War Child – We Were So Turned On: A Tribute to David Bowie

Quoting 24 studio albums, 2 Grammys, 2 Brits, an Ivor Novello commendation, 136,000,000 albums sold, a five-decade long career and a knighthood: you’d be hard pushed to find a musician more qualified than the legendary David Bowie.

That explains the concept – a Bowie tribute? Hey, why not! War Child? It’s not like we’ve had enough of them! What it doesn’t explain is the ridiculous eclecticism of this compilation. It’s not often you see Duran Duran lie within spitting distance of Warpaint, nor Mechanical Owl associate with Xu Xu Fang.

Unfortunately, that’s the album’s main problem. It constantly jumps from one genre to another: here’s something any self-rewarding Sarah Records fan will fall in love with. Here’s a man screaming his guts out. Here’s a worryingly charismatic deep female vocal. There’s nothing to grasp onto, bar the obvious – the songs are all originally by David Bowie.

Conversely, some of the covers are damn near perfect. Exit Music make a decent attempt with their drizzled version of ‘Space Oddity’, but the first to tinker the resolute call of success are the majestic Megapuss (a.k.a. ‘the Devendra Banhart and Fabrizio Moretti band’). Theirs is the strangest adaption of ‘Sound and Vision’ your dreams can’t image. The Brooklyn trio are quickly followed by Warpaint, whom it’s rightfully treason to criticise at the moment. Although the two are clear highlights, they stand at opposite ends of the spectrum: one loony-tunes band make a Bowie song their own, while a more mentally sound quartet stay true to the notes and melody, and in doing so conducted themselves perfectly. The only comparison that could be drawn is that both bands are American, and both forgot to press the ‘stop’ button.

While a few of the artists are recognisable, others will be completely alien to the vast majority. Some of these unknowns are so astounding you’ll be kicking yourself for not discovering the band before now; others are nondescript, embarrassing and boring.

Chairlift fall into the first category – the Colorado residents envelope ‘I’m Always Crashing the Same Car’ with their fearsome glory. All Leather fall into the second category – their roared ‘Fame’ only scares my eardrums. WE ARE THE WORLD stand proudly in the first – ‘I’m Afraid of America’ rivals the crackers off Megapuss. A Place to Bury Strangers the second – they sabotage ‘Suffragette City’. That’s tracks six through to ten, by the way: on, off, on, off. It’s almost as though the producer is deliberately trying to test our patience, and we’re not even half way through the collection.

Worst of the rest is the shameful desecration of the best Bowie song of all time, ‘Theme from Cat People’, sung in reverie by The Polyamorous Affair. From there on in, War Child launch themselves between VOICEsVOICEs, Carla Bruni and Keran Ann; all deserve a medal for making classic Bowie songs sound mundane. If one thing can be said of the third-quarter of this tribute, it’s that it lends time to make a cup of tea…

…To calm down before the horrible fright that follows. Lights come on like a sickening blend of Abba and Atomic Kitten, then Aquaserge gargle in French over something that loosely resembles ‘The Supermen’. After this double pronged attack, Caroline Weeks fails to engage with ‘Starman’ – the most engaging song of all time. It’s enough to make you spill half of that tea down your front, and then chuck the other half at the screen. Not even a last minute breeze led by Mechanical Bride and Edward Sharp & the Magnetic Zeros resumes control.

We Were Turned On: A Tribute to David Bowie is a textbook demonstration of how not to arrange a tribute. War Child have clutched at a handful of up-and-coming bands and correctly guessed that they’ll deliver. They’ve then repeated the process twice, once resulting in filler and once in something very distressing. Presumably realising their cock up, they’ve wielded their cooking spoon and stirred the concoction together, before finally sprinkling Duran Duran on top for good measure. They should have tried to salvage the first batch.