"Walk On By", by The Stranglers.
Following on from our most recent dispatch, today we were reading a list on The Groanydad web site of "the 50 best covers". Aside from being immediately struck by how many great covers aren't on that list ("Life Is Life", by Laibach; "I Heard It Through The Grapevine", by The Slits; "The Model", by Snakefinger; "The Model", by Big Black ... we could go on; we won't), we were drawn to number three. Did we know that The Stranglers had tackled "Walk On By"? If we did, we had long forgotten.
In retrospect, maybe we shouldn't have been as surprised as we were by "Golden Brown" and "Skin Deep". Any supposedly "punk" band that: (a) had the vision to take Bacharach and David and play it straight (and long), and with a complete absence of punk subversion, attitude or (perhaps) irony; and (b) could meanwhile sound exactly like themselves, was clearly capable of anything.
