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Cover Wars: There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
For some, The Smiths occupy an near sacred space in the annals of music history. There are those, myself among them, who measure other’s musical tastes–their hipster cred, as it were–by their knowledge of, their love of, The Smiths. They are an untoucable band. The followers may be rarely get together en masse to celebrate their beloved music. They do not have an island or an annual conference (as far as I know), but their power to both encapsulate the experience of being young and alone, as well as to simultaneously make fun of that adolescent angst is what captures the ear again and again. In the melodic lines of Morrissey’s voice and in the gritty twangs of Johnny Marr’s guitars, we hear both our own teen angst and our adult selves reflecting back on that momement as something different than we once thought it was.
If there is any song that it is quintessentially The Smiths, then it is “There Is A Light That Will Never Go Out.” From the first beats of the drum, the first strum of the guitar, Morrissey warbles a melancholy plea to “Take me out tonight” and to “Please don’t drop me home.” It seems difficult to imagine that a song about late night traffic and cars passing each other on the road could evoke such strong emotions of wistfulness and nostalgia for moments we may never even have experienced, but it does.
The Dum Dum Girls choice to cover “There Is A Light That Will Never Go Out” on their recent EP, “He Gets Me High,” is a pretty bold move. Covering any song is a risk. Covering a song that has reached near divine status among many music fans is triplely risky. For some of those listeners, there is no way you can compare to the original no matter how brilliant your cover is simply because you are not the original. Doing a cover of such a song could be considered a sacrilege on par with Miley Cyrus performing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Of course, Dum Dum Girls are much better musicians than Miley, but still.
Yet, their cover does what all good cover songs should. It retains the essential emotional power of the original but re-imagines it in a different musical landscape. In this particular case, the Dum Dum Girls lift the English-ness off the song and plop down in a scene of Gothic surf music, Marr’s singular guitar work replaced by the throbbing of Jules’s own distinctive sound. But truth be told it doesn’t deviate from the original all that much and that may be why it works
This was a tough one. On the one hand, it is nearly impossible to diminish the hold The Smiths’ version of “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” has on the collective consciousness of my generation. But on the other hand, the fact that the Dum Dum Girls chose to cover this song and managed to do it well is something that has to be given props. I’m going to call it a draw. The cover is a damn fine version of a song that is an unparalleled classic.