10 Greatest Rock Cover Songs Of The 1980s
4. Dancing In The Street - Van Halen
When it comes to '80s covers of the Martha and the Vandellas classic Dancing in the Street, your options are either the ridiculous David Bowie and Mick Jagger version from 1985, or this one from three years earlier.
The Bowie/Jagger crossover is spectacular, but for all the wrong reasons, so it's gotta be Van Halen.
Taken from their fifth album, Diver Down, Van Halen's Dancing in the Street is fully updated for the 1980s. There's a synthesiser intro, which segues into a driving rhythm section that continues throughout the whole song. David Lee Roth's coarse voice weirdly suits this upbeat call to action, despite being a stark contrast to Martha Reeves' sugary-sweet pipes.
They might sound radically different and be made up of totally different instruments, but both songs have the same energy to them. They're both delightful bursts of joy that are impossible to sit still to; it's just that one was made for a '60s Motown crowd and the other for hair metal enthusiasts two decades later.
As for the Jagger and Bowie version, who the hell knows who that was made for?