Listening to The Dead Kennedys' Too Drunk To F***, Jello Biafra's thrashy, riff-heavy satire on moronic partygoers, it's hard to imagine how anyone could see the potential for a breathy, bossa nova-style cover.

But French collective Nouvelle Vague did, reimagining the band's 1981 single with samba rhythms and drunken, flirtatious female vocals that lend an entirely different dimension to its lyrics about "drinking 16 beers and starting up a fight".

It was a similar story with The Clash's Guns Of Brixton, which, given the Nouvelle Vague treatment, becomes a slow, menacing, journey through lounge.

Originally intended as a fun, one-off project for producer/instrumentalists Marc Collins and Oliver Libaus, the group's self-titled 2004 album of reworked post-punk songs proved a surprise hit, tapping into the nostalgic fondness for unlikely cover versions mined by Mike Flowers Pops and Richard Cheese.

They followed it up with Bande A Part in 2006, which featured a sweet rendition of Billy Idol's Dancing With Myself and a farcically daft cover of The Cramps' Human Fly.

Collins says: "I was a New Wave fan and, after I became a producer and composer, I realised listening to these songs that they were beautiful. I wanted to imagine a very different way of arranging them but keeping the music and lyrics the same."

The first album used young French vocalists who had no prior knowledge of the songs they were performing, an approach unlikely to win approval from fans of Ian Curtis' heartfelt lyrics, but one Collins thinks gave the tracks a fresh feel.

"When you're really fond of a song maybe you just try to imitate it and sing it like the original," he says.

"When you don't know the song you can do what you want - there's a freedom to it.

"And the thing with the Eighties was the production was not so good then, so there is more for us to work with."

Collins says the group will probably record a third - and final - album shortly, though he is not sure what they will cover on it.

He adds: "I think with three albums that is enough - you can feature most of the best music from that period in three albums."

And what of the suggestion that they are merely a novelty band?

Collins dismisses this with the continued popularity of their music.

"It was just an idea that I got for the first album - it was a one-off project," he says. "But after we made it we realised we had done something more interesting - there was something stronger there.

"The audience response was incredible so we decided to keep on doing it. Now we are not considered a novelty covers group.

"Most of the time we're playing in front of people who don't even know the original songs, so they come purely to see the Nouvelle Vague version."

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