Neil Innes, Monty Python partner and Beatles parodist, dies at 75
English musician and humorist Neil Innes worked closely with two of the biggest cultural juggernauts his nation ever produced — the Beatles and Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe — yet never became a household name himself, a goal he often espoused in interviews.
“I’ve been very close to people who have had all this terrible fame and renown — it’s really not for me,” Innes, who died Sunday at age 75, told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “I’d rather be able to talk to people, my neighbors, or be able to be in a shop and nobody thinks I’m a freak. If that means I only do tiny things here and there, then that’s fine. At least it’s working the way I like it to work.”
Innes died of natural causes at his home in recent years near Toulouse, France, according to a statement released by his family. “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,” the statement said. “He died of natural causes quickly without warning and … without pain.”
His approach worked for more than a half-century, when he first gained some measure of celebrity in England as a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, whose humor-laden music often skewered the loftier aspirations of the rapidly expanding ’60s rock music scene.
“The Beatles used to come to gigs,” Innes told the Times in 2003. “A lot of bands that were in the god strata used to be dead jealous of the Bonzos ’cause we could muck about, and they couldn’t. Eric Clapton said, ‘I wish I could do what you were doing.’ … ’Cause it’s too much for anybody to take all this idolatry.”
A decade later Innes took more jabs at such idolatry, helping create one of the savviest musical parodies of the 20th century, the Beatles send-up project called the Rutles, which affectionately lampooned the Fab Four with its faux retelling of the history of a band whose legacy “would last a lunchtime.”
Innes also was dubbed “the seventh Python” for his close association with the comedy troupe, for which he wrote songs and appeared in films including “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” (he wrote the song “Brave Sir Robin” and appeared as the minstrel who sang it) and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”
‘A wise, funny and beautiful man’
“Utterly dismayed to hear about Neil Innes. Right out of the blue,” Python founding member John Cleese tweeted on Monday. “A very sweet man, much too nice for his own good. Lovely writer and performer. When he worked with Python on our stage show, I listened every night to ‘How Sweet to be an Idiot’ on the Tannoy (loudspeakers). Very sad.”
Others who combined comparable passions for pop music and humor reacted quickly as well.
“I wanted Neil Innes to live forever,” actor-musician-comedian Michael McKean, aka David St. Hubbins of the mock rock group Spinal Tap, posted to his Twitter account. “A wise, funny and beautiful man.”
His Spinal Tap bandmate, humorist-writer-filmmaker Harry Shearer, tweeted “RIP the quite brilliant Neil Innes.”
Little-known among music fans in general, Innes was revered by musicians, especially those in England regularly exposed to his songs with the Bonzos and in the late ’60s on a children’s TV series “Do Not Adjust Your Set” that was the launchpad for future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin and which counted their soon-tobe troupe members Cleese and Graham Chapman among its fans.
Innes may be most widely recognized for the songs he crafted for the Rutles, ingenious original songs that evoked the style and sound of the Beatles without directly imitating them.
The idea was born after “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” TV series ended its run in England, and Idle launched a new show called “Rutland Weekend Television,” a parody of a low-budget British TV series that regularly included musical numbers provided by Innes.
Innes would become an adjunct member of the Pythons, one of only two people with writing credits for the troupe’s TV show — the other being “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams.
In recent years he had toured regularly, sometimes as a solo act and sometimes with Beatles tribute bands supporting his performances of the Rutles song catalog.
“He’s a great showman,” Palin told the Times in 2003. “As soon as he starts, people just love him. It’s a magic ingredient.”
Innes said he preferred intimate spaces to some of the massive venues he played when he appeared with the Pythons in their heyday.
“Who needs all the angst of big promotions and record companies and all that crap?” he asked in 2003. “I just don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to play to more than 500 people — 500 people’s too many.”