“Everybody loves it”: the 1982 album William Shatner called “the greatest of them all”
If William Shatner is associated with one thing, it is Star Trek. You can’t fault him, for he is a true science fiction onscreen icon, one of the first to ever do it, and he was brilliant, but some people also associate him with music, and they probably shouldn’t, to be honest.
The reason they do that is for almost as long as he has been acting, Shatner has been doing spoken word covers of popular songs by other artists, and then releasing them himself, as far back as 1968, in fact, when he put out The Transformed Man. That was an LP of covers like Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by The Beatles, but with Shatner dramatically talking the lyrics rather than singing them.
Now, to give him his due, this was something of a cash-in due to his fame as Captain James T Kirk, leader of the Starship Enterprise, who he was still playing at the time, and so the artwork of the album reflected that, with a ‘futuristic’ typeface and the name of his Star Trek character emblazoned on the cover. That’s fine, everyone’s got to get that bag, as they say on Instagram.
But that was nigh-on 60 years ago, and somehow Shatner has managed to drag this ‘just talk over other people’s songs’ schtick out decade after decade, despite it being something literally anybody could do, as long as they have a voice and access to a recording studio. Oh, and some famous mates to rope in occasionally to add some legitimacy to it all.
Things reached a nadir in the 1970s, when Shatner decided to take things further and would sit on a stool on the telly in full black tie, smoking incessantly and performing painful jazz versions of songs like Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’. It was rubbish; I don’t care how many Klingons you’ve zapped, but it was inexcusable.
And Shatner is still at it even as he approaches 100 years of age, putting out an album as recently as 2024’s So Fragile, So Blue, which was produced by Ben Folds Five, and a single called ‘I Want to Be a Tree’. In fact, the only real period of time when Shatner didn’t bother a recording studio much was the 1980s, during which he perhaps let actual musicians get on with it, including Michael Jackson.
Shatner cited Jackson’s world-conquering 1982 album Thriller as his favourite of all time, telling MusicRadar, “This album is a no-brainer. It just might be the greatest of them all. Everybody loves it, of course, it’s all wonderful. We’ve seen him perform it, and the image of him on stage captures our imagination perhaps more than anything else. He was truly a supreme performer.”
Jackson, who has gone through a massive revival recently thanks to the Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic Michael this year, was indeed a supreme performer, but he comes with an awful lot of baggage that the TikTok teens don’t really know about, possibly because the film’s producers came to an agreement with his estate to leave all the troubling sections of his life out completely.
Thriller remains the best-selling album in music history, shifting around 70million copies since its release, and it was nominated for a record-breaking 12 Grammys, winning eight, making it the most critically awarded album too.
