Very often, cover versions stay close to the original – same genre, similar instrumentation, comparable tempo. But things get really exciting when a band completely reinterprets a song. A master of this radical transformation was Irish producer David Cunningham, who, with his new wave project The Flying Lizards, gave some of the greatest classics in music history an experimental, electronic-minimalist makeover.

Alongside rather bizarre and dark reinterpretations of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne or Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, the third Flying Lizards album Top Ten features a legendary version of James Brown’s Sex Machine – a cover that lifts the funk classic into an entirely new dimension: cold, mechanical, deconstructed. 

The monotonous vocals, combined with the chopped-up, experimental sound, strip away the raw energy of the original and replace it with a futuristic, almost Dadaist atmosphere. It sounds as if James Brown had landed in a synthetic parallel universe.

A true insider tip for anyone who loves offbeat cover versions and has long since grown tired of conventional reinterpretations!