News Round-Up: David Bowie, Glastonbury and more
News Round-Up: David Bowie, Glastonbury and more 20 December, 2020
Our recap of the biggest and best headlines we featured during the past seven days includes some high profile covers from David Bowie and the prospects of a Glastonbury return next year.
David Bowie’s covers album Pin Ups, and its mixed results, are well known, but the two covers he recorded with Tony Visconti in 1998 which were ultimately never released are less so.
This will change on January 8th when, to mark what would’ve been Bowie’s 74th birthday, versions of John Lennon‘s Mother and Bob Dylan’s Tryin’ To Get To Heaven will be released on digital and 7″ vinyl formats.
Nicky Wire, Manic Street Preachers – Wolverhampton Civic Hall (Photo: Gary Mather for Live4ever Media)
Manic Street Preachers have teamed up with Gwenno for the reworking of one of their earliest tracks.
The Missing People UK and Trussell Trust charities are both being supported by Manic Street Preachers via the Bandcamp release of a re-recording of their Spectators Of Suicide track.
As well as the charity work, this new version takes the Manics back to their formative days with Heavenly Recordings, the hugely influential UK label whose history is being remembered right now with Robin Turner’s book Believe In Magic.
NME how he was “deeply honoured” that the band had made such a fitting new rendition.
“When the book was originally going to come out, there was this idea of doing launch parties,” Turner told
NME. “I asked James [Dean Bradfield, frontman] to play a couple of acoustic songs for us at The Social, but that’s all gone out of the window this year so I asked him to do an acoustic version of ‘Spectators’ that we could use on the radio or something.
“He gave it a go and called back and said, ‘I’ve done it with the band, but I want a female voice on it – how do you feel about me getting Gwenno?’ He hadn’t connected the idea that it was an artist from the label 30 years ago with an artist on the label now. He sent it back and I was just like, ‘Are you fucking serious?’ The Manics are a band I approached as a fan long before I ever worked with them.”