Cover Me, Imħabba: Why Malta Falls Head-Over-Heels for Reimagined Classics

On a sticky August night in Valletta, the bronze doors of the Manoel Theatre creak open and the crowd that spills onto Strait Street is humming the same chorus: “Għanja ta’ l-Arġent”, but not the 1970s original by Enzo Gusman. Tonight it’s Nadine Axisa’s stripped-down jazz trio version, slowed to a crawl, her voice brushing against the melody like sea-spray on limestone. Phones shoot up, videos fly onto TikTok, and within 48 hours the clip has more views than the population of Gozo. Everyone already knew the song; what they hadn’t expected was to fall in love with it again.

Welcome to the peculiar Maltese magic of the cover version—our tiny archipelago’s favourite musical time-machine.

Ask any DJ at Glitch, Rockna or Coconut Grove and they’ll tell you covers are the cheat-code for instant euphoria. Drop Red Electric’s reggae spin on “Viva Malta” and a hen-party from Manchester hugs a table of Żabbar pensioners. That shared spark is no accident. In a country where 85 % of radio hours are still Maltese-language playlists, familiar lyrics act like sonic passport stamps: we all recognise them, but the stamp is fresh.

Why, though, do some covers become folklore while others vanish after one Carnival? Psychologists call it the “mere-exposure effect on steroids”: our brains crave novelty yet cling to the safety of the known. A great cover walks the tightrope between déjà vu and surprise. The recipe is extra potent in Malta because our collective memory is so compressed. When Ira Losco re-recorded “Fejn Staħbejtli” as a torch ballad for the 2023 Valletta Film Festival, half the audience had sung it at primary school assemblies; hearing it slowed to 66 bpm felt like time folding in on itself.

Local musicians have learned to weaponise that feeling. Singer-songwriter Matthew James Borg admits he road-tests covers in village band clubs first. “If Uncle Tony from the fireworks committee taps his foot, I know I’ve hit the sweet spot between nostalgia and rebellion.” The clubs—those echoing baroque boxes in Siġġiewi, Qormi, Żejtun—are Malta’s unofficial A&R labs. Brass bands that once marched festa marches now rearrange Dua Lipa for tenor horns; their YouTube channels rack up subscribers faster than Spotify ads.

Economics plays a role, too. With no major record labels on the island, covers are low-risk currency. Wedding singers can triple their fee by slipping in a ska version of “Xemx” right after “Uptown Funk”. Meanwhile, bars in Paceville discovered that a bilingual mash-up keeps punters drinking: one Bud Light for every “ħabib” they recognise in the chorus.

But the deepest pull is cultural. Malta’s identity is a palimpsest—Phoenician, Arab, Norman, British—each layer visible if you squint. A cover song does the same in three minutes. When The Travellers release a synth-pop take on a 19th-century għana ballad, they are literally remixing heritage. The band’s frontman Chris Cardona says fans message him saying the track helped them talk to nanniet about the old dockyard songs. In a country where emigration has scattered families from Melbourne to Toronto, a shared cover becomes a postcard that arrives everywhere at once.

Technology turbo-charges the phenomenon. Instagram Reels shot on Comino’s Blue Lagoon now soundtrack foreign tourists discovering “Qalb ma’ Qalb” via local buskers. The algorithm doesn’t care that the original was a Labour Party campaign jingle; it only registers that Maltese lipsyncs are going viral. Suddenly, a song once trapped in political memory is reborn as summer-love background music.

Not everyone applauds. Purists argue that constant covers suffocate new Maltese songwriting. Yet the numbers say otherwise: sales of original Maltese singles rose 27 % last year, precisely because covers funnel listeners toward local artists on streaming platforms. Like pastizzi leading to rabbit stew, the gateway drug works.

Back at the Manoel, Nadine Axisa takes her bow. A teenager in the front row wipes away tears; her grandmother beside her is doing the same. Between them, three generations of Maltese memory are harmonising in real time. The song is old, the arrangement new, the feeling unmistakably ours. And that, ultimately, is why we can’t quit certain cover versions: they let us time-travel without ever leaving the island.