|
In the summer of 2000, television personality Alison Holloway interviewed
Neil Innes for a Court TV documentary about John Lennon and Mark
David Chapman. The program aired in October, but what was shown
on TV was a pale representation of all that Neil said during
the hour and a half interview. We were lucky enough to obtain a
copy of the complete, raw interview, and here it is, transcribed
in all its splendid rawnessness. (The text in blue made it into the show.) |
|
Neil, can you remember the first time you
heard the Beatles? Not exactly... I was at art school though... and I seem to remember at that time I was trying to sort of do things with primary colors, to see if I could make a red more important than a blue or a yellow on the page... and I remember "Love Me Do" being on the radio and thinking, that's quite nice, but it definitely... you know, they were around when I was at art school, and I remember when I came to go to London art school, Hornsey Art School, they asked me what I thought of the Beatles and I thought, that's a rather irrelevant question, so I didn't go there, even though they offered me a place. I just thought it was good pop music. Did it have an impact on you, did you feel it got to you at some point? The one that got to me, and I thought, this is elevating pop music to something else, was the haircut one, um, Penny Lane. I thought it was really good, I really loved the images and the production of it. It's the one that really made me first sit up and listen to them. Before that, it had been sort of rhythm and blues and, you know, good rock and roll. Did you see them perform in those early days? No. I mean obviously I saw them on television or something like that. I truly wasn't reeeally aware of them until I'd almost left and we'd formed the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Before we get into that, did... Describe... (muffled discussion by crew) (pause) "Speed again..." We can start again if you want. If you'd like to go with that last one... Yeah, it would... That's fine. (pause) Did you see them perform in those early days? Um.. no, not really, I certainly didn't go to concerts or anything like that... I knew they were around and they were causing a lot of people to scream and things, but I was a little, sort of above all that, in my own little cloistered art school world! (the shot didn't work, pause) Oh no, it was me! (laughs) (more laughter) (long pause) When did they actually stop performing, about 66, wasn't it? 66... 67 ... (long pause) Did you see them perform in those early days? 
No, no, not live, no, I was too busy being an art student and going
on... I was aware of their music and obviously things on the news
about screaming fans, and all this sort of thing, but I didn't really
pay that much attention to it. I thought the songs were rather good,
and they deserved to be up at number one where they were.Describe London in the 60s for me, and where did the Beatles fit into that picture? Well... I think London in the 60s was rather special, because I think that generation of teenagers didn't have to go to national service, and also the economic climate was rather good, Harold Macmillan was saying "you never had it so good." And I remember the feeling, never mind what job, you can pick a job, so there was this feeling, people of that age, that they could sort of challenge the establishment and do anything. You know, it's our turn to have a go at things. So in that climate, the Beatles were wonderful because they also, having started off as four guys in a van making agreeable rhythm and blues, their songwriting came up and up and up and seemed to echo the times. Was it just that they just came along at the right moment, or do you think Britain did feel that this was something they could get behind? No. Derek Taylor said a wonderful thing, that the Beatles didn't just catch the bus, they were the bus! A club called the Scotch of St. James... Scots... was the Scots or Scotch of St. James?... um, no, I don't think I ever went there. Why, did they play there or something? Yeah that was quite big at that time. Tell me about the lead up to the band. The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Well... we were all at art school in London, and I don't know how we really met, but it was sort of chance meetings that sort of... I heard about it from Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, who was living in the same house and he met Rodney and Vivian and some other people after the Royal College of Art, and they used to rehearse every Tuesday night, and they'd already got the name by then, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, they got that by pulling out things from a hat.. Bonzo Dog was this little cartoon character on seaside postcards and Dada was the anti-art movement at the turn of the century, and being a collection of people, and there was other things in there, but Bonzo Dog Dada Band came out, and we soon got tired of trying to explain what a turn of the century art movement was so we changed it to Doo-Dah. And I first met Vivian at a pub, an Irish pub in South London, and he was rather plump in those days, he came in through the door wearing Billy Bunter checked trousers, a black Victorian frock coat, these horrible little oval violet Pins Nez glasses, and he had a 
euphonium under his arm, and he also had huge, pink rubber false
ears, and I thought, well, this is an interesting character. So
I mean, the Bonzos were like that, and we just played in pubs. Just
sort of as art students, just sort of make some money. But as far
as the Beatles going on, that was all part of it. People were out
having a good time in those days. And I suppose jazz was as popular
as anything else.It got to a much wider audience, I mean what was the appeal, why did people support you, what did they get out of you? Well we didn't take it seriously. I think we sort of gently lampooned the more sort of look at me I'm wonderful show biz characters that were around, things like Sunday Night at the London Palladium. And I remember the Beatles doing the Royal Command Variety Show, and I think John said something like, if you don't want to clap your hands or something, rattle your jewelry... or something. He was always a bit mischievous. I think everybody loved him for that. Sort of slight irreverence. Well, a lot of irreverence really. Is that what you liked? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Because I think that generally young people then were saying, "Oh, stop going on about the war!" you know, to the older generation, and let's live a little, lets try and do this, and of course we were getting castigated for having long hair and silly clothes, but the more they made a fuss about it, the more we wore it. Quite mild compared with what goes on today, I mean, any old clothes. I think what's significant I think is it's the first generation to sort of make themselves known. I think it was the late 50s when somebody coined the word "teenager"? So I mean, we seem to think that teenagers have been with us for years and years and years, but it was, I think it really came into its own around the 60s. And ... hmmm.. I think arguably, by now, this area, social area, demographic, whatever, has been sort of neatly pigeonholed and targeted quite ruthlessly by people who sell things. Tell me more about the side of personality of John Lennon, you described there the wit, that side of him that perhaps was revealed over time, or was it there from the beginning, did you always know there was something different, special, whatever, about John? Yeah, I think, when you saw them, you just knew there was a sense of, you know, daring mischief... he was a bit like Vivian Stanshall in a way, or Viv was like him, in that there are certain people that can get away with anything, you know, and you got the feeling that John (a cell phone starts ringing) would do something outrageous, like ring up in the middle of an interview! (all laugh) (Brief cut) Neil, did you know from the beginning that there was something different about John Lennon? 
I think there was always this sense of mischief about him... I think
Vivian Stanshall also had this quality. He could get away with anything.
Anybody else would be outraged, but there's always this sort of
sense of fun that John had. Also you got the feeling that he wasn't
scared to say what was what. And if you look at it in school days
time, I think if anyone was going to drop a balloon full of cold
water onto the bully it would be someone like John. Or Vivian. They'd
get away with it. Maybe they never lost the sense of fairness that
a four year old has. Most of us become more cynical as time goes
by, that the world is the way it is and you can't change it. John
had that quality of knowing what was fair and what wasn't fair.
What was fun, what wasn't fun. And pushing it to the limit. Did he have a tremendous wit? Oh, yeah. I think so. Yeah. Saying something like that, the mind goes completely blank. But, yes he was. I mean, that was part of it. I mean, you got the feeling that in any situation he'd come back with a quick one-two. I mean the lines in Hard Days Night are nice, "I can get you on the stage, oh really, yes, it's down the right and down the left" and what have you. That was a reconstructed manufactured thing, but... I didn't know him well, personally. I was too shy, in fact, at the opportunities I had to sit down and talk at any length with him. I remember there was a Christmas party at Apple, and we'd done the Magical Mystery Tour or something like that, and there'd been a party for that, and I remember the party for the Magical Mystery Tour, the Beach Boys were there and we got up on stage and did a 20 minute version of "Oh Carol" with George on saxophone. And everyone was just having a good time. And similarly at the Apple Christmas party there was a room full of children with a Santa, and a conjurer, and things like that. And my three year old had wandered off into the room where the Hell's Angels were, and was sitting on a Hell's Angel's knee who was offering him sips of beer from his little finger. So I thought, uh... so I suppose I was slightly phased, but John and Yoko were sitting on the floor and John said, "Oh, hello" and I said, "oh, hello!" and I sort of scooped up my son... I mean, really, I would have loved to have spent some time with him, but I never did, and I've always regretted that. Later when he moved to New York, I had the opportunity to go round and see him, but I thought, what do you do? You go knock at the door and say "Oh John I really think your songs are good" or something like that... nahh! Everything I know is what I felt about the human being, the working class hero, really. Let's move on to Python. How did you get involved with Python? 
The Bonzos were invited to do a television show with Eric Idle and
Michael Palin and Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Denise Coffey and
David Jason as well. It was going to be called "Do Not Adjust Your
Set." And we made 26 of these, and in it you can see the embryonic
signs of how Python came about. Eric and Terry were already writing
for David Frost and people like that, and they'd done the Cambridge
Footlights, that sort of thing. The Bonzos were the Bonzos, they
were anarchy, you know, complete anarchy, and nonsense and mucking
about, so the two together, by the time we finished it, I think
Eric sort of suggested that they were influenced by the Bonzos.
So the Pythons had a sort of anarchic quality too, which meant you
didn't have to look for a punch line So I got involved because we'd
finished the end of the children's series "Do Not Adjust Your Set".
The Bonzos went to America and the others started forming Monty
Python with John Cleese and Graham Chapman. And of course Terry
was doing those wonderful animations in those days too. So by the
time we came back the Bonzos were sort of disintegrating. We stopped
arguing and became friends. And by the time we came back the Pythons
had become Pythons. And Eric Idle rang me up out of the blue one
day saying, what are you doing, and I said I'm just doing a bit
of writing and producing, and he said, come down to the television
studio, our warmup man is ill, and I said "I don't do warmups!"
and he said "It's 25 quid" and I said "Done!" Then we went off for
some supper, and then we started talking about making albums, and
it was a lot of fun. And I kind of missed, you know, being in an
outfit of sort of fairly wacky and off-the-wall people. And the
difference between the Pythons and the Bonzos was that the Pythons
just had a little bit more control over the wackiness than the Bonzos
did. The Bonzos were completely freefall anarchy and whatnot. If
anything new happened in what we did it was because somebody thought
of something that might put somebody else off, and if it got a laugh,
it stayed in.Throwing the Beatles into that mix, how would you describe the way perhaps the Pythons, the Bonzos and the Beatles intersect? We're all contemporaries in a way. The Beatles had actually stopped touring by the time the Bonzos actually went in to make their first record. I remember we went to Abbey Road to make a thing called "My Brother Makes the Noises For The Talkies", which is an old 30's thing, "my brother makes the noises for the talkies, there's not a single noise that he can't do" and there's lots of guns going off and cats meowing and liners leaving dock, all sorts of things like that. And funny enough, I'd been down the corridor, and I came back, and there, against the sunlit doors, were four figures in sillouhette, mop-topped figures in dark suits and sunglasses. And I thought, yes, it's the fabs, isn't it, of course, they record here too! And I snuck down the corridor to hear what they were doing, and I heard George's song "I Want To Tell You" with that wonderful F over E7, and I thought this is really great, this is cutting-edge stuff, and then went back into our little place going "my brother makes the noises for the talkies". So we were just going out and doing this kind of thing, and they were going their own way, much more in the studio. We have to thank them, or blame them if you like, for the concept album, or more importantly, multi-track recording, because they actually pioneered it, putting four four-track machines together to get 16 tracks. I mean, now you have 24-track machines linked up to other 24-track machines, but they were at the cutting edge of it all. I dare say if the stuff had been around then like it is now, they probably would have got in the van again, and performed live, because now you can do all the orchestral things. Anyway, I'm waffling around the question... we met up with them to do Magical Mystery Tour, because we were on the road with The Scaffold quite a bit, and Paul McCartney's brother Michael was in The Scaffold, and he suggested to Paul, you know, why don't you get the Bonzos in Magical Mystery Tour? And the thing is, Viv used to hang out with both Paul and John, and it was because Viv was hanging out with Paul that Paul came to produce the Urban Spaceman. So we sort of interlocked in that way, and we were already working with the people who then became Python. You see what I mean, it was just that we sort of bumped into each other. It was the 60s. What about sensibility-wise, I mean, how all the minds thought alike?  I can only speak personally, I sort of drifted from one situation to another. If I analyzed anything, it was what was going on at the time. That was the wonderful freedom about it, you didn't feel you had to target anybody. I don't think anybody thought about targeting anybody. It was what felt right, it was, you know, you did it. You didn't think will I upset anybody or will we get more people if we do this, you don't, you just do what makes you laugh and your friends laugh, and you build up a kind of sense of values in that way rather than having analysis on any given situation. The 60s were a good time to be young because you felt that's all you had to be. I dare say it probably feels the same now, but I think it was a little more, you know, making footprints in the snow, there weren't so many footprints in the snow. Now it looks like a rather badly-worked metaphor! Where is your place in Beatles myth and history? My place? Well I don't know... I mean, the thing was, the opportunity of making All You Need Is Cash, the Rutles, sort of came about by accident as well. I was doing a show with Eric called Rutland Weekend Television and he wrote skits and I wrote musical ideas. And one of the things I thought would be cheap and cheerful to do was a parody of a Hard Days Night, and Eric had an idea for a documentary maker who was so boring that the camera ran away from him. And we showed this on Saturday Night Live, and before I knew where we were, could I write 20 more Rutle songs by next Thursday lunchtime? So I sort of agreed to do this because George was sort of keen on it too. And you have to remember at that time there was real pressure for the Beatles to get back together again. And I'd always felt there was too much hysteria, the hurly-burly had got out of control, and I kind of in my own way wanted to say, hey, wait a minute, everybody, this is four guys who got in a van because they like rock and roll, and they happen to write some pretty good songs. And the kind of weirdness that was going on about how this so so important to everybody, I thought it would be fun to sort of remind everybody how this sort of thing starts, and also tell the story pretty tongue-in-cheek. And I'm pretty sure that's how George thought it would be fun as well. Let's demystify this, can't we all start again? Can't we tone the hysteria down? So I thought the Rutles was worthwhile, doing that, just to sort of... again, no more than a gut instinct, really, anything that wasn't quite Beatley enough, I used to say well it doesn't matter, we're the Rutles! Lazy really... but everybody on the Rutles, from people running around in Liverpool, actors, musicians, everybody knew the story, it was wonderful, you don't really need a script because everybody knew the story. I mean, the Beatles were so huge in everybody's lives ... when was that? That was when, by then John had... I think was thinking about putting out that last album he did with David Geffen's organization. But we'd done the City Center in New York, I'd done it with Python, around 76? Yes, 76, because it was the Bicentennial. Of the revolution or whatever. You touched on something there and that was bursting this balloon, if you like, of the myth of the Beatles, I mean, everyone was waiting, were they not, for the Beatles to somehow get back together again, and that's what Britain wanted, and when you came, do you think it did burst the bubble for them at a certain point? Not enough. It wasn't just Britain wanting them back together, the whole world wanted them back together again. I mean, this is probably the first time any sort of strummers had this sort of influence on the world. I remember people behaving in a very childish way, you know, government-level, about things, you know, the Great and the Good were doing terribly sort of like pompous and wagging their fingers about this kind of thing, but it didn't matter. People felt, you know, this is a chance to sort of stop some of the unfairness going on in the world. And John certainly focused people's attention on it. I mean, no one can take away anything from the song "Imagine." I mean, that is going to last and last and last for as long as human beings walk the planet and care about other human beings. Nothing will ever take that away. Nothing. 
The Rutles... did
it become more than you had anticipated starting off at?Well I'm sort of proud that the Rutles, when it was shown on prime-time television, was actually the lowest-rated show that ever appeared on prime time, it came a splendid 65th out of 65. I think "Charlie's Angels" won. But no, no one really picked up on it. It was joke-bypass in the early days. It was only later when it came out on video, I think, that people started to say, hang on, I get the joke! Because I suppose everyone was still so hotly involved in hoping that the Beatles would get back together again. And of course you know you can't, it's like the saying, let the butterfly go, because if you have it in your hand you'll kill it. But I mean, it was crazy, I mean, Lorne Michaels running this wonderful gag on Saturday Night Live. Because somebody had offered 3 million dollars to anyone who could get the Beatles back together, so he was offering 3 thousand dollars, and he got George Harrison on and waved the money in front of him saying George, this could be yours if you get the guys back together, and he said, what is it all for me, and he said, no no, you have to share it with the others, maybe you don't have to tell Ringo, that kind of joke. And that's how Eric got to host the show, because he said he could get the Beatles back together again for three hundred dollars. It was all good fun and nobody ever really thought it would go anywhere, except that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Like I said, no one was really analyzing anything or focus-grouping or targeting. It was quite innocent fun, really. How did that play out? How did... how do you see its course? Well it happened... it was very intense... Gary Weis, he's brilliant, he shot the thing from the shoulder, or the hip, so it had this wonderful documentary feel. Technically I think it's rather splendid. We got Neil Aspinal and the others who let us use other footage. There's real Beatle footage in there, matched in with our footage. In a way, it was done as a semiofficial biography, if you like. Tongue-in-cheek, with sort of, if you like, Liverpool humor. You know, not taking itself too seriously. And it took a long while for that to really sink into the psyche of the people who for one reason or another were getting weepy and dewy-eyed. But of course then the events of 1980, that was two years after the Rutles, I think its taken a long long time for people to see everything in perspective. That's why I did it, I thought, you know, nobody should go through this kind of heat and fame. I mean, the songs are good enough on their own. It's the music that counts with the Beatles. Their personality and all the nonsense, the knees bent running about behavior and screaming, that's not important. It was the music. Your role in it... was it kind of odd doing that role? I have to say I didn't particularly want to do the John role. I didn't particularly like the name Ron Nasty. But next to Michael Palin I suppose I'm sort of labeled as The Nice One. Some people say you don't get anywhere in the world being nice, but I've proved to the world you don't get anywhere being Nasty either. Who was Ron Nasty? A lot of it was me trying not particularly hard to be John, but every now and again I thought what would John say here? because we ad-libbed an awful lot, you know. So that bit about, what do you want to spend your money on, or something, this inane question... you have to remember it was quite good in its lampooning the documentaries of the day... and I remember saying, "I'd like to buy a squadron of tanks". Because partly I thought.. it was weird, because I wasn't trying desperately hard to be John, but I was just trying to sort of have John's attitude of things, and I thought that's all I needed to do, really, I mean, I'm not really an actor as such, but I mean, it was fun to just sort of get into another character in a way that you knew and admired, was mischievous, probably had been more daring than you were ... certainly a better songwriter... and a bit like Rod Hulll and Emu who used to be a character who had this rather mischievous bird on his hand and this bird would do outrageous things, but he couldn't do it without the bird. So you needed the dressing-up element of putting a moptop wig on and running around to come out with the ad-libs, really. But as I say everyone knew it, everyone knew the story, it was deeply embedded in everybody's psyche. Four lads can get in a van, go to Hamburg, come back, write a few songs, get turned down by a few record companies and then go on a blitz of a career which has never been rivaled. But it has its downsides as well, I mean, you can have too much fame, and too much responsibility for other people's lives and happiness because they dump that on you. And it is too much and it's ultimately dangerous. It's dangerous for the people who give up their individuality to somebody else and become fanatics... it's dangerous for them and its also dangerous for the subjects.  Did you ever discover what John
Lennon thought of the Rutles?Only third-hand... I mean, I gather somebody saw him in the street in New York and said "what do you think of the Rutles, John?" and his response was to sing Cheese and Onions. What traits did you pick up and parody? Some of them were just facial, like in All You Need Is Love, Love Life as we put it, I noticed he was chewing gum in the film so I chewed gum. But that was the thing, I mean, once I'd written the songs, I knew they were similar and different at the same time, the real copying was in the production. And of course if you wear the clothes, you're halfway there. And we've only got to sort of change a few things, because everybody knows the joke. This is really the secret of... oh, don't start me being pompous about comedy! But one of the things that make comedy work, is that people understand the situation. And so with the Rutles, everyone understood the situation. What was Cheese and Onions? What was it? I don't know, I mean, it was a song, it was a Rutles song. It sort of lampooned trying to put too much serious philosophy into a song, really. Cheese and Onions is a sort of stock sandwich, crisp flavor... I don't know. I don't know why. It was just Cheese and Onions. Do I have to spell it out. Because I knew I was on a pretty slim ice, you know, saying "I have always felt in the back of my mind cheese and onions, I have always thought that the world was unkind, cheese and onions, do I have to spell it out, and then going "C-H-E-E-S-E-A-N-D et cetera. But at the same time, I've put in, I mean, you can't argue with, really, if you keep screwing around with fossil fuels taking no notice of your environment, ultimately, you're going to have trouble. So that sentiment in the late 70s of man and machine keep yourself clean like a dinosaur is still true today and it's probably becoming truer. So that part of writing, you know, trying to get the essence of what the Beatle songs were about, was, you know, I wanted to make it as serious as possible, without... I didn't want to trivialize anything. The job was to make people laugh, but I the same time I don't think you make people laugh by just trivializing... you need to laugh with, not laugh at. I think any musician, you know if they'd had a few beers they'd get up and do a Tony Bennett or mimic somebody else, do you know what I mean? So it was in that spirit. But that was just one, um... did you mean what was cheese and onions in terms of what it was supposed to be like in Beatle things? It suited the Yellow Submarine era for us, whereas Piggy In The Middle was obviously Magical Mystery Tour. That was the job of the first Rutles album, was to be, you know, signposts, if you like, for the story. So we had to have things like Ouch and some psychedelic kind of stuff. That was easier to write, actually. It was a lot easier to write than to sort of try to remember what your first teen dates were like, the angst of it all... oh! She's looking at him now! You know, stuff like that. And the second album, Archaeology, was much more measured from my point of view in terms of... it was more of a personal tribute to the Beatles' music. I wouldn't have gone ahead with the project even though I was having my arms twisted by all sorts of people, had it not been for the... I wanted to write a song that wasn't too heavy but at the same time didn't dodge the issue of what happened to John, so I wrote the song "Questionnaire". And it deliberately comes in lightweight and then hopefully ends up with, you know, tell me what you think about how easy it can be to buy a gun, do you think it's crazy half crazy or not crazy at all... don't ask me, I'm just a questionnaire. And together with other things, I signed it off with Back in 64, you know lyrically, just says so long, it's all over, and it should be... but it won't ever be, because you know, the songs go on. The music is the thing. Getting back to John's recognition if you like of what your work was and the Rutles, did it give you a thrill that he obviously knew about it, obviously appreciated it, to some degree? John was quite a Bonzo fan. You know, in fact he wasn't alone, I mean lots of people who are sort of straight musicians if you like, serious musicians, really envied the Bonzos because they could muck about. I remember Eric Clapton saying, oh, I wish I could muck about just once or twice, I'd love to come on stage with a stuffed parrot on my shoulder. But when you've got posters saying Clapton is God, a stuffed parrot is right out! Got no chance. So yeah, we were lucky in a way because we weren't parented to the business as professionals. We were just art students having a good time, I suppose that's why we burnt out in five years. You could argue then that the Beatles, what burnt them out, was a sort of over adoration, if you like. It'd get impossible to go anywhere. You couldn't even hear the music because people were screaming, you know. This is... weird. I mean, as I say, for the Rutles to help diffuse all that was worth a go. 
Do you think it did diffuse it?Not enough. It did in a small circle of people. But more widely, I think there is more... I mean there are Beatle fans now who weren't alive when the Beatles were there. So I think the new generation of people who appreciate the Beatle music can also piece in what the Rutles did as a piece of history, contemporary history, at that time. Which sort of makes sense. And as Paul helped me with Urban Spaceman and things like that, I like to think I've given a little bit back in terms of the pain, if you like, of the fame. Sort of saying, lighten up, we've all got to take responsibility for ourselves, really, we can't dump it on some sort of hero. Even if they are good heroes. What did you admire, as a musician, about John Lennon's songwriting talents? Clarity of mind. I mean, he wrote some stunningly, you know... vivid, and uncluttered... "love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight" is not the kind of bump-dee bump-dee bump line you would immediately associate with a song, it's a brilliant line. And when I try to write songs now, I keep having to go back and say what am I trying to say here? Is there a better way of saying it? Takes me much longer to write stuff. I mean, some of the best songs I've written I've written remarkably quickly. But maybe as you get older, you know you're on the side of a cliff, whereas you didn't know you were on the side of a cliff and you thought that would do. You could argue you could go too far the other way, you're too quick to let things go out, but the freedom of saying sod it, this is what I think, but John had that clarity of mind and the courage to sort of... and the opinion... he also had humor. He was full of mischief and daring and anger and love. Just like anybody else, it's a muddle. And he was particularly good at articulating all those emotions. His life took a path... not a strange path, but I mean, from where he came from with the Beatles, then Yoko Ono, then America... what do you think that life pattern was that took him on his course, what his desire was, what his need was in life. Cor. I would imagine that he was trying to get some normality in his life. What they went through in those days was not normal. No one had really trodden that path before. So for some people to say, this may look bizarre from the outside, but from the inside, it might look like the most comforting thing you could do a the time, some refuge from this glare, this never ending glare, this air of expectancy that you were suddenly going to cure all the world's ills just by turning up somewhere. It must be a terrible pressure. Must feel like being on an ocean cruise or something like that, where everywhere you go you have to smile. You're trapped in this bubble, this hideous kind of scrutiny. How did Britain react when John fell in love with Yoko Ono? I... well I think... I don't think they reacted too well actually, I mean... but, I don't like the idea of saying how "Britain" reacted, I think a certain element of Beatle fans felt... I mean, I dare say Harold Macmillan was unmoved. So yes, a certain element of Beatle fans probably thought that this is breaking up the Beatles or something. But never mind what poor Cynthia thought, or Julian thought. This is the casualties of a show business career. Um... I don't want to go down as a pundit on what the nation thinks about Yoko! I don't think about these things. Did you ever meet her with him? I only sort of met them, and again, not really met them, at the... not Abbey Road... I only ever met them at the Saville Row Christmas party that year. They sat on the floor with a room full of Hell's Angels while I was trying to find my 3 year old son. No, I couldn't say I was that close with either John or Yoko. But Yoko did... it was intimidating, I mean, my natural shyness came to the fore and I sort of made my excuses and left. Lennon. 1980. I think it was December 8th. Where were you leading up to that day when he was shot, do you remember your life at that point? Well, yeah I do, but, um... I sort of have... don't really like the idea of being part of a montage of people's memories, but I don't mind sharing the fact that I was doubly-shocked, because I was staying with Terry Jones at the time and I came down for breakfast and it was my birthday. And I was going to say, hey Terry, let's go and do something because it's my birthday, and I came into the kitchen and Terry Jones was in tears, saying "they shot John Lennon." So yeah, I remember the day. What happened then after for you, after that impact? Uh... well I think... shocked and stunned. I mean I don't know what I thought. What do you think? Numb, really. I mean I was never a fan, fanatic-fan of the Beatles. Just admired his craftsmanship, his sense of fun, and his courage and what he took on. And okay, he may have been silly at times, I mean growing your hair and hopping about in a bag, but in a way, that's wonderful sort of satire of the stupid antics that were going on. He really did. He belongs in Tate Modern as well as the Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Yoko's influence was in that I think quite good. I mean they were a sort of embryonic Damion Hirst and Tracy Emin of their day. Happenings in a bag, I mean, come on, again, it's like, what else are you going to do? Are you going to get up, or are you going to hopefully go into the House of Lords or something like that? It's just like, these things... I remember feeling just as shocked when I heard on the news that a little girl was waiting outside a chemist in some little town in Bedfordshire and a lorry had come through and a wheel had come off the lorry, bounced across the pavement and crushed her to death. The sort of... .... why. Who can explain? I don't know. I don't know how you... I, I don't want to. I don't want to try and articulate any sort of reason for that.  You moved in the same kind of celebrity circle, if you like, did it cross your mind, dawn on you, that something like this could happen? I mean moving near the circle of the Beatles and what you had done, was there ever a thought that something like this could happen? Not before, no, but then the shockwave certainly set in, we certainly realized that there were people out there among us, the fanatic element, who, with sufficient problems of their own, could do something arguably as unspeakable as that. And I don't know in this great soup of human consciousness, how these things happen. Time to time I look around at the world and I get fed up with the news stories everybody else does, and I always get fed up with hearing it, because I can't do anything about these things. You get brutalized by too much information. And I think since 1980 it's going more and more that way. We've gotten so much more information to deal with, I really don't know how you make judgments of why more people aren't crazy, or are there very few people who are sane? Which way around is it? Who's going to measure it? You can even measure a Duvet by its TOG rating... at times I feel, have I been born into a species I have nothing to do with? Sometimes I do. So I try and live everyday, yes, there's all sorts of likelihoods of things happening. The appalling attack that was made on George just recently. It's scary. And I don't know if you can appeal to anybody to tone down this kind of cynical marketing of mass audience hysteria. I mean, people are working very hard to build acts up to the height of the Beatles, because they think it's good! Because it makes money. Or something. People should just work on making the music good, and fans should grow up. Fame should be played down as well. A songwriter shouldn't be treated any more importantly than a plumber. Both can do a job for you. That's just what I think. Did you try, in the days after John Lennon was shot, to remember him somehow. Was there something personal for you that you did to pay homage to him? Well, I made sure, as much as I could without being maudlin, as I said Questionnaire was a tribute to John. And also another song, Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik. I didn't actually write that especially for Archaeology, I had that in a show I wrote about Alice being in Nowadays, it was the third Alice, if you like, and it was called "More Jam Tomorrow". And I invented this character called The Working Class Heron, basically a typing error, but he sang Eine Kleine Middle Klasse Musik and it was all part of Alice peeking in at nowadays and wondering if it was wonderland or through the looking glass or what it was, because I think arguably, if you take an objective look at what we're all doing today, and it's like, there's a fight down one end of the playground and they all rush down there, all the cameras rush down there, then, oh wait a minute there's something else at this end! and it's all at this frantic level. Maybe I'm just getting old.  What was lost that day when Lennon was shot? Uh... well. ... a life? The rest of a life. The rest of a creative, working life. You've got to put it into perspective with all the other life and death situations that happen around the world. Why we're sitting here talking about what makes that a loss more than another is because the program is dealing with John. I don't know. I wouldn't like to speculate on what was lost then. I think it kind of renews. Something is lost and something replaces it. And if it turns out to be a more objective and less hysterical and more reasoned appreciation of what John did, see him when he was being a clown, see him when he was making a point... he always used to say it's the music, the only good thing that came out of the Beatles was the music. The business, the hysteria, all that was not so good really. Doesn't help anyone to drive people to think that way. Ultimately it's pretty dangerous like football hooliganism. It's too big. It's too big to do in a little sound bite You know, his killer is up for parole this year, the first time in 20 years. Do you have any thoughts about that? I don't understand why anybody could do that, all I know is that some people do, and I don't know what drives them to do it, whether it's a legal matter or a health matter, I don't know. I don't know how legal systems really work... it's supposed to protect the community at large... I don't know. I really don't know. I'm sorry, but I don't want to sort of judge anybody, I mean he could have been out of his mind... I'd have said he was out of his mind, whether or not you let somebody out all depends on the circumstances of what he's like now. If he is truly sort of... has remorse, then he's got to live with having done something horrible for the rest of his life. And if he doesn't know that, then it doesn't really make any difference where he is. Except if he's a risk he should obviously not be allowed out. I suppose somebody who's qualified will make those judgments. But I don't understand what lawyers do, why they cost so much money. But I do understand the principle of it, and that's to sort of protect society. So I'm not.. I don't... did he know what he was doing? Does he still? Is he sorry? I mean, they have to weigh those things, and it's not something I'm in a position to do. Do you think there would be a rush of emotion if, indeed, he was let go? I think that whatever happens, the media is going to behave in it's usual disgraceful way. What's your favorite Lennon song? I think I'm Looking Through You... was that his? Why, the words? The tune and the words. But it has that lovely line, "love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight". "Why tell me why do you not treat me right... love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight." Great! The working class hero that John Lennon had, could you describe that for us, could you describe his appeal on that level? That's his phrase, isn't it, a working class hero is something to be... the best of writers like Shakespeare, he's coined a phrase, the Working Class Hero. The 60s is sprinkled with them. David Bailey the photographer... it was a chance to knock the British class system aside for a while. And I suppose that's what was so invigorating about the time. So again, he's giving us something, working class hero. Something I summed up in the Working Class Heron, he had a flat cap and a nose like that... Why did he matter more than other pop stars of that time? Cause he had depth. I don't mean the sort of pop deeply shallow depth, it was real stuff. I think he was always a painter-artist at heart, and saw... I suppose that's why I have an affinity with him, because he went to art school and heard the same rubbish. Anybody else who was going through art school, they need to read Tom Wolf, The Painted Word, and that really sorts it out, art in the 20th century and beyond, and so he'd gone through that artspeak nonsense and I'd gone through it at art school, and I could see where he was coming from a lot of the time, and that's why I warmed to him, some of the true ironies of what he was doing, not the sort of modern irony that's confused with sarcasm, but the genuine irony of doing something that was on one level, and on another level someone would pick up on it. And coming from Liverpool, there was no disadvantage in that, because Liverpool is the home all wonderful comedians, the city itself has a great sense of humor and philosophy, and it's not out of rosy-tinted pink sort of home counties kind of view of life, it's quite hard, a lot of fun, and truth in it. So coming from there, there was wonderful mixture. I mean that, the 60s, the others... Paul was a brilliant musician, George is a thinker, and also a musician, and Ringo being the loud one... the noisy one, ... Rutle thing... but the chemistry of things were right. And on that side of it, the music will last forever. Down to earth. He wasn't exactly the flat cap brigade, was he? No. But he identified the genre, if you like, almost, people sort of coming up... you've got Willy Russell, you've got the, uh... oh, golly... the, uh, ... Boys in the Black stuff ... the other writer... what's his name?  So down to earth, but not exactly the flat cap brigade. No, I mean, the flat cap brigade is almost like the Andy Capp between-the-wars idea of the working class... John added to it because it was possible for people to actually go out into the arts, to university, go on to politics if they wanted to, become photographers... I mean, the climate of the 60s, you know, a working class hero, it's lovely, it's kind of like a bittersweet thing. Britain has suffered terribly from this class system, and this kind of middle-classness which everyone aspires to, and on the other hand, we'll bow and scrape and we're lucky to have this... the British class system is dreadful. But I dare say you've got it in America too, but it's more cut and dried, you either have money or you don't. But it's remarkably subtle in England and John was cutting through that by bittersweet observation and being working class but being a hero as well. Also, a lot of people went to war, and that was traumatizing for my parents' generation. And as I deal with people who are 84 now who went through the war... in fact it's only just coming out just how traumatizing it was. So everybody in their lives knows this pain and has a need for poetry. And John supplied that. There's poetry in its... soul. Art. Art for art's sake. Being a human being. To express what it's like being a human being. Not to express what it's like having material things or ... (tape cuts) (tape resumes, already in progress) ...and I thought finally, I'll do it, you know, I'll try and make it, round it off. Probably my own version of what you're trying to do here. It must have been amazing doing those 20 songs in a week. Well, it wasn't quite a week, but it was getting close on. The album only took 10 days. We rehearsed for two weeks in a little semidetached house in Hendon, and just played it live into two Revoxes, two two-track machines, and by the time we came out we really felt like a group. So we went into the studio and just steamed into it. Took me about three months to write. The Rutles... were they treading on sacred text, the Beatles, do you think? Our attitude wasn't like that, you know, all right we may have been fools and angels have trodden, or not trodden, but the idea was, really, to sort of demystify it a little bit. To take away... to remind people of the humor of what can happen to anybody. Certainly people want to be millionaires these days, I mean, that's not the same thing as writing wonderful songs that people take to their hearts. And I've always had this theory, you see, I mean, of a hit, has a million sales, it's not... the million people who bought it are not an entity. It's because it meant something to one person at a time. And I only, as a songwriter, think about what meaning one person at a time. So it's great, so by sort of reverse thing, if it sells a lot of records, that's the only way you're going to know that that many people cared enough about that thing that you've written, that's supposed to mean something to them, to go out and buy it. Money isn't the guiding force, for me, anyway. I wrote a song called We Are The Slaves of Freedom, which you could arguably say is sort of like Lennonesque area, because it's playing with words and sort of looking at the wider picture of how we live. And I heard on the internet that some 18 year old in America sang it unaccompanied to his high school. And I thought, yeah, that's what being a songwriter's all about. How did Lennon affect you on that level? Well I liked some of his jokes, I mean, that funny book he brought out. Having done Latin in school, I loved that "amo amas amat a marmalady a minibus" . I knew exactly where he was coming from, because at that age, a lot of the humor is still sort of puerile. And I had to look back, and I dare say the Beatles had to look back at some of their early days as being infantilian. It is, you know, the stuff you do when you're young. And uh, so I... when... he plays around with words, I mean, he lost me a couple times on sort of yelling and screaming a bit,  same
with Frank Zappa lost me a few times when Zappa does melodies, I
don't like it going wobbling off into sort of free form too much.
So he lost me a few times, but for the most part, it was just delightful.
As I say, he was picking up on the sort of things that I used to
get at art school, sort of wonderful pretentious things that were
said about art, and he used to be able to cut through it. And every
time he did, I used to go "YES!!" Because people do take them terribly
seriously. So am I, I suppose. If it weren't for cigarettes and
being pompous, I'd be perfect! What is John Lennon's legacy? Um... John Leggon's Lenancy... what is John Lennon's legacy... um... it teaches you never to trust a journalist! |
|