Neil Innes, ‘the 7th Python’, dies aged 75
Comic genius and musician behind Rutles and Bonzos
HE was the genius who was inspired by The Beatles, embellished Monty Python and was, unintentionally, an inspiration for Oasis.
But musician Neil Innes, whose death at 75 was announced yesterday, mostly avoided the stardom accorded to those he worked with.
The songwriter and comedian, who had not been ill and toured this year, died suddenly on Sunday from natural causes in France, where he had lived for a number of years, his agent said.
The son of a soldier, Essex-born Innes found fame in the mid-Sixties in the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The quirky group’s 1968 No 5 hit single I’m The Urban Spaceman was written by Innes.
It was produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym ‘Apollo C Vermouth’, and Innes and the Bonzos also performed in The Beatles’ Magical Mystery
‘Songs touched everyone’s heart’
Tour film. Through the band’s appearances on the children’s show Do Not Adjust Your Set, he met Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, who – along with John Cleese and Graham Chapman – would form Monty Python. Innes became known as the ‘Seventh Python’ because of his contributions.
He wrote songs and sketches for their final TV series in 1974 and played ‘Brave’ Sir Robin’s minstrel in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
Innes, who also appeared in Life Of Brian, was one of only two nonPythons credited as a writer for the TV series, alongside Douglas
Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
Together with Idle, Innes then created the Rutland Weekend Television sketch show. It spawned The Rutles – an affectionate Beatles pastiche in which Innes played Ron Nasty, a parody of John Lennon, and Idle played Dirk McQuickly, based on Paul McCartney
– resulting in All You Need Is Cash, a 1978 mockumentary about the ‘Prefab Four’.
Innes had a BBC show, The Innes Book Of Records, and in the 1980s worked on children’s TV in The Raggy Dolls – which he voiced and composed music for – Puddle Lane, The Riddlers and Tumbledown Farm. In the 1990s, Innes sued
Oasis, claiming their 1994 hit Whatever borrowed portions of his 1973 song How Sweet To Be An Idiot. The case was settled with Innes receiving a songwriting credit.
Yesterday a statement from his wife of 53 years Yvonne, whom Innes met when they were students at Goldsmiths College in London and with whom he had three sons and three grandchildren, said: ‘We have lost a beautiful, kind, gentle soul whose music and songs touched the heart of everyone and whose intellect and search for truth inspired us all.’
Cleese said he was ‘utterly dismayed’ to hear of Innes’s death ‘right out of the blue’ and paid tribute to ‘a very sweet man, much too nice for his own good... lovely writer and performer’.
Comedian Adrian Edmondson, who performed with Innes in a reformed version of the Bonzos in 2006, wrote on Twitter that he was ‘the most talented but least ambitious man I ever met, a real gent with a beautiful soul’.