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| Culprit | David Bowie |
| Title | Penny Lane |
| Year | 1967 |
| Written by | John Lennon and Paul McCartney |
| Submitted by | Siegfried Baboon |
Since this is basically an identically-arranged cover of the original, I wouldn't ordinarily include it as a gear change in its own right. However, the trumpet playing towards the end is so superbly wrong exactly one bar out that it deserves pride of place in the list.
I don't know much about this version, except that it was originally included on one of those Top of the Pops-type albums which used to feature re-recordings of current songs in the charts (or "hit parade", I should say). Back in those days, Bowie was still trying to hit the big time, and (like many others of his time) paid the bills by singing on such compilations. From today's perspective, now that "Penny Lane" has become such a classic, it seems astonishing that anyone could get it so abominably wrong; but I can only assume that when it was originally played (with time and money for just one take, no doubt) the trumpet player had not yet heard the original. Though this doesn't explain why the arranger systematically missed out the second chord of the chorus sequence...
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I was first alerted to the genius of this version by Danny Baker's breakfast show on BBC London. He also points out Bowie's random decision to try and get all "northern" when he sings the word "customer" (at the start of this clip). It seems that he momentarily thought "hey, the Beatles are from Liverpool, I'd better sound like that too" but forgot to do the same with the word "another" which precedes it.