German singer Katja Ebstein has covered a lot of songs, and she is good. www.katjaebstein.de
A good percentage of Laibach’s songs are covers. They’ve also done Queen, Europe and War.
Does the Sex Pistols doing a cover of Johnny B. Good or Sid Vicious doing My Way count?
The CD Cover The World, released by Putumayo World Music features 12 tracks of covers. My favourite is Bob Marley’s No Woman, No Cry by an Okinawan female quartet called Nenes. There is also a very nice flamenco version of Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side by Albert Pla and a great version of People Get Ready done by Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Phobe Snow. Check out the website, you should be able to listen to the first 45 seconds of most of the songs there.
Don’t forget Roadrunner, Come on Everybody, Something Else and No Fun.
If the Pistols count then The Clash should count for I Fought the Law, Brand New Cadillac, Heartbreak Hotel, King of the Road, and Junco Partner.
Oh man, there’s a ton of these in Finland. At the moment, I can only remember Danny - Kesäkatu (cover of “Summer in the City”) and Frederik - Rasputin (cover of, well, “Rasputin”) and Kung Fu Taistelee (cover of “Kung Fu Fighting”)
While their Roadrunner/Johnny B. Good cover is among my top ten songs of all time, weren’t RR and No Fun by British bands and thus “foreign” to begin with?
Nouvelle Vague, (This Is Not) A Love Song
Gipsy Kings do “My Way”, not exactly rock but it’s well known and a good cover. They call it “Mi Manera” i think.
One of my favourite covers is “Miña terra gallega”, which is Sweet Home Alabama done by Siniestro Total. Siniestro used to go under “punk” but now they basically go under “siniestro”, if you know what I mean… they are a truly emblematic band.
“Mi ciudad Buenos Aires” (can’t remember the group) is a cover of Miña terra gallega 
I find it specially funny to play Miña terra gallega within hearing distance of Americans and see what they say: half love it, half are horrified. Lynyrd Skinyrd (sp?) got to hear when they came to Spain for some concerts and Siniestro was opening for them: they loved it.
Moe, The Cover My World looks very promising…Here for anyone else to have a lookey.
Keep them coming!
I heard a version of the song sung in Norwegian several years ago. So there!
“the song” of course is Norwegian Wood. My bad.
The soundtrack to the Bob Dylan movie Masked and Anonymous contains a number of foreign-language covers of Dylan songs.
Actually , it’s originally a french song (“Comme d’habitude”), sung by Claude Francois (again), though Sinatra kept only the music, and had entirely unrelated lyrics written.
Well, I have to thank everyone who has contributed to expanding my love of foreign covers of songs.
So far, I’ve picked a few from the Gipsy Kings (Hotel California & My Way…ooooh, who doesn’t love music like this?) , Social Distortion ( Ring of fire. God, I just love that tune.) and since Napster didn’t have alot of the other ones, I’ve bookmarked the thread for future references. I won’t admit it publically, but I also rekindled my tigerbeat crush with Ricky Martin and feel like a hip teen again by rediscovering Talking Heads
One question, that Sex Pistols version of Johnny B Goode is it suppose to be just screaming and no musical evidence whatsoever of the original tune? Or am I just not that savvy? Cause I kinda liked it in a morbid way.
Sweet! There are a couple really good song suggestions in this list. The Life Acquatic Soundtrack has some great Portuguese covers of David Bowie. TheSpanishVersion.com has a entire catalog of Spanish language covers of American and English pop songs. http://thespanishversion.com I like Santiago’s cover of the Beach Boy’s classic Kokomo. America did an interesting Spanish language cover of their song Sister Golden Hair. And, Sheena Easton did a Spanish language album with covers of Telefone and The First Train. There are hundreds of Spanish language covers. David Lee Roth did an entire album in Spanish, it was a cover of his album Eat’m and Smile called Sonrisa Salvajae.
It’s not terrible. It just sounds like a generic foreign language cover of an English language song.
Heh…nice zombie…get to pimp some songs I’ve been kind of obsessy with lately…
Three different Japanese female singers doing Green Day’s Basket Case:
Haruna Ikezawa (Warning, way more adorable than Basket Case has any rightto be.)
Nana Kitade (Warning, opens on LOUD feedback, and that kinda sets the tone for the whole song.)
Puffy (Warning…actually no warning on this one.)
Ikezawa and Puffy’s are both on all-cover albums (Puncolle ~voice actresses’ legendary punk songs collection, and PUFFY AMIYUMI X PUFFY respectively).
Others I like on each album:
Puffy:
Joining a Fanclub - original by Jellyfish.
Don’t Bring Me Down - original by ELO.
Puncolle:
Yuko Goto - Smells Like Teen Spirit - original by Nirvana.
Rie Tanaka - Anarchy in the UK - original by the Sex Pistols.
Mai Kadokawa - Pretty Fly For a White Guy - original by the Offspring.
And a couple by my favourite artist:
the brilliant green - Song 2 - original by Blur.
(One of the singles for the same album that was on had All Day and All of the Night as a b track, but that’s not on YouTube. I like it, though.)
And from one of the singer’s solo projects, Tommy february6:
I’m in the Mood For Dancing - original by the Nolan Sisters.
Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You - original by Frankie Valli.
I Only Want To Be With You - original by Dusty Springfield.
Most people don’t react to the song itself, though, their reaction is to that song having a Spanish language cover. And I have no idea what your second line means, unless it is “oh yeah, I can recognize the melody and have no idea what the lyrics say”. For people who are familiar with the lyrics of both versions, half the joke is in the contrast between them (“where the sky is always blue” becomes “where the sky is always grey”; the Skynyrds are coming back, the galegos had to emigrate; etc.)
Mago de Oz (with or without umlauts) always include some covers in their records; often the cover kicks the original’s ass. They published a book of covered rock ballads under the name of their then-singer (José Andrea): the lineup was Mago’s usual, but they figured since the material deviated from what their fans would expect it was best to change the banner. This link is to the part of their official webpage dedicated to tribute and collaborative albums.