Susheela Raman imaginatively reinterprets Bowie’s song Golden Years to mark the golden jubilee of his album Station To Station.

I don’t normally like cover versions of favourite songs, or songs by my favourite artists. And this is both. But I love the different directions taken by Susheela Raman with Bowie’s song (originally written for Elvis to record, but he died before that could happen).

Like many of the best covers, Raman respects the original while investing it with her own creative ideas to make something new, yet familiar.

And she has an impressive track record with cover versions, having released a wonderful album in 2006 reimagining tracks from the Sixties and Seventies by an eclectic array of artists ranging from Dylan and Lennon to Hendrix and Beefheart, the Velvets, Throbbing Gristle and Can.

Bowie’s own producer, Tony Visconti, has given her adaptation of Golden Years his seal of approval by mixing the song, celebrating 50 years since it was first released on Station To Station.

Production itself is by her long-term partner Sam Mills who plays guitar and bass with Charles Hayward on drums and Djanuno Dabo on percussion.

Raman’s recording will appear on her forthcoming album based around William Blake (not sure how this fits in tbh), which I will be looking forward to.

I interviewed Susheela right at the very start of her career 25 years ago when her debut album Salt Rain – and I highly recommend it, especially the closing adaptation of Song To The Siren – was nominated for a Mercury Music Prize.

That made her the first “world music” artist to be nominated, though she was born in London and spent part of her childhood in Australia before settling to Bradford-upon-Avon in the West Country.

Immersed in her parents’ Tamil culture, she began singing Carnatic music at an early age and and her performances are built on the sacred Bhakti and Sufi traditions of India and Pakistan.

She sings in an array of languages – Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Luo – and has a musical palette that reminds me of the folk-jazz hybrid that Joni Mitchell created in the mid-Seventies.