10 Amazing Cover Songs You Need To Hear

David Bowie has no one definitive song or album, that's how good he was. Get 100 Bowie fans in a room and ask for their favourite song and you will hear the widest amount of options for any modern artist. Life On Mars is one of his most commercially successful and critically acclaimed hits and tends to be thought of by those outside of the Bowie fanbase as the best, and there is a real claim to that, the song is so perfectly performed and constructed that you will not find a better artist to handle the piece. Seu Jorge gave it a great shot though, and not even in English.

The Brazilian singer/songwriter and actor gained a great deal of public exposure playing Knockout Ned in the film City of God (you really should see it if you have not yet, it's pretty harrowing). Seu Jorge's musical abilities were presented to the world in 2004 film The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, where Jorge plays one of the titular Zissou's crewmen who seems to pass the time playing David Bowie covers in Portuguese.

Covers in other languages are often pretty fun, but Jorge handles these songs with a stripped-down patience and care one would expect to find from a David Bowie fan. Bowie in turn loved Jorge's covers, crediting them with bringing “a new level of beauty” to his work. And that's not just faint praise; Bowie was outspokenly critical of covers he didn't like. He called Barbra Streisand's version of the extensively-covered Life On Mars “bloody awful. Sorry, Barb, but it was atrocious.”