An Article from 1992

The Parody's Over

Despite his connections - Hendrix, George Harrison, the Pythons - and a brilliant talent for pop parody, Neil Innes drifted out of music's mainstream and into jingles and kids' TV. Steve Grant meets the urban spaceman who's touching down with a new show.

During a rare conversation with an old friend from the 60s, we find ourselves debating the definition of ‘hip' and the vagaries of fashion. Where, in the current climate of musical pap, exemplified by the tired and third-rate bands that find their way on to ‘Top of the Pops' and ‘The Word', does Neil Innes fit? Can there still be a place for that super-pop-parodist, that supposed footnote in the history of pop, whose assured claims to fame remain the once-stirring ‘doper anthem' 'I'm An Urban Spaceman', and his part both as the so-called seventh (Monty) Python and the musical brains behind the amazing Beatles TV spoof, ‘All You Need Is Cash', starring the ever-wonderful Rutles?

After a six-year break, the cherubic, moon-faced Innes starts his new national tour with a two-week stint at the Arts Theatre and a series of dates climaxing with the Edinburgh Festival. Innes is a face from the ‘60s and ‘70s, most recently remembered in various TV commercials and film scores, among them ‘Eric the Viking', where ‘all the serious music was drowned out by the sword-fighting'. Buried for some time in the wilds of Suffolk, he says he's spent most of the last 72 months ‘talking to cats, searching out interesting books and being slightly silly'.

As a parodist, Innes could be splendidly spot-on with such ditties as ‘How Sweet To Be An Idiot', or scathingly tart about pretentious Bernie Taupin-like lyrics. His send-up of protest music began: ‘I've suffered for my music and now it's your turn' and his other satires encompassed everything from country music to the Beatles songbook so amusingly ravaged in the TV Rutles saga. To add a sardonic musical not, the Rutles' ‘Tragical History Tour' was (obviously enough) a spoof of the ‘Magical Mystery Tour' Beatles film in which Innes actually appeared as a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, the group which he founded in the mid-'60s with the likes of Viv Stanshall and Roger Ruskin Spear.

The Bonzos, as they were known then, were art students with a penchant for the surreal and the eccentric, whose ‘Gorilla' album became a favourite play among the rock elite of his time. Innes tells how no less than Jimi Hendrix attended one of their dates a year before his death: ‘We were having a piss side by side and Hendrix said to me, "we're doing the same thing, basically." I said, "What, having a piss?" He said, "No, making revolutionary music; only I have to pretend I'm a serious musician."'

Despite his strange anthem, ‘Urban Spaceman', which he introduces as a ‘medley of my hit' and which he claims has nothing to do with drugs at all, Innes has no desire to be a symbol of psychedelic culture. ‘I claim to be the last man to write a song in which words like "gay" meant "happy", "tube" meant "Underground" and "speed" meant "rate of knots". And basically, I've never made a career move in my life, it's all come from various connections; first people like Eric (Idle and Terry Jones of the Pythons, then George (Harrison), and then someone like guitarist Andy (Roberts))" — with whom he is doing his latest tour, ‘More Jam Tomorrow'. Innes recalls how his last tour in the mid-80s was wrecked first by a car accident which broke both his tour manager's arms, and then by his father's terminal cancer.

‘Frankly, it just all ground me down. That was why I retreated into jingles and commercials, into children's television and into composition for films and television. But I missed being bole to argue with people, missed the excitement of the chase.' His latest show is ‘a hopeful effort' which is based on Lewis Carroll's ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass' and aims to point up parallels between the nonsense of the Victorian era and the ‘linguistic garbage of today, such as ‘sustainable growth", "left-wing" and "Joe Public", who seems to be this person that everyone is pretending to be, but to whom nobody pays any real attention'.

Innes has been intrigues by these connections for decades. The humour may be a trifle bland and gentle on occasion, but it's also very subtle: ‘When I did the songs for the Rutles there was a song called "I Must Be In Love" which was a parody of "If I Fell In Love With You" on the "Hard Day's Night" album. And even though George had been very keen for this project, we were sued by ATV music for plagiarism. But we could prove that even though the song sounded like a Beatles song, there was in fact nothing musically common to both, even though the opposition spent five grand on a musicologist to try and prove differently.'

From the Bonzos, the Pythons and the Rutles to TV series like ‘The Innes Book of Records' and ‘Rutland Weekend Television', Neil Innes has been one of those zany figures ‘who are no more or less than the entertainment equivalent of a plumber, the kind of guy you go and see if you need a bit of recreational repair'. Could the man who wrote the lines: ‘I'm the urban spaceman baby, I've got speed, I've got everything I need' be anything other than a musical troubadour hero, I wonder. Maybe that's pushing it a bit, but as my old friend said, ‘I tell you, in this business if you can make one person smile then you deserve your headstone. Neil's done more than that.'

A great deal more.