“The most exciting woman on earth,” Orson Welles once called Eartha Kitt. Unfortunately for us, she made antiwar statements during a visit to the Johnson White House and was essentially blackballed in America for years. Our loss was Europe’s gain.

Here she is, at the age of 81 and looking a good 30 years younger. Astonishing. See for yourself:

...if we don’t change our ways, someone will be singing the American version of this song one hundred years from now. John McCain’s name will be an integral part of the song unless we can learn to get along. Oh well, I’m singing to the choir. The great unchurched masses who want you and me to be left behind probably will never change their ways.

Who’s young enough to remember this one?

Quoth Eno: “I’m an anti-musician. I don’t think the craft of music is relevant to the art of music.”

“Dead Finks Don’t Talk is the most randomly generated of my songs. I wrote the lyrics at home with my girl-friend with a cassette of the backing track from the studio. I sang whatever came into my mind as the song played through. Frequently they’re just nonsense words or syllables. First I try for the correct phonetic sound rather than the verbal meaning. Off the top I was singing ‘oh-dee-dow-gubba-ring-ge-dow.’ So I recorded these rubbish words and then I turned them back into words. It’s the exact opposite of the technique used in phonetic poetry where words are changed into pure sounds. I take sounds and change them into words.”

Oh cheeky cheeky
Oh naughty sneaky
You’re so perceptive
And I wonder how you knew.

But dead finks don’t walk too well (oh no)
A bad sense of direction (oh no)
And so they stumble round in threes (oh no)
Such a strange collection.

Oh, you headless chicken
Can those poor teeth take so much kicking?
You’re always so charming
As you make your way up here.

And dead finks don’t dress too well
No discrimination
To be a zombie all the time
Requires such dedication.

“Oh please sir, will you let it go by,
’Cos I failed both tests with my legs both tied
In my place the stuff is all there
I’ve been ever so sad for a very long time.

My my, they wanted the works:
Can you this? and that? I never got a letter back
More fool me, bless my soul
More fool me, bless my soul.”

Oh perfect masters
They thrive on disasters
They all look so harmless
Till they find their way up here.

But dead finks don’t talk too well
They’ve got a shaky sense of diction
It’s not so much a living hell
It’s just a dying fiction.