(Groovescooter/Creative Vibes)

A falsetto voice soars above pristine synth-laden electronic drumbeats. Boys in make-up glide effortlessly while imperious girls with big hair stare past their shoulders. For Georgie and Paris at Sydney label, Groovescooter, the early 80s were a formative time. It marked the duo’s first exposure to the exotic delights of community radio and many a record library’s worth of Australian and overseas music.

British Airwaves is the second volume in the label’s critically acclaimed cover series, Re-fashioned. This time they’ve put the spotlight on British tracks from the ‘80s, reworked by an all Australian cast.

Seminal electronic tracks and well-known pop classics by artists like Japan, Shriekback, Bowie, Depeche Mode and many others get the cover and rework treatment. And the artists doing the covering are equally stellar spanning some of the best of the current crop of electronic musicians (Gotye, Ollo, Ens) through to some of the biggest names of the past (Southend, Jeff Dread).

Disjunction Reunion dives deep into dub territory with his cover of The Police’s Walking On The Moon, while Deepchild and Jeff Dread create equally loping dub worlds (with subject matter from The Specials and UB40 respectively). Elsewhere Southend and 5000 Fingers of Dr T take their inspiration from the bigger end of the pop spectrum (Bronski Beat, Eurythmics).

Occasionally it doesn’t work. But who ever heard of a cover album that was 100% though – nobody mention Yesterdays New Quintet’s Stevie album.

But mostly it does. Don Meers’ cover of Sylvian & Sakamoto’s ‘Forbidden Colours’ is simply sublime. DJ Soup’s bombastic Eurythmics cover (featuring Damien Millar aka Frankenfurter from the Rocky Horror Show) is already getting a lot of Triple J airplay. One of the most promising new artists in recent years, Gotye, takes the beat out from under Depeche Mode’s ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ to bring out the classic torch song it always was.

The Groovescooter pair enlist ex-Adelaide MC Quro for a slight twist on Shriekback’s post-punk classic ‘My Spine (Is the Bassline)’ and Dsico’s version of PIL’s ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ leaves GT’s lackluster effort from a few years back for dead.

But it’s Sydney duo Ollo that make the album worth listening to. Their reworking of ‘The Lunatics (Have Taken Over The Asylum)’ by Fun Boy Three is simply the best song on the album. They’ve taken the inherently quirky ska original, added in glitchy broken funk and for the first time from the duo, vocals, and that rare spark of inspiration for a perfect piece of off-kilter pop music. Picked up by Triple J this will be big.

Refashioned 2 is great. There is passion and excitement here and in a music industry based on mediocrity that sells units, that’s worth checking out.