Moog Cookbook – Whole Lotta Love

Warning: disturbing levels of Cotton hatred imminent.


Generally, I’m all in favour of the law against twatting a person full in the face with a banjo, ramming a javelin up their left nasal cavity, taking a rusty chainsaw to their lower limbs and then running over their twitching carcass with a tank. However, I also believe morality is a mutable concept not given to black and white rulings – especially when faced with the perma-grinning mush of Fearne Cotton.

Yes, the final episode of Top of the Pops airs tonight and the blame for its demise, and that of Western culture in general, lies entirely on Cotton’s shoulders. It’s not so much the fact that she has the brain power of a squashed slug (or Patrick Kielty for that matter) or that the only adjective in her vocabulary is ‘amazing’ or that she’s sleeping her way through faux-indie band-boys like a Primark Winona Ryder; it’s that her vacuous inanity has forced me to thrust my head through 6 television screens in the last two weeks.

Fearne’s (apparently non-sarcastic) reaction to Damien Marley’s song of Jamaican violence and poverty Welcome To Jamrock (sample lyric: “Welcome to Jamrock/Poor people are dead at random/Political violence, can done”) was:

Ahh! A nice bit of Jamaican sunshine there from Damian Marley.

Cotton, shut your shit-spout you beslubbering flap-mouthed death-token.

Ahem, on to matters 1997 related. In tribute to Top of the Pops, here’s Moog Cookbook’s cover of the TOTP aka Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love.

Moog Cookbook’s first album of kitsch synthesised versions of current indie hits (most notably Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun) seemed like a one-off oddity. However, support from the rock-ocracy and probably no little cajoling from the record company saw them repeat the trick with classic rock songs on 1997’s Ye Olde Space Bande. This time they had a few guests along with them including Eels’ Mr E., MC5’s Wayne and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh.

Surprisingly, the joke hasn’t worn thin. This is probably due to the obvious glee with which these tracks are made. There’s an enormous sense of fun as they throw snippets of The Who and Beethoven into this track and the ‘bumblebee trapped in a jam-jar’ sound on the guitar solo is irresistible.

Moog Cookbook – Whole Lotta Love

Buy Ye Olde Space Bande

For Fearne