The Daily Telegraph

Neil Innes

Comedy musician feted by the rock aristocrac­y who also collaborat­ed with the Monty Python team

- Neil Innes, born December 9 1944, died December 29 2019

NEIL INNES, who has died aged 75, was a comedy musician who achieved the possibly unique feat of excelling in both department­s. With the Bonzo Dog Band in the 1960s, the Beatles parody The Rutles and Monty Python in the 1970s, and then his own television show, The Innes Book of Records, he created musical pastiches that invariably rose above the form and frequently transcende­d their origins.

For a select band of passionate admirers, Innes never received the recognitio­n his wry, witty, occasional­ly wistful songs deserved, but he did not care; close contact with superstars including the Pythons and The Beatles had left him convinced that true fame came at too high a price.

Equal parts artist and clown (he preferred “idiot”), over a five-decade career he maintained a smile and a mischievou­s twinkle in the eye despite neglect, lawsuits and celebrity squabbles that might have pushed others to ruin and despair.

Innes first came to notice in the mid-1960s in the Bonzo Dog Band, an assembly of art students with a shared taste for Surrealism and bad English jazz from the 1920s. Innes, the pianist, was the only musician of any accomplish­ment; indeed, memberwith­out-portfolio Roger Ruskin Spear was more keen on blowing up robots onstage than playing his saxophone. Still, Innes’s musical curiosity – allied with the sharp wordplay of the eccentric singer Viv Stanshall – gave rise to four albums blending musichall whimsy, social satire and conceptual art.

It made the group unlikely favourites of the rock aristocrac­y, and at the height of psychedeli­a they found themselves playing at the undergroun­d UFO Club alongside Pink Floyd, and opening for The Who, The Kinks and Led Zeppelin – though they were as likely to perform a set of callisthen­ics as music.

At the San Francisco rock venue the Fillmore West in 1968, a deeply stoned crowd was terrified when Ruskin Spear’s false head exploded during the noise-barrage of We Are Normal (inspired by Marat/sade), at which point they broke into a campy version of Elvis’s Blue Suede Shoes.

The Beatles were among their admirers, and invited them to appear in their 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour; its negative reception led Innes to joke: “I think we probably dragged them down.”

The following year Paul Mccartney produced their only hit, Innes’s catchy ditty I’m the Urban Spaceman, after Viv Stanshall moaned to him in a club that their record company was demanding a single. Perverse as ever, they chose to credit Mccartney as Apollo C

Vermouth, though word soon spread and the single reached No 5.

Burnt out by relentless touring, however, the band split soon after. While most of them drifted back into art, Innes reconnecte­d with a group of comedians they had met when working as house band on the children’s television programme Do Not Adjust Your Set in 1967.

One of them, Eric Idle, invited Innes to warm up the audience on their new show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and he quickly became the troupe’s chief musical collaborat­or, moving onscreen as a performer and even sketch-writer (the only non-python credited apart from Douglas Adams) for the final series in 1974.

He also joined them on tour in Britain and America, and made memorable contributi­ons to the Python movies, including The Holy Grail (1975) as the Minstrel to Eric Idle’s Brave Sir Robin, zealously listing how his master was not afraid to have “his head smashed in and his heart cut out and his liver removed and his bowels unplugged”.

The Rutles first appeared as a sketch on Rutland Weekend Television, Idle’s post-python 1975 BBC Two series, for which Innes was recruited as musical collaborat­or. An expanded “mockumenta­ry”, All You Need Is Cash, starred Idle as Mccartney figure Dirk Mcquickly and Innes as Lennon stand-in Ron Nasty, alongside talkinghea­d interviews with real rock stars such as Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, and jokes about recording albums on “tea”.

Shown in America in March 1978, it was a ratings disaster, but its afterlife was assured by Innes’s songs, which pastiched with enormous wit, skill and affection (fabulously over-the-top Liverpudli­an accents included) every period of The Beatles’ career from rock’n’roll wannabes to progressiv­e explorers.

George Harrison, who appeared in the film, told them he preferred their

Penny Lane pastiche Doubleback Alley to the original. John Lennon also enjoyed it but the lawyers pounced and Innes, to his eternal torment, was forced to credit all the soundtrack’s songs to Lennon and Mccartney.

Payback, both karmic and financial, came belatedly when the heavily Beatles-indebted Oasis were instructed to list Innes as co-writer of their 1994 hit Whatever, found to be demonstrab­ly similar to his 1973 song

How Sweet To Be an Idiot.

The Rutles returned in 1996 with a new album, Archaeolog y, inspired by The Beatles’ archive set, Anthology, but Idle and Innes fell out over ownership of the group so often that Harrison was heard to comment, “You’re supposed to be sending us up. You’re not supposed to be emulating us.”

Innes was incontrove­rtibly leader of his next project, The Innes Book of

Records (1979-81). A prototype musicvideo show for BBC2 he had originally wanted to call Parodies Lost, it aspired stylistica­lly to the “Potter’s Wheel” intermissi­ons of the early days of television.

Each show featured a variety of different songs and settings – Edwardian parlour songs set against disco and forays into punk and easy listening – interspers­ed with archive footage, mime and spoken word. Remarkably, it lasted three series and found up to seven million viewers.

Drawing on the solo material Innes had released to little fanfare between collaborat­ions, it was also the purest expression of his unique talents, and strong evidence in favour of his favourite quotation, Duke Ellington’s “There are two kinds of music – good music and the other kind.”

Neil Innes was born in Danbury, Essex, on December 9 1944, though he spent much of his childhood in Germany, where his father, an amateur painter, served in the Army. After Thorpe Grammar School in Norwich, he went on to the city’s School of Art, transferri­ng, aged 19, to Goldsmiths College, where he lodged with a lecturer, Vernon Dudley Bohaynowel­l. The latter recruited him into what was originally the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band, named in homage to the Dada art movement, supposedly via a game of Consequenc­es between the members.

In the 1980s, bruised by his experience­s with the music industry, Innes moved into children’s television, providing narration and scripts as well as music for the long-running Ragg y Dolls (1986-1994), among others. He was, he recalled, “happy as Larry” in this new world, but continued to perform solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival through the decade before making another unexpected move with the publicatio­n in 1992 of Gloom, Doom, and Very Funny Money, a book about “Economics for half-wits” that expressed a growing bafflement that the world had not lived up to the promise of the 1960s.

He forged on regardless, on radio with the gently philosophi­cal Innes Own World (2003), and revisiting his past with modest tours as The Rutles, solo, and with sporadic Bonzo reunions that culminated in a new album, Pour l’amour des Chiens (2007).

When a 2008 documentar­y about him, The Seventh Python, played on his low profile by showing his picture to people in the street to zero recognitio­n, his reaction was laughter: “I’ve never been someone very interested in playing the fame game,” he said. “It’s a lot more fun being a Rutle than a Beatle. It really is.”

Neil Innes married Yvonne Hilton in 1966; she survives him with their three sons.

 ??  ?? Innes on stage in 1975 and, below (second from left), with members of the Monty Python troupe: he considered himself a profession­al ‘idiot’
Innes on stage in 1975 and, below (second from left), with members of the Monty Python troupe: he considered himself a profession­al ‘idiot’
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom