MP3: R.E.M. & William Burroughs - Star Me Kitten

Here'a another one of my favourite cover versions. It's basically the instrumental version of R.E.M.'s Star Me Kitten, which is course from their 1992 classic Automatic For The People. The twist is that it's sung by writer/legend/junkie/genius William S. Burroughs, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He's one of those people, like Tom Waits or Orson Welles, that just has such an incredible voice that anything they do automatically sounds amazing. This cover version is funny, disturbing, and absolutely brilliant.

It's taken from a 1996 record called Songs In The Key Of X: Music From And Inspired By The X-Files, which was a really rather brilliantly compiled collection, including songs from Soul Coughing, Foo Fighers (with an excellent cover of Gary Numan's Down In The Park), Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds with Red Right Hand, plus Filter, Frank Black, Meat Puppets, Danzig, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Elvis Costello & Brian Eno, Rob Zombie & Alice Cooper, and um...PM Dawn. It's an amazing record, and served as my first introduction to some of my favourite artists (I think I must have had quite good taste for an 11 year old).

It was also one of the first CD's I knew of to feature hidden tracks which were found in the minus time before the first track, namely two amazing and obscure tracks from The Dirty Three, the first being a 6 minute alternate version of their song Better Go Home Now featuring a spoken word performance from Nick Cave, and called "Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum" (Dread the Passage of Jesus, For He Will Not Return), and the second being a Dirty Three cover of the X-Files theme. If you get a chance to pick this up, don't think twice, it's probably one of the best TV tie-ins CDs you'll ever here. You can get ultra cheap second hand copies at amazon.co.uk. That's all for now, have a good saturday!

Quick update: If you wanna hear that new Killers single (and everyone seems to), get over to Obscure Sound.

R.E.M. - Star Me Kitten (Feat. W.S. Burroughs) - MP3