Taking a song that was written long before even your great-grandparents were probably born, and creating your own cover of it, is not quite a standard move in today's music market.
Come in Manchester outfit Hartheim, who have just produced a cover of Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit', which was premiered by Mary Anne Hobbs on her BBC 6Music show, earlier this week.
Never a band to shy away from stark material - see our debut feature on them here from just over a year ago with their first release, 'Yellow' - the suitably sombre song was written by Abel Meeropol in 1937, as a protest song against the lynching of African Americans, which was a familiar sight during that period in the nation's history.
Hartheim’s frontman Mike Emerson summed up the reasoning behind such a sensitive cover. "It's the most important song ever written in my eyes," he says. "The startlingly depressing thing is that now, almost 80 years after it was first published, the message remains just as poignant. With everything that happened in Ferguson last year, and no doubt is happening all over the world every day, it felt like the only thing to do… and there's no better way to express it than what's already there in the lyrics. It's brutal, and unsettling, and most heartbreakingly - still completely relevant."
Continuing the muted atmosphere of the instrumentation, the track's video was created alongside 200-year inhabitants of the functioning crypt below St.Philips Church in Salford. Introduced by prose from Roy Fischer and prize winning poet Lauren Bolger, there were few locations that could better induce the frame of mind needed to connect to the melancholic content.
The band release this prior to their single, 'When Did Your Last Rose Die?', which drops on March 9 via JackToPhono Records.
No comments:
Post a Comment