CD - Various Artists: LIFE BEYOND MARS - BOWIE COVERED

David Bowie is hard to avoid. Not in a Rolling Stones, tracks-on-Honda-Fiat-ads kind of way, mind you – more in that way that once you’ve heard Bowie, you begin to notice that he’s actually been with you all along. Bowie has infiltrated pop culture without making a nuisance of himself, and remains as distinctive and – let’s face it – weird as he was when he was wearing silver spandex in 1972. So the obvious thing to do is throw a big bucket of paint stripper over his 4-decade catalogue of work and redo it with synthetisers. 

 Don’t panic and flail your arms around like that, because Life Beyond Mars – Bowie Covered isn’t as desperate as that last sentence implied. The label doing the stripping and synthing is Rapster, who in 2006 released a successful album of Radiohead covers (Exit Music), and earlier this year gave Prince a good stab (Controversy). They’ve done it again with Life Beyond Mars, assembling an eclectic bunch of electronic artists to let loose on the Thin White Duke.
 
 
Life Beyond Mars is a sugary, sugary treat for Bowie fans, if only for that first listen to see what these dang-blasted new-fangled upstarts have done to your favourites. Heartbreak’s reworking of obscure track ‘Loving the Alien’ (originally from 1984’s Tonight) is a thumping, strong cover, and Tokyo wunderkind Susumu Yokota does service to ‘Golden Years’ (the Station To Station sessions). Less successful are Kelley Polar’s ‘Magic Dance’ (from the Labryrinth soundtrack), which strips all the cheeky vibe of the original, and Matthew Dear’s disappointingly plodding take on ‘Sound & Vision’.
 
But – since the dawn of all time – the fundamental challenge of a covers record has always been the same: Do the tracks stand up on their own, even when you pretend the originals never existed? Can a non-fan snap up Life Beyond Mars and still have a sugary, sugary time?
 
With Life Beyond Mars, the answer’s a king of indecisive “yeah – but…”. A few tracks definitely make Bowie their own – Au Revoir Simon’s ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’ and Leo Minor’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’ spring to mind – but there are a few misses, particularly ‘Sound & Vision’, which will leave any non-Bowie fan scratching their head. And then there’s the album closer, ‘Life on Mars?’ by The Thing, which – though an interesting experiment with sound (I counted three of them) – does a good job of frustrating anyone, anywhere, Bowie fan or not.
 
For an artist who thoroughly owns all his own tracks (let’s forget Tin Machine), covering Bowie is a huge challenge – but overall Life Beyond Mars is a fair punt. But it would be a fallacy to say that the album brings Bowie into the 21st century – after all, he was here long before all of us.

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