The Incredible Bongo Band’s cover version of Apache by The Shadows should probably have featured in my top 10 best ever covers as well as the top 10 songs ever used as samples. Oh well…

Cliff Richard’s backing band The Shadows may not strike you as a band who have been instrumental in the story of hip-hop. But through the Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of their song Apache, they have been.

The Incredible Bongo Band’s cover of Apache takes a track that was a popular guitar driven instrumental, and substitutes (unsurprisingly considering their name) a whole lot of bongos and other percussion for most of the guitars. And this cover has since been sampled by just about every major (and some not so major) hip-hop, house, drum & bass and dance act since the early 80s. These have included rap pioneers the Sugarhill Gang, Goldie on his epic Inner City Life & even the Future Sound of London.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a version of Apache by the Incredible Bong Band to link to, but I did stumble across a (rather bizarre) home-made video for it, which you can see below. In the meantime you should really only listen to this sort of thing on vinyl, so why not get Apache on 12″?

UPDATE: Due to this new service I’ve found at the lovely Napster, I can now give you Apache in all it’s glory… (the video underneath is still worth a look mind….)

Incredible Bongo Band – Apache