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Baker's Dozen

Evidently Chicken Supreme: John Cooper Clarke's Favourite Songs
Alex Burrows , November 18th, 2020 11:32

Performance poet, style icon and broadcaster John Cooper Clarke tells Alex Burrows about his most-loved songs of all time and growing up during the birth of rock & roll. Portrait by Paul Wolfgang Webster.

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The Ramones – ‘Needles And Pins’
I love The Ramones. This is a fabulous song written by Sonny Bono and Jack Nitzsche and was first a hit for Jackie DeShannon. That was a beautiful version and I don’t want to take anything away from that. It’s like another song when she does it – there’s a whole lot of stuff going on in that which the version by The Searchers doesn’t deal with. That was a very truncated version of Jackie De Shannon’s song. What The Searchers did was covert it into a form that could be tackled by a four-man beat group. The Jackie De Shannon version was recorded in a state-of-the-art Los Angeles studio with the Wrecking Crew but The Searchers did a good job of coverting it and it’s that version obviously that the Ramones cover. But they do it so much better!