A publicist for Arcade Fire has stated that The New York Times incorrectly reported that Arcade Fire will be covering Peter Gabriel’s song “Games Without Frontiers” for the upcoming project I’ll Scratch Yours, the sister cover album to Gabriel’s newest endeavor, Scratch My Back. In fact, it’s not clear whether the Canadian indie band will be contributing anything. Of course, it’s well known by now that Scratch My Back contains covers that Gabriel admires, and the purpose of the project was meant to go exactly how this whole thing sounds: for every artist Gabriel covers on Scratch My Back, those artists (ideally) will contribute a cover of a Peter Gabriel song.
Unfortunately for Gabriel, it seems that some artists are not showing immediate interest–Radiohead news site At Ease recently reported that Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has not yet responded to Gabriel’s cover of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” Gabriel said:
I still haven’t had a response from Thom Yorke. He originally wrote to say he wanted to do a version of ‘Wallflower’, but I haven’t heard what he thinks of my version. Not everyone likes it and I’ve no real idea whether he likes it or hates it. We have a little clue, though. We gave out codes for the artists to listen to their songs on a stream and we could see how many times they’ve heard them. I think he’s only streamed ‘Street Spirit’ once, which isn’t a good sign, but who knows?
That’s not to say that Radiohead won’t participate at all–same for Arcade Fire. These are busy bands, and the request is not a small one. But we can’t help but think odds are not looking good for Gabriel to receive a song from every artist he covered on Scratch My Back.
Thus far, the most solid evidence of participation is from Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields, who covered Gabriel’s “Not One of Us,” which was released as a split single with Gabriel’s cover of Merritt’s “Book of Love.” There is Paul Simon’s take on “Biko.” In Peter Gabriel’s podcast about the progress of the album, he revealed that Randy Newman will cover “Big Time” and an as-of-yet unknown song from Neil Young, which was revealed through Gabriel’s anecdote about meeting Young and discussing the project with him.
Here is the song that Arcade Fire was rumored to be working on. It comes from Gabriel’s self-titled album from 1980, also known as the “melted face” album:
Scratch My Back has been available in Europe since February and was released today in the U.S. via Real World/Virgin Records.
(P4K)
