You learn something new every day. Today, for instance, I learned that the song Tarantula — the number from the Roma companion album that Beck performed Monday night on The Late Late Show With James Corden — is actually an old Colourbox track from the ’80s. Clearly I was never a Colourbox fan. Then again, neither are a lot of other people, it seems. Except for one of my regular readers (I won’t use their name in case they don’t want to be identified) who sent me the following note:
“They keep mentioning that Tarantula is a song inspired by Roma while it’s a cover of an 1980’s song by Colourbox. I guess Beck’s interpretation of the song was inspired by the film.”
Good catch! I updated my original post accordingly. And since I figured maybe you weren’t that familiar with the original either, I posted it above: The original song that inspired the new version of the song that was apparently inspired by the movie Roma. Or something like that. Here’s Beck’s performance again just in case you want to compare and contrast.
https://youtu.be/y3avkM0_l0o
And it gets more interesting: Turns out Beck is not the first person to cover the cut. Here’s another version by This Mortal Coil that dates back to 1986. It actually sounds a lot closer to the Beck version. So maybe that means the original Tarantula is the song that inspired this version that inspired the new version that was inspired by the movie Roma. There. Glad we could clear that up.
