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The Flying Lizards: "Money (That's What I Want)"
After taking a week off, Cover Friday is back, with a great one-hit wonder: The Flying Lizards, doing the classic “Money (That’s What I Want).” It’s a song co-written by Motown’s Berry Gordy and staff songwriter Janie Bradford and originally recorded in 1960 by Barrett Strong. It’s particularly notable in that original version as having been the first hit for Motown (although released on their Tamla label); in the years following, it has been played (and often recorded) countless times by good and bad bands alike. The Beatles may have done the definitive version (I think so, anyway), but no one has done it with quite the panache of The Flying Lizards.
This is probably the first "Reselection" so far where I literally knew almost no details about the band. I have just now done a little Googling to find out more, but the only thing I’ll add here is that the plinky sound running throughout the song is not a guitar or toy instrument, but rather a piano that has had objects laid across the strings inside the piano itself, resulting in the very odd sharp-yet-muted tone (which I won’t try to describe any further because, well, you can hear it right here yourself).
I remember quite vividly how bizarre the song sounded on the radio when it came out back in 1979 (on the band’s debut album The Flying Lizards). I thought it sounded like some off-the-wall German group, but as it turns out (okay, that's another fact I learned from my searching) the band was actually a pair of British art-school friends, augmented by a couple of improvisational musicians for the album. For a while, the song was on American radio quite frequently (apparently only making it to #50, although I could swear I remember Casey Kasem introducing it on “American Top 40” at some point), and it sounded unlike anything I’d heard before. Although the song’s element of surprise may have disappeared over the years, it still sounds like a song well ahead of its time, and unlike any radio hit I’ve heard since — a true pop oddity.
Original post date: September 16, 2011