"Dance Hall Days" cover (and vid memories)

[dorinda]

AV Club does this feature where it recruits bands to cover older songs in their little studio, and last week they did this really nice one where Ben Watt and Bernard Butler covered Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days". I think it's an interesting approach, and really lovely.

Ben Watt is half of the group 'Everything But the Girl', who I was first introduced to by a Pros vid, of all things. The Media Cannibals made a Pros vid to the song "We Walk the Same Line," which came out on MC tape 2 (I can't look around to see if this vid has been remastered yet, because I'm at work and so many websites are blocked here...). I remember some interesting discussion on Virgule-L about the juxtaposition of such a sweet/soft song with such a rough-edged show/characters . But for all that I agree the song is sweet and quite soft in its tone and approach, which the show is not, for some reason that never bothered me. Possibly the underlying emotion and the lyrics still felt true enough to me that it didn't rub me the wrong way?

Comments

[gwyn]

We actually learned a lot with that vid -- about songs that don't have peaks and valleys, specifically, because that seemed to have a lot to do with the reaction people had to it. Not so much about the softness, I think, but about the fact that the tone doesn't change at any point, it's pretty much at one level, and that was surprisingly hard to vid to! After I did the Timing Is Everything panel with Talitha78 at VVC last month, I can see why -- there's no obvious place to use the Scene/Sequel concept I discussed from a storyteller perspective. You have to figure out ways to do that, and it's a bit more challenging.

Oh and also no, it hasn't been remastered. I still want to get a site up with the vids digitally, but that seems to just never really happen.

[dorinda]

Ahhhhh, yeah, I see what you mean! Running through the song in my head, it's clear it doesn't really change as it goes along, up until that verse when it gets suddenly quiet (though the rhythm remains just the same). But until then, what are you gonna do to give the vid a shape? An interesting conundrum!

The work was well-spent as far as I'm concerned. I've always enjoyed it, and the song remains in my "Vids" playlist in ye olde iTunes.