The charm of Weller’s covers is that they allow him to express his love for a track and also to breathe himself into it: his voice, now a lush, wavering croon, automatically turns a song into something pensive and dramatic.
On his 1995 cover of Dr. John’s ‘I Walk On Gilded Splinters’, he brings an air of someone damaged and bitter, a dirtiness that puts a sting in the tail of an already-dark track. On ‘I Started A Joke’, he is still damaged, but the bitterness is gone and replaced by cold, keening isolation. The Bee Gees’ version is achingly sad, but Barry Gibb’s vocals are so lovely that you can forget; Weller’s arrangement makes you feel the full weight of it.
“I looked at the skies running my hands over my eyes / And I fell out of bed hurting my head from things that I said” he sings moodily, cutting a stylishly solemn figure as always. This kind of music seems to pour out of Weller, and as he grows older, it seems to require less and less effort from him.
Despite the moroseness, there is even a joy in it, a performance which comes out of a love for the original song. One of the pleasures of ‘I Started A Joke’ is that it digs out a lesser-known, pre-disco version of the Bee Gees, something that has clearly stuck in Weller’s memory as he now drags it out into the light. This makes it not just a great cover, but a very relatable expression of music fanhood, which his own adoring fans will accept with arms wide.
