The Moshville Times - Album Review: My Pleasure

I was going to pop this up as a Classic Cover article and point you at the album as a whole, but I couldn’t pick a single song out so decided I just had to rattle off a quick review. With 8 hours to go (at time of writing) before Bandcamp Friday ends, maybe I’ll get a couple of you to chuck a few quid at it before time’s up!

Now I know, Revolver isn’t an original album title. It’s been used before. And that’s because Hull’s one-man act My Pleasure has covered the whole Beatles album in order. I don’t think I’ve heard of a whole album being covered in one go by one artist before, especially one as well known so I had to give it a listen and I was very pleasantly surprised. My Pleasure is billed as “alternative pop” which did, I it, make me a little wary but I shouldn’t have worried. It just means that this take on the classic album is nicely distant from its source.

The songs are pretty recognisable, but definitely different from what John Lennon and co may have envisaged back in the day. My Pleasure has gone to some trouble not to simply regurgitate the 1966 version, to quite some extremes in cases. A pair which stood out were “Eleanor Rigby” and “Yellow Submarine” which seem to have swapped tempos. The former rattles along, while the latter is much more laid back and dreamy than the pompous madness of Ringo’s most famous number.

If you like what we do, consider ing us on Patreon for as little as £1 per month!

My Pleasure included a fair bit of information about the album with the email we got, and it would be a shame not to share it. So here it is!

It was about ten years ago when I got a strange urge to cover Revolver in its entirety. I can’t explain why, but the idea never left my head. I put it off for a long time because I didn’t feel good enough to do it. I mean, I still don’t feel good enough — I’m one amateur trying to be all four of the Beatles — but I had to get it out of my system.

So, about two years ago, I started trying to work out how my version of Revolver would sound. I decided to take each track individually with no constraints. This is why there’s a strange divide between electronic and acoustic tracks, but I like how it turned out. Jonny Hooker at Young Thugs Studios did an incredible job of improving the sound of the album, and tying everything together.

I learnt a lot during recording — firstly, that I am not the Beatles and never will be — and secondly, that it’s really hard to do justice to some of the finest songs of all time when you can’t really sing and you got a D in Music Technology at school.

Performing cover versions feels good. There’s something just so joyful in recreating songs you love. Singing words that are not your own creates a connection between you and the creator. You’ll never be inside their heads, but performing their song gets you that little bit nearer to your heroes’ feelings and mindsets.

Of course, the listener’s experience is vastly different. There are a million bad cover versions out there, and maybe I’ve just added 14 more to the pile. But I hope you like them. I think it takes a lot for the cover to sur the original, and there are very few good examples, so all I hope from these is that people enjoy them and take them in the spirit they were intended.

For the artwork of my version of Revolver, I wanted to recreate the original as closely as possible, but with my face plastered all over the cover. Jazz Harbord did an incredible job in my opinion, and all this in spite of the fact that it’s my face photobombing a timeless piece of art.

The original back cover of Revolver has a really awesome black and white picture of the Beatles just having a real good time. Rather than recreate that, I chose a picture of me looking extremely lonely atop a rock. I think the juxtaposition of the four Beatles enjoying themselves vs. me, alone, with a vast terrifying endless landscape before me was a good metaphor for how it felt tackling the task of reinterpreting Revolver.

Lastly, I should probably tell you Revolver isn’t even my favourite Beatles album (it’s my 2nd fave). But there was no way I could stomach tackling all 30 songs on the white album…