Less famous covers that you knew before the more famous originals

re: “You Don’t Own Me”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R22urvGcWy4

hugely popular Dutch cover version (from 1981)

fairly sure I heard Beats International's "Dub Be Good To Me" before I ever became familiar with the SOS Band's "Just Be Good to Me"

100% sure I did. might not have been familiar enough to pick Guns Of Brixton at the time, and didn't hear Jam Hot until the last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hphwfq1wLJs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz-RNe7xoVI

The Sisters Of Mercy - Gimme Shelter
Devo - I Can't Get No Satisfaction
The Danse Society - 2000 Light Years From Home
The Soup Dragons - I'm Free

I guess I had no exposure to the Stones as a kid, except for their 80's stuff.

I knew DJ Sammy's version of "Heaven" long before I knew it was a Brian Adam's song.

I hate both versions with a passion.

*Bryan Adams

Haha, that one does genuinely surprise me.

part of it was I didn't have a cd player in my car until about 2003, so I had to play the radio, and the local adult contempt station was playing the hell out of this shitty dance version, and I'd somehow avoided the Bryan Adams version.

one week, I was at work (restaurant) and the Bryan Adams version came on, and it was like..."oh, that makes sense".

That you made it through the 80s without hearing the original was what surprised me! It was given awards for radio airplay in the US and Canada and apparently charted higher in the US: http://www.jimvallance.com/01-music-folder/songs-folder-may-27/pg-song-adams-heaven.html

lol I'm surprised too, especially since I knew just about every other Bryan Adams song.

oh man, i was a fan of that Soup Dragons song when I was 9 years old and I was today years old when I found out it was a Stones cover

fairly sure I heard Beats International's "Dub Be Good To Me" before I ever became familiar with the SOS Band's "Just Be Good to Me"

I had a similar realization a few years back with the St Etienne cover of Only Love Can Break Your Heart... I knew each song separately but didn't initially make the connection. I'd say that's one hallmark of a great cover version.

Or maybe that's just rationalizing my own inattentiveness.

bauhaus - third uncle
the dickies - eve of destruction

yeah Third Uncle I think I heard on taht mini lp collecting the singles that I bought in 1983. THought it really good, was probably years before I heard Eno rock. I have Taking Tiger Mountain among the printout images i have on my wall right now.

I don’t think I’ve even heard the Eno original. I think I always knew it was a cover but I can’t recall hearing the original one. Let me amend that right away.

I love the Eno song but it's not particularly famous, is it?

Oh wait I have actually heard it. I wouldn’t call the original as more popular than the cover though... I mean neither are chart hits but I think the Bauhaus one is the most popular one. At least on spotify and youtube it’s true.

I love the Eno song but it's not particularly famous, is it?

That's true of a few of the suggestions in the thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpGA0azFdCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-EF60neguk

For me this is all Beatles songs (which I mostly heard as jazz versions or other covers).

Also a ton of '70s funk and soul and '80s r&b, which I heard as New Orleans brass band backgrounds and quotes. Then I'd either ask somebody or randomly hear the original at some point and be like "ohhhh." Also true for a ton of samples obv.

Nazareth's cover of "This Flight Tonight" (it took fukken decades before I heard the 'riginal:)

This was true for me too but I don't consider the original more famous, I don't think. At least when I was growing up, Nazareth's version was a classic rock radio staple around here.

"Secret" classic rock Canadian Content! Just like "Born to Be Wild" (written by Edmonton's Mars Bonfire) and Alice Cooper's "Hello Hooray" (written by Toronto's Rolf Kempf).

Sinéad's version is definitely more famous than the original.

Yeah, I had assumed that post was somehow positioning Prince’s version as the “cover”

The "Prince" version was released in 2018, two years after he died, so it'd be quite a surprise if anyone knew his demo before the Sinead cover released in 1990.

The original was released by The Family in 1985, which had Prince playing keys, St. Paul Peterson and Susannah Melvoin singing, and regular Prince horny guy Eric Leeds on sax. It's the only song on the album that Prince didn't falsely credit as being written by other people.

(I assume all xzanfar's embed spams itt are trolling)

When She's So Unusual came out, I was a kid and not familiar w/Dirty Mind (I didn't hear the original version of the song until much later). Lauper's album sold many more copies than Dirty Mind, which I suppose makes her version more "famous" by default... though given the profile of the Prince album (and song), it sort of feels like a toss-up today.

^This is a really good one! I can't remember if it was "much" later that I heard or owned the original, but it definitely was somewhat later, although I'm sure I knew who wrote the song and knew that album existed, but it didn't have the big hits like 1999 and Purple Rain.

Yeah - I remember knowing it was a Prince cover, but our family’s Prince collection started with 1999.

(I’ve still never heard the original “Money Changes Everything”!)

Sinead and Prince is like the exact opposite concept of this thread.

(xp)
Heh. B-b-but have you heard the Rogue Wave cover of it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz3MtoAmXYQ

Or The Smiths song with the same title?

or the Bryan Ferry cover of the Smiths song, but with a different title?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHyUSNPtNJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkh_oEN_Pc8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-2CKsaq5r8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrMd1meC_2I

are you a bot y/n

Speaking of The Smiths, I knew TATU’s cover or “How Soon is Now” before knowing who The Smiths were. I’m not that certain that The Smiths one is more popular... they seem to cater to a different audience.

I’ll assume it is and that it fits the concept of the thread.

How do we stand on covers that reached #1 of original songs that also reached #1? Like eg: Venus (Shocking Blue/Bananarama) or Lady Marmalade (Labelle/Christina Aguilera, Mya, Lil Kim & Pink).

In those cases I heard the cover first, and they reached top of the charts but the originals were also #1 hits in their respective years.

Earlier in the thread I posted Puff Daddy’s interpolation of The Police, they were both #1 hits but I wouldn’t think for a second that Puff Daddy’s version is more popular. Maybe in the late 90’s it was but I don’t think I’ve overheard it anywhere in the past 20 years.

Lol, Neanderthal.

What audience does TATU cater to (actual question)? Fwiw, the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?' has over 128M plays on Spotify (their third-highest, which is mind-blowing to me). TATU's cover has a little over 10M plays.

or the Bryan Ferry cover of the Smiths song, but with a different title?

Now that I look at the Apple Music list more closely, though, "How Soon Is Now" is listed three separate times since it appears on multiple releases, so that probably makes a difference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDS6i3j11jU
heard a demo version of this: pretty good!
played the game much later: pretty bad!
finally saw the movie even later than that: pretty bad!
then found the lauper/captain lou video: pretty good!

What audience does TATU cater to (actual question)?

― to party with our demons (Sund4r)

Compared to The Smiths? I’d say rockist vs popist. Nowadays the lines are blurred but it didn’t feel that way in the early 00s.

As I said, I suspected The Smiths original was the most popular version but in my experience I don’t know many Smiths or TATU fans, I’m just going by the reaction whenever that song is played. Usually friends born 88-onwards know it by the cover.

I don’t care about that song in particular, but I do get frustrated when I play “Running up that hill” in a social gathering and I hear someone telling me “oh good one! The Placebo song!”

Interesting. The Smiths song was even used in car commercials here in the early 00s. The only TATU song I've heard (and the only one that charted in Canada, based on Wikipedia) is "All The Things She Said". If I expected people to know a cover of "How Soon Is Now", it would probably the one that was used for Charmed (Love Spit Love?).

However, the first version of "How Soon Is Now" that I heard was the Meatmen's, which is definitely a candidate for this thread.

Anyhoo to expand on the TATU vs The Smiths audience: I think people who were listening to TATU were very most likely not into indie/jangle rock from the 80’s or even aware of who The Smiths were.