The Italian band Måneskin made its name in the U.S. with a crafty cover, of the Four Seasons’ “Beggin,'” and there were more where that came from during the band’s set Sunday night at Coachella: The group went to both ends of the pop/punk scale and memorably covered Britney Spears‘ “Womanizer,” followed by Iggy Pop and the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”
Although it may not exactly count as a cover, singer Damiano David also offered a partial recitation of one of the greatest movie speeches of all time — the climactic monologue from Charlie Chaplin‘s classic anti-fascist film “The Great Dictator” — as the introduction to a new, original song that was dedicated to Ukraine.
Probably not much of the young crowd immediately recognized the 1940 Chaplin speech, which was shortly followed by David yelling “Fuck Putin!” in the middle of the new song, “We’re Gonna Dance on Gasoline,” their last number of the night on the Mojave stage.
But there was mass recognition, and an outbreak of joy, as the “Eurovision” winners tore into Spears’ modern pop classic in a fercious fashion befitting the rest of their hard-rocking set. As with another already iconic cover from earlier in the weekend — Harry Styles doing “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” with an assist from its originator, Shania Twain — David took a song with a strong female point of view and did not bother doing any gender-switching in the lyrics.
“As you know, we really like doing covers,” the singer told the crowd. “More than how much we love doing covers, we love Britney Spears,” he aded.
