Illalla mennään sitten täysillä, mutta näillä Urho Tulitukan valitsemilla käännöksillä pääsee jo alkuun. Linkeissä alkuperäinen versio, kympistä lähtien kuullaan sitten ehkä samat suomeksi.
I love it when serious rock bands take a disco detour. Here's three good disco covers of AOR (=adult or album oriented rock) standards. Maybe we could call it Adult Oriented Disco, then?
This one was unknown for me for a long time. I always kinda thought Feist had a disco-ish element to her, but it came as a surprise she actually covered Bee Gees for this little number:
I'm real happy again about our forthcoming night and our guest. (27th this month at Dynamo UP) This time we are dedicating a big part of the night to discovering Finnish disco and dance music in it's blazing gloriousness. Our international fans might not know a lot about our own take on disco music, so I've compiled some links for your educational purposes. A lot of the tunes sound familiar, and that's because they are; about 90% of the good songs are cover versions of foreign tunes with Finnish (usually quite incredibly funny) lyrics.
I think you all recognize the original for this:
Anyways, here's a list for three mixes from our guest, Disco Urse. They have rightly rosen to cult status - you can't find these songs from internet, you just have to dig in deep at various flea markets. Disco Urse has other mixes on the net as well, from other types of music. Well worth your time too. But here are the Finnish disco mixes:
A big guess on which number it actually is. Anyways, this one's been on my dirty little disco mind for quite a long time. It's disco-upped cover which gays the original wayyyy up.
Original: Spencer Davis Group
Remix: Macho - I'm a Man
A glorious gay disco classic, top-notch all around. I think I was turned onto this in part by Cybernetic Broadcasting System, part by Powerpoint Boys. I actually own a near mint, original copy of this. Must say: love the artwork!
This one's quite interesting. Paul Weller's Style Council did a cover of Joe Smooth's Promised Land just a week later the original dropped. Of course, the well-known rockers topped the original by a little known soulful, black house singer. It's all explained here.
Compare for yourself, the songs are below. I dig the original. BTW, it was covered again last year by Findlay Brown, who in turn was remixed by Pilooski and Dimitri from Paris.
Original, Joe Smooth version:
Style Council cover:
Now, what makes this whole thing a bit more interesting is this little twist: Style Council in turn was covered a decade later by Fire Island, a moniker for two UK house producers, working with Loleatta Halloway.
Good Finnish Disco is pretty hard to find, but well worth the effort. Just put these on the decks at a hipster disco at witness the smiles on everybody's faces - just to show them it's not too serious. Like a lot of our charttoppers up until eighties, lot of the good tunes are pretty much cover versions of international hits. Here's a few good examples, very Disko WTF-ish stuff.
Meiju Suvas' "Pommi oon" is simply quite wonderful. A decent bassline with some good horn action, but the real deal are the lyrics. You simply cannot resists to sing along with the lines (ruff translation) "I'm bomb, full of hot elemental force, you would have me, I'm a bomb, if you want to, you could extinguish". Very tacky, so much fun. It has a great singalong part too.
This one's the bomb. It's pretty straightforward version of Brother Johnsons' "the Stomp", but the real catch are the Finnish vocals. They're full of youth vernacular circa 1980, with references to going out to the city with the gang, to "ruff nites". It's so cool when sung in 80's Finnish, trust me. Risto has a cool edit of this, maybe we'll drop on an unsuspected crowd someday...
There's a good place to find more good, listenable Finnish oldies gems at here: Hiihtopipo & Kavallus-show. Just scroll down to suomispeciaalit I-IV. Big kudos to Hiihtopipo and Kavallus for those!
