldn't be caught dead listening to the originals. The latest such tribute album is a more intriguing affair than most, featuring a parade of (mainly American) indie acts offering their various interpretations of the Carpenters' hits. The minimal memorialising the marginal: such is the last stop before celebrity oblivion. In recent months, artists as disparate as the Bahamian folk guitarist Joseph Spence and the psychedelic avatar Arthur Lee have been thus immortalised, in the case of the latter by a motley collection of no- hoper unknowns whom even the most fervent of indie specialists would struggle to identify. In the future, not only will everyone be famous for 15 minutes if their career lasts that long, there's a more than even chance that a decade or two later they'll be treated to that vinyl equivalent of the celebrity roast, the tribute album. ![]()
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