And from a cover of Femme Fatale to a series of covers of the song because, well I have nothing better to do until, oh at least the end of January I imagine. So many bands and artists have tried their hand at this spectral, nuanced and moving song since Lou Reed and the Velvets laid down the original on The Velvet Underground & Nico in 1967. So off we go. Let's list them.
First some biographical detail about Femme Fatale itself. Lou wrote the song on Warhol's suggestion about Factory leading light and doomed and tragic starlet Edie Sedgwick who barely made it out of the Sixties, a decade whose spirit she embodied in many ways. 'Oh don't you think she's a femme fatale?' Andy said to Lou about Edie and Lou went off and did the decent thing, coming up with the classic original a song that artists have queued up and attempted to capture its wan and fragile essence ever since.
A definition first. A femme fatale according to any decent dictionary, is ' an attractive and seductive woman, especially one who is likely to cause distress or disaster to a man who becomes involved with her.' We've all met them. Some of us have gone out with one or more of them. And Sedgwick was an excellent example of one..Her life story is fascinating. She had a dysfunctional if ridicuously privelidged trust fund sponsored upbringing, suffered eating disorders and mental health issues in her teens and started a series of doomed and short lived relationships with famous and dilettantish partners before she was in her twenties. She was just made for Warhol's melodramatic and debauched Factory circle and attached herself to it from 1965 onwards almost immediately on her decision to move to New York and into modelling. She died of an overdose in November 1971 and her brief but eventful life has been catalogued in film and print ever since. Die young, stay pretty.
Femme Fatale is an equally brief and dazzling tribute to this kind of living, careering round a vertiginous mountainside slope in a car without brakes before plunging inevitably if dramatically onto the rocks below. The song was the B Side of Sunday Morning which was pruned from the Velvets debut album by record label MGM as a 45 in a vain attempt to sell the Velvets to the American public as cute balladeers when they were clearly actually anything but. The single, like the album it was culled from, died a commercial death when it was released in December 1966, though the album of course has since risen to immortality and surely has a good claim to being among the most influential Rock & Roll records ever made.
And wow has Femme Fatale been covered and covered since by anyone with the vaguest aspirations to the Velvet Underground's cool legacy. Nico, who sang the original in that startling deathly , toneless manner that made her both incredibly arresting and distinctly marmite, apparently never cared for the way Reed pronounced the title. As Sterling Morrison, the Velvet's lead guitarist related: 'Nico whose language is minority French would say 'the name of the song is Fahm Fatale'. Lou and I would sing it our way. Nico hated that. I said. 'Hey Nico. It's my title. I'll pronounce it my way.' Acording to music journalist Stphen Davis it remains 'a beautiful song that portrays the vivid, conflicted and emotional undercurrents of 1966.'
So where to start. Why not with the R.E.M. cover which they often played live and featured on the B Side of Superman and the B Sides and cast off collection Dead Letter Office. R.E.M. had a way with cover versions and never more so than here. Stipe does a wonderful job with the vocals. The band's performance is faithful if characteristically slightly more jangly than the Velvets take. .Mills and Berry put in excellent shifts on backing vocals.
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