Covered in glory: the tribute albums that saved careers and changed lives

This week brings new all-star love-ins dedicated to Elton John and Johnny Cash – marginal releases in the context of their careers, yet tributes to lesser-known acts can prove transformative

There are, when you boil it down, two kinds of tribute albums. There are the ones featuring people you’ve heard of – household names paying homage to other household names, genre stars paying respect to other genre stars – and there are the ones featuring people you’ve never heard of. The latter tend to disappear into the ether, sometimes flitting across your consciousness when you’re searching for something on Spotify. The former get the big push – as is the case this week with Revamp and Restoration, two all-star Elton John tribute albums, and Forever Words, in which the Johnny Cash estate gets well-known musicians to write songs around words that the country star left behind.

The first tribute album I can discover – in the sense of multiple artists covering songs by one act – isn’t really a tribute album at all. It’s the soundtrack to the musical documentary All This and World War II, a peculiar combination of second world war newsreel footage and clips from 20th Century Fox’s 1940s movies, accompanied by a soundtrack of Beatles covers – Rod Stewart performing Get Back, Bryan Ferry doing She’s Leaving Home, Peter Gabriel having a bash at Strawberry Fields Forever (his first solo release) and three contributions from the Bee Gees. The movie was pulled from cinemas after two weeks, so disastrous was its reception, and the soundtrack album appears to be out of print, though of course a large proportion of it has been pulled together into a YouTube playlist.