Okay, so this isn’t strictly speaking a Hallowe’en song. T’ain’t No Sin has a long and illustrious recorded history, mostly focusing on the song’s commandment to cast off your clothes and shake your booty down to the ground. Perhaps a little unconventional and unseemly back in the day but certainly nothing sinister. Not till Tom Waits got his hands on it anyway…
For his opera ‘The Black Rider’, Waits recruited the help of none other than William Burroughs to record their own version of the tune. Burroughs’ scratch spoken delivery and Waits’ disharmonic backing render the original tune unrecognisable. In the process the refrain “T’ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones” becomes altogether more ghastly and unnerving. Well done boys. Well done indeed.
