Tom Dunne: Why John O'Dreams by Christy Moore ranks among the great cover versions
Christy Moore got John O'Dreams from English folk singer Bill Caddick, and the song was originally based on a melody by Tchaikovsky. (Photo by Roberta Parkin/Redferns)
What makes a great cover version? We all know one when we hear it: Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’, Sinead’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, etc. But what makes it great? What do they find, in the song, in themselves, that elevates it? What is the voodoo at play?
What did Jimi Hendrick bring to the table in ‘All Along the Watch Tower’ that makes you somehow forget that it’s a Dylan song? How did Kirsty McColl turn Billy Bragg’s New England into a timeless pop song? Why was Tainted Love just the perfect song for Soft Cell, and they the perfect band for it?
I could go on. How did Willie Nelson think he could find something new in Elvis’s ‘Always on My Mind’? And how was he right? How can that be? Elvis had one of the most beautiful voices ever, and yet, the dry emotion in Willie’s largely unmusical voice trumps it.
The song which sent me down this dark – but very entertaining - night of the soul was Christy Moore’s version of ‘John O’Dreams’. It’s a song that haunts me. I marvel at it. I seek out different versions. I listen back. Like Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’, I will never grow tired of it.
I first discovered it at a Christy gig in Theatre L in UCD back in the early 1980s. I was an Engineering student and a member of a punk rock band and that was not an easy marriage. A lunchtime gig in the Arts block at Belfield between Mechanics of Materials and a Physics practical was manna from heaven.
Of course, Christy was theoretically on the “trad/folk” bus whereas I was on the “punk” bus. These seemed like very different buses at the time, and I was as surprised as anyone when they kind of ended up in the same place. But we did not know that then. We eyed each other’s buses suspiciously.
I would have been wearing red jeans and a leather jacket. If you were playing a quick round of ‘One on These Things is Not Like the Others,’ you’d have spotted me quite quickly. If the Arts faculty had made an intervention, Engineering would not have missed me.
I’d seen Auto Da Fe and Freddie White at these gigs, so expectation was high and all was proceeding to plan until Christy played ‘John O’Dreams’. It hit me the way I’d imagine the Pied Piper’s tunes hit the children of Hamelin.
It washed over me like a balm. “The Stars are flying, your candle dying,” said the man, and I floated out of my body and above the buildings. I saw Earth and all the stars and my place amongst them. I arrived back thinking time is short, we need to practise, and we need to write more songs.
Christy got the song from an English folk singer called Bill Caddick. Bill, known in the UK as a “master craftsman of songwriting” included it on his 1976 album, Rough Magic, so it must have been still quite a recent addition to Christy’s canon.
The melody, as it turns outs, is taken from a movement in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony #6, Pathetique. You should Google it. On the version I watched, by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, it comes in, distinctively and unmistakably, after about 5 mins 30 seconds.
But that doesn’t explain the voodoo, the alchemy at play when Christy sings it. I’ve tried singing it and even though that version goes down beautifully with audiences, I know there are things at play in Christie’s version that are elusive, and which weave a spell which remains beyond my grasp.
I persevere because I love the song. It lifts me. It exerts a strange calming force upon me.
I did get to ask him about it recently. All he would say was that it’s a special song and the “mojo” has to be right before he tries it. And therein lies the greatest question of all: What does Christy find in that song that allows him to inhabit it so completely?
There is no end to that line of questioning; What did Tina Turner find in ‘Proud Mary’? What did Aretha see that she could add to Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’? Why does David Gray’s ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’ work so perfectly for him?
There is no simple answer here. It involves an artist’s humanity and a human’s artistry, but I don’t know which comes first. But: you know it when you hear it.
