Autumn Covers #4

OK, for the record, I absolutely fucking hate Duran Duran. Always have done. I remember first seeing them on Saturday Superstore when I was barely a teenager. They were huge at the time - and boy did they know it. Never before had I seen such an arrogant egocentric bunch of arseholes. I detested them immediately and never softened my stance.

Many years later, within the last decade or so, they appeared on the Jonathan Ross show. You would have thought they'd have mellowed with age and, no longer teenybop heartthrob flavours of the month, they'd be humbler and, maybe, not arseholes. No. Nothing had changed. Total twats of the very highest order. My loathing of them continued unabated and still does.

Sadly though, my hatred of Duran Duran is tempered everso slightly by the fact that they did occasionally write a decent tune. Sometimes someone will cover one of their songs and I'll actually quite enjoy it, mainly because it's not actually Duran Duran. I remember Miles Hunt thought rather a lot of himself back in the day. The Wonder Stuff were a much better band than Le Bon et al, so you can forgive him just a little bit. A few years back, they released an album of covers of songs by bands from the Midlands which included Planet Earth, Duran Duran's best song in my opinion.

Melys have featured on these fair pages a couple of times before, but are always worthy of another mention. The Welsh wonders once did a version of Girls On Film for a John Peel session in 2004. It was their eighth and final session for the great man who passed away later that year. Quite frankly, Duran Duran are not fit to lick Melys' boots. So there!


Soundtrack:

• Planet Earth - The Wonder Stuff (from 'From The Midlands With Love')
• Girls On Film - Melys (from the Peel Session, 9 June 2004)