CD: British Electric Foundation - Music of Quality and Distinction Vol 3: Dark

It took nine years between the first and second instalments of this series, and another 22 years to make the third. And that's one of the least strange things about this record. The production team of B.E.F.

(aka Human League / Heaven 17 members Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh) have dedicated themselves to unusual cover versions, in the past featuring guest vocalists from Gary Glitter to Tina Turner to Paula Yates, and they are still on a mission to rework classic songs in a high-gloss 1980s pop style with very peculiar results indeed.

There are a lot of high points here. Sandie Shaw yelps her way through an android Motown take on Gladys Knight's “Just Walk in My Shoes” like a punk cabaret singer. Long time Heaven 17 vocalist Billie Godfrey's histrionic seven-and-a-half minute gender-reversed version of Bronski Beat's “Smalltown Girl” teeters constantly on the brink of demented schmaltz yet somehow remains intense and moving. The borderline industrial backing and Kim Wilde's fierce vocal turn Stevie Wonder's “Every Time I See You I Go Wild” into a song of deranged obsession.

Yet for every track like this, there's something inexplicably odd like Boy George gurgling the lyrics to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” in an unplaceable accent, or the mad scientist camp of Russian pop star Max Pokrovsky taking on Abba's “The Day Before You Came”, or a downright painful tune like The Noisettes' Shingai Shoniwa slaughtering “God Only Knows”. And all of it is laden with so much demented Fairlight synth, rigid Eighties rhythms and OTT studio gloss, that it's an exhausting listen in its entirety. A true curate's egg, this is to be approached with caution, but is definitely delightfully mad and worth picking through for the good bits.

Listen to B.E.F. and Boy George's "I Wanna be Your Dog"