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Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n
Sun 30 August 2026 13:00, UK <\/p>\n
Sometimes a cover song can be so great that people forget it\u2019s a cover in the first place, or that the song was ever sung by anybody else before, like Johnny Cash singing \u2018Hurt\u2019 or Bettye LaVette singing \u2018Love, Reign O\u2019er Me\u2019 in honour of Pete Townshend<\/a> and Roger Daltrey of The Who, at the Kennedy Centre Honors ceremony in 2008.\u00a0<\/p>\n And then there are some cover versions that make you wish you didn\u2019t have ears to begin with<\/a>, wondering what on earth \u00c9douard-L\u00e9on Scott de Martinville was thinking when he invented the first sound-recording device in 1857.\u00a0<\/p>\n You know, like Luke Combs butchering \u2018Fast Car\u2019, Gene Simmons singing \u2018Firestarter\u2019 (yes, really), or The Who, singing The Rolling Stones\u2019 \u2018(This Could Be) The Last Time\u2019 and \u2018Under My Thumb\u2019, both of which are criminal, and it\u2019s ironic, considering the circumstances they were recorded under<\/a>.\u00a0Listening back to those two covers, you\u2019d be forgiven for wondering if the cops hadn\u2019t caught the wrong guys and thrown the wrong band behind bars. <\/p>\n With all that in mind, though, it\u2019s 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\u2019s songs. <\/p>\n So, when he gave an opinion on Heart\u2019s hammy, theatrical and overblown rendition of the already hammy, theatrical and overblown \u2018Stairway to Heaven\u2019, which even featured John Bonham\u2019s son, Jason, on drums from the 2012 edition of the ceremony, he could be considered an extremely reliable commentator on the matter. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s most famous song. <\/p>\n \u201cWatching Robert Plant at the Kennedy Awards crying when somebody murdered one of his songs\u2026\u201d Townshend lamented the confounding cover performance that made him realise how important those old songs were to the old man who\u2019d written them. <\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n He added, \u201cI just think, \u2018Fuck, this guy loves what he does, he loves what he\u2019s done\u2019\u201d,\u00a0and surely the very last thing anybody would want to do would be to watch something they\u2019d loved creating being murdered by somebody else.<\/p>\n
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