New Test Leper

Having fallen in love with the acoustic version of this song, which was issued as a B-side of the Bittersweet Me single, I recall being a bit disappointed with how different the album version was when it came out. But I can see why the band did it that way. I often prefer stripped down versions of songs, I was the same with The Lifting and Beat A Drum, but for New Test Leper to appear on New Adventures In Hi Fi in its acoustic format would have left the song feeling out of place on a mostly electric album. Plus, if the album version had never seen the light of day no one would ever have heard Mike Mills’s bass line! I often praise Mike Mills for his bass lines but often it’s not until you really start to study the songs that you learn how impressive some of the more subtle aspects of the songs are. The bass parts on this, in particular the verse, dance all over the place, it’s like he’s playing a different song to what Peter is playing on rhythm guitar. It was real fun to work out and to play.

Despite my love for the acoustic version, my cover is pretty much a direct reproduction of the album version, mainly because this made it more of an interesting project. I suppose the only outside influence is the way I treat the guitars is more inspired by the way they tended to play this live. On the album the electric guitar is really distorted and yet live it’s a lot more jangly.

Incidentally the chorus riff I play on guitar, even though I have my suspicions that it’s actually played on an organ. I may be wrong but I just don’t know how you’d get a guitar to sound like that.