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Sun 30 August 2026 13:00, UK
Sometimes a cover song can be so great that people forget it’s a cover in the first place, or that the song was ever sung by anybody else before, like Johnny Cash singing ‘Hurt’ or Bettye LaVette singing ‘Love, Reign O’er Me’ in honour of Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who, at the Kennedy Centre Honors ceremony in 2008.
And then there are some cover versions that make you wish you didn’t have ears to begin with, wondering what on earth Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville was thinking when he invented the first sound-recording device in 1857.
You know, like Luke Combs butchering ‘Fast Car’, Gene Simmons singing ‘Firestarter’ (yes, really), or The Who, singing The Rolling Stones’ ‘(This Could Be) The Last Time’ and ‘Under My Thumb’, both of which are criminal, and it’s ironic, considering the circumstances they were recorded under. Listening back to those two covers, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the cops hadn’t caught the wrong guys and thrown the wrong band behind bars.
With all that in mind, though, it’s pretty clear that Pete Townshend is somebody who is both familiar with the kind of performances you can expect to hear at The Kennedy Centre Honors, and also with truly horrible cover versions of other people’s songs.
So, when he gave an opinion on Heart’s hammy, theatrical and overblown rendition of the already hammy, theatrical and overblown ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which even featured John Bonham’s son, Jason, on drums from the 2012 edition of the ceremony, he could be considered an extremely reliable commentator on the matter.
Less than an ascent up to the Gods, Townshend felt it was more of a steep slope down into an infernal darkness, the kind of feeling that anybody who has ever worked in a guitar shop must have felt when some (scrawny white) guy comes in, yanks an expensive Martin D-12 down off the wall and starts noodling his way through the opening notes of Zeppelin’s most famous song.
“Watching Robert Plant at the Kennedy Awards crying when somebody murdered one of his songs…” Townshend lamented the confounding cover performance that made him realise how important those old songs were to the old man who’d written them.
Further reading: From The Vault
He added, “I just think, ‘Fuck, this guy loves what he does, he loves what he’s done’”, and surely the very last thing anybody would want to do would be to watch something they’d loved creating being murdered by somebody else.
It’s plain to see from Townshend’s harsh critique of the performance, and from Plant’s obvious discomfort while the so-called murder was taking place, that neither man had very much love for Heart’s rendition of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. But then, I actually prefer the comment that does the rounds on the internet every now and again in response to Plant’s tears, which says that Heart ‘made Led Zeppelin feel what it’s like to experience Led Zeppelin’.
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