The Shat

There’s much to be said for the vocal abilities of William Shatner, his 1968 spoken word album The Transformed Man is legendary for its pause-filled and over-the-top interpretations of poetry, juxtaposed against popular song of that era. The Shat showed no shame as he mercilessly blundered through Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Mr. Tambourine Man and It Was a Very Good Year, shamelessy mashed against Theme from Cyrano, Hamlet and Spleen respectively. At the 1978 Science Fiction Awards, he performed a ruinous version of Elton John’s Rocket Man, whilst wearing a frilly shirt and smoking a fag.

Luckily for music, he then took a couple of decades off, whilst his efforts to date were ruthlessly parodied. Shatner re-emerged on the music scene in 1998, on the Ben Folds project Fear of Pop. This brief appearance gave rise to The Shat’s 2004 album Has Been, produced by Folds, with contributions from a few real musicians to make it a little less painful. In fact, Has Been did quite well on this front, seeing appearances from Folds, Henry Rollins, Adrian Belew and Joe Jackson, amongst others. Once again, Shatner rolled out the poetry, this time some of his own work, which was autobiographical in nature. Folds provided the music and the album managed some reasonable reviews. This was probably all on the strength of one track, a cover of Pulp’s Common People, featuring Joe Jackson ‘dueting’ with Shatner. The song is a Brit Pop classic, and the Shatner/Jackson version is undoubtedly the high-point of Has Been.

True to the spirit of The Shat’s musical mash-up career, some clever person has spent what appears to be a large amount of time mashing the song against clips from Filmation’s animated version of Star Trek. Without an official video to promote the song, I think this provides suitably entertaining visuals to accompany the tongue-in-cheek interpretation of Jarvis Cocker’s finest few minutes.