Sing That Again Trivia Quiz

Answer: Don't Stand So Close to Me

Sting and Stewart Copeland were never the happiest bedfellows. Indeed the band had been apart for two years by the time they came to compile their greatest hits. On the eve of the recording sessions for the album, Stewart Copeland fell from a horse and broke his collarbone. Unable to use his arms to bash the drums, Copeland used his sequencer to record his part. However, Sting was insistent that his machine was better equipped for the job. The stress of this one decision made the band members realise that they had no desire to sit together in a studio to record all their songs, so they called it quits after just the one track.

"Don't Stand So Close To Me", a song about a schoolgirl with a crush on her teacher, features a reference to Nabokov's 1955 novel, "Lolita". The original version of the song hit the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 and reached number one in the UK in 1980. The re-recorded version, known as "Don't Stand So Close To Me '86" peaked at 24 in the UK charts.

Answer: 1999

When "1999: The New Master" was recorded in late 1998, Prince had been in dispute with his record label, Warner Bros for five years. Claiming that he was a slave and the label was stifling his creativity, he stopped using his name and used a symbol to represent him on his records.

Prince claimed at the time that he had already re-recorded all of his back catalogue. However, "1999" was the only one to see the light of day and reaction to it was lukewarm at best. Prince seemed uninterested and soon moved on. His contract with Warner Bros was due to expire in 2000 and with it he went back to producing new material, the first of which was the appropriately titled "Emancipation". 2000 also saw him return to using his given name of "Prince" and consigned the love symbol to history.

Answer: Electric Light Orchestra

"Mr. Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra", released in 2012, started with Lynne deciding that he wanted to use his many years of experience as a producer to see if he could come up with a better version of the title track. As he explained, "When I listen to the old versions they don't sound the way I thought they did when I first wrote and recorded them."

He started with a re-recording of "Mr. Blue Sky" on his own and decided that the result had achieved his objective. So, he set about working through the remainder of the ELO catalogue. The resulting album proved to be a commercial success, reaching the top ten of the UK album charts.

Answer: Def Leppard

Def Leppard were in the fortunate position that their music label, Universal, could not do anything with their back catalogue recordings without the band's permission. So when the band deemed the level of compensation paid for the download of their MP3 files to be "unfair", they fell out with Universal and sought a way to take ownership of the situation.

They banned the label from making any of their albums available for download and set about re-creating all their old songs in new recordings. There were significant challenges in re-creating the sounds of the originals; technology had moved on; and so had the band members--as 52-year-old lead singer Joe Elliott admitted, he no longer had a 22-year-old's voice.

But despite the hard work, the re-recording met with the approval of the band and the original producer, Mutt Lange and the new recordings were made available in the digital sphere.

Answer: Unplugged

The original idea behind "MTV Unplugged" was that bands would play their usual songs without any amplified instruments (except for microphones of course). The series began in 1989 but it was with the participation of high profile artists such as Paul McCartney in 1991 that the show truly broke out to the mainstream. Clapton's appearance came in 1992 and was recorded in a studio in London.

He recorded a number of songs and the album of the whole performance sold more than ten million copies. But it was "Layla" that left the lasting impression.

It was released as a single, reaching number 12 in the Billboard Hot 100 and winning the Grammy for single of the year. It has become as much of a pop standard as the legendary original.

Answer: The Abbey Road Sessions

Kylie Minogue first came to prominence thanks to her acting in the Australian soap opera, "Neighbours". When she released her first single in her home nation, "The Loco-Motion", the lights marked "highly marketable commodity" shone in the heads of the record producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman. They got her in to their offices in London and, while she was in the waiting room, wrote a song for her called "I Should Be So Lucky" and the rest was history. The speed with which it was written says a lot about Minogue's output with SAW - it was simple and formulaic, but undoubtedly catchy and proved very successful.

Returning to the songs in 2012, Kylie gave them a new sound that was anything but formulaic; orchestral arrangements gave the songs greater depth; and Kylie's more mature singing style gave the words greater resonance. The result proved a hit with critics and audience alike, reaching number two in the UK album charts and number seven in her native Australia.

Answer: Squeeze

Glenn Tilbrook, singer and songwriter with Squeeze, was another artist who was dissatisfied with his record company. Having no ownership or control over their previous recordings, the band chose to re-record their entire greatest hits album in order to provide advertisers with a cheaper option should they wish to use any of the songs in their work. Tilbrook admitted that the album had been hard work to record and offered very little to fans other than the opportunity to work out where the new versions differed from the originals but he declared himself "perversely pleased with it" as an album.

Answer: John Lee Hooker

Performing in a part of the United States in the 1950s that was still blighted by segregation, Hooker was a second class citizen and was paid accordingly. However, his music was anything but second class. His style of blues was quite unique and subsequent imitators have not come close to repeating it.

A classic country blues style was fused with boogie woogie and over the top was Hooker's original talking, growling vocal. His biggest international hit came in the 1960s with "Boom Boom", by which time Hooker was a veteran of the music scene with over 100 releases to his name (and others).

It was nearly 20 years later when he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame and another decade passed before the Grammys recognised him with a lifetime achievement award.

Answer: Plagiarism

The album consisted of 19 re-workings of songs they had previously released including two versions of their biggest hit, "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us", which had reached number two in the UK charts in 1974. One of the new versions of the song, recorded with Faith No More, saw them re-enter the UK top 40 chart for the first time in 18 years, albeit 40 was as high as it got.

Answer: The death of Diana, Princess of Wales

The new version certainly struck a chord with the grieving British public who soon made it the best-selling UK single of all time. The records for US singles and worldwide bestseller soon followed and total sales were claimed by "Guinness World Records" of over 30 million copies.

Elton John, a personal friend of Diana, performed the song live just once; at Diana's funeral.