OK, I've got enough of the Comic Book Shop Guy in me to appreciate ranking worst things. The Music Choice tv channel did a viewer's poll for the worst ever Beatles covers.

The winner was William Shatner's version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds". Now this may be the most infamous Beatle cover, but it is far from the worst. Actually, his dramatic reading is fairly amusing (at least halfway on purpose- I think), particularly as he's reading the line "look for the girl with her head in the clouds and she's GONE!!!"

PM Dawn seems to be getting undeserved disrespect here. What's so awful about their Norweigan Wood?

The Candy Flip version of "Strawberry Fields Forever" especially doesn't deserve to be on a worst list. It's actually a pretty good straight cover. The singer won't make me forget John Lennon, but still.

I've got a couple of crappy suggestions to add to the pile in their place. For someone who was a serious world class singer, Bing Crosby really stunk up "Hey Jude". He even made it the title song for an album Hey Jude/Hey Bing. He crooned the tuned so blithely that there was no telling from his performance that he recognized that Jude was sad.

In the range of unbelievably, all-time jaw-droppingly bad though- the true WORST EVER BEATLES COVER, you really must see the video of Kylie Minogue from the Ono sponsored 1991 Lennon - A Tribute live concert video. She did a really incredibly glib dance version of "Help" with the cheesiest gay black dancers she could find doing this campy choreography. Oh yeah, and one of them did a little rap to top it off. It's almost worth the price of the video just for this, especially sandwiched directly between bits of U2 and Roy Orbison singing the same song. [There are other much better performances that make this actually an exceptionally good video.]