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(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n
Thu 18 December 2025 8:00, UK <\/p>\n
While in recent years, the art of the cover version has seen a slight decline in terms of frequency, during the 1950s and \u201860s, artists from the world of pop and rock<\/a> were constantly having a crack at reinterpreting songs that had previously been released by others.<\/p>\n Considering people often claim that music was better during the older generations, it\u2019s strange that so many covers were recorded during this period. While it may have been down to artists wanting to pay tribute to songs that they considered to be tremendous works of art, there\u2019s an argument to be made that it would have been far greater to hear artists recording more of their own original material than relying on recycling songs that have been heard before.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not necessarily that people have got better at songwriting since, but there seems to be more stock attached to the idea of producing original material, whereas it was commonplace for even the biggest artists of older generations to try their hand at reworking another song in their own style. <\/p>\n For example, all of the first four albums by The Beatles featured at least one cover of another older song, and while they would eventually drop this as a feature after the release of Help!, fans still enjoyed hearing their interpretations of songs such as Barrett Strong\u2019s<\/a> \u2018Money\u2019 and The Marvelettes\u2019 \u2018Please Mr Postman\u2019 on their earlier records.<\/p>\n Other artists from this period were even more prolific in the art of covering, with large swaths of their records being dedicated to recording covers in order to make the process of completing an album smoother and quicker. If you don\u2019t have to painstakingly work on your own material and try to perfect your craft, why not bolster the tracklist with a handful of tastefully cherry-picked covers?<\/p>\n As much as this may have been the mindset of many acts, others weren\u2019t necessarily fans of the idea quite as much, and while The Rolling Stones were known for having covered a number of songs on their early albums, Mick Jagger<\/a> wasn\u2019t exactly a fan of all of the ones they chose to record.<\/p>\n Their self-titled debut album, released in 1964, was littered with covers, with only the one song in \u2018Tell Me (You\u2019re Coming Back)\u2019 having been written by what would become the band\u2019s primary songwriting duo of Jagger and Keith Richards. The rest of the tracklist consisted mostly of blues and soul tracks that they were fans of, giving their interpretation on material originally performed by the likes of Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye<\/a> and Willie Dixon.<\/p>\n This was not, however, all to Jagger\u2019s preference, and he questioned the necessity of recording a cover when there\u2019s already a version good enough to be listened to. \u201cWhat\u2019s the point in listening to us doing \u2018I\u2019m a King Bee\u2019 when you can hear Slim Harpo do it?\u201d Jagger queried long after releasing the track.<\/p>\n