“Battle Flag” by Lo Fidelity All-Stars featuring Pigeonhead and Pigeonhed

The Lo Fidelity All-Stars' "Battle Flag", from their 1998 album How to Operate With a Blown Mind, started life as somebody else's song. Pigeonhed, an American funk rock outfit, cut the original for their 1997 album The Full Sentence. A year later the All-Stars, a British big beat crew, remixed it for a Pigeonhed collection with the gloriously overstuffed title Flash Bulb Emergency Overflow Cavalcade of Remixes.

Credited to Lo Fidelity All-Stars featuring Pigeonhed, it came out as a single in November 1998, on Skint Records, with the songwriting credit split between the two acts. The All-Stars produced it with Martin Whiteman, who also plays keyboards and shares the engineering, and the rest of the credits read like a crew roll call: The Albino Priest on samplers and turntables, Andy Dickinson on bass, Johnny Machin on drums and Sheriff John Stone on extra keys. What comes out is funk rock pushed through the big beat blender, heavy on strut and menace.

At home it was only a minor hit, stopping at 36 on the UK Singles Chart, but American alternative radio took it to heart and pushed it to 6 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.