School kids in space: Is this the greatest David Bowie cover?

Posted On June 26, 2025June 26, 2025

Chances are, if you’ve looked twice at a guitar, you’ve covered David Bowie. I don’t make the rules, I just follow them. The sheer number of musicians who’ve taken the Thin White Duke’s absolutely deathless songbook for a spin is as wide and deep as music itself. Everyone from Simple Minds, to Lulu, to Nirvana, to Brian Eno has covered his work, and that’s just the folks who’ve covered 1971’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World’.

It’s a sign of Bowie’s diversity, as if it needed to be proved, that no matter how long a list it may be, there would be few artists to cover the ‘Starman’s’ songs that would surprise you. Peter Gabriel? Absolutely. Sleater-Kinney? Checks out. Beck? I’d be more surprised if he hadn’t. A Canadian elementary school choir? I mean, slightly out there, but I wouldn’t put it past a hip music teacher getting their kids jamming out to the classics early; we’ve all seen School of Rock.

Well, it turns out that Mike White took a little inspiration when writing that movie. Not only is there an album of songs recorded by this choir, made up of students from four different elementary schools around Langley, British Columbia, but there are also songs by The Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. Moreover, these versions of these songs are also arguably some of the most praised and respected cover versions ever recorded.

It’s true. The Langley Schools Music Project is one of the most successful examples of outsider music ever made. This is due to the project embracing the fact that recording a bunch of kids lifelessly singing classic pop songs in a school hall with some amateur backing is a sound melancholic to the point of depressing. How can we know this was intentional? The 2001 re-release of the two albums they made as one CD came with a subtitle: Innocence and Despair.

How did these David Bowie covers get released?

The project was the brainchild of music teacher Hans Fenger, who became disillusioned with the way music was being taught in his school district. In the liner notes to Innocence and Despair, he wrote, “I never liked conventional ‘children’s music,’ which is condescending and ignores the reality of children’s lives, which can be dark and scary. These children hated ‘cute’. They cherished songs that evoked loneliness and sadness.”

These songs evoke loneliness and sadness the way that ‘Killing in the Name‘ evokes the word ‘Fuck’. They are quite spectacular in their way. So much so that when music collector Brian Linds found the self-released records Fenger had put out in the 1970s, in a thrift store in 2000, he immediately sent them over to Irwin Chusid, a writer specialising in preserving outsider music. Chusid immediately began shopping the records to labels as a landmark piece of the same

After being (understandably) rejected by ten labels, Bar/None Records finally took a chance upon this bizarre little project and struck one of the most unlikely yet rich veins of gold I’ve ever heard of. The record was (for a piece of outsider art), astonishingly successful, able to get this all-timer of a quote from David Bowie himself for their cover of ‘Space Oddity’.

“The backing arrangement is astounding.” Bowie said, “coupled with the earnest if lugubrious vocal performance, you have a piece of art that I couldn’t have conceived of, even with half of Colombia’s finest export products in me.” Absolute gold, just like this haunting record.

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