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Aug.17,2012A year in the making, there’s now a huuuuge new section on Innes Book of Records, including interviews with just about everybody who created it, and behind-the-scenes pictures & video and anecdotes and just a whole lotta wow things. http://neilinnes.org/ibor/
A whole lotta UK tour dates just put up. More to be announced in the future, including some possible dates in Slovenia, Holland and Germany. No US tour this year.
http://neilinnes.org/live.htm
Neil’s US tour is over, and now you can see it through his wife Yvonne’s eyes and camera lens in Yvonne’s Tour Diary.
The website overhaul continues – I’ll keep putting the revamped sections on the front page under “updated so far.”
UK autumn tour dates will be coming sometime soon so I’m told, so if you live in the UK keep an eye on the site!
Finally I’ve begun to create the neilinnes.org we could only wish were possible in 1999, and then never bothered to make when it became possible around 2005 because I didn’t care anymore then.
In a fog of (at least) creative frenzy that started when I made a Neil-related animation to crack up Laurie, I’ve been having the best time over the past few weeks working on a massive overhaul of the letter pages, that is the actual lyrics pages themselves.
- Lyrics: I put up the lyrics to all the songs from the recent Bonzo CD and a few more we never bothered to put up when they came into existence. Thanks to Neil for helping us out with those.
- Audio: Under most of the song lyrics you can either listen to that song right on the page or find a link to Neil’s site innesbookofrecords.com or Amazon.com to buy the CD or MP3 download. You have to disable any ad blocker to see the links to the MP3 downloads on Amazon. But those are the only “ads” we have and even that stirred a bit of an ethical crisis in us since we swore we’d never have ads on the site, but I think people would appreciate it since fans do want to help give back to Neil for the music by actually buying it if and when they can, especially since for so many years it wasn’t possible. The NISA section is still up but I’ve gotten rid of the main big MP3 audio page all together since they’re all on the letter pages now.
- Pictures: 99% of the pictures on the site were snapped from 10 year old 20th generation VHS tapes. Laurie bought a PAL to VHS video machine and that served us well back in the day. But now video is so much clearer, so I’ve replaced many of the pictures on the lyrics page. And many more embiggen, and don’t have to open up a new browser window to do so anymore! I’ve also put up some mini photo galleries and animations and all kinds of stuff. It probably looks like it was made by a crazy person.
I’m hopefully going to keep going, and get to all the other pages, but I won’t bother to say “suchandsuch.htm is updated” every time. Maybe I’ll put up a “Warning: Ancient” sign on all the pages til I get to them! And for those of you still on dial-up, please forgive me for how much longer these pages will take to load now.
HUGE thanks to NellyM and Daryl for their HUGE video and audio contributions to this effort!
And just because it was the spark that set me off doing all this work on the site, the spotlight video is the animation I mentioned, made a couple months ago to a 10-year-old recording of me and Laurie playing the Rutland Weekend Television theme (or L’Amour Perdu) on piano and violin. To appreciate it first you have to see the good version by Neil himself and the real Dribbleshire Ladies Calisthenics Society. (okay I made that up but I’ll bet I’m not far off)
Neil’s going to be releasing Best Bits 2 around Christmas but it’s available for pre-order now.
GOD I wish I could see this! Neil’s doing a music/comedy show with Phill Jupitus, Ade Edmondson, Simon Brint & Rowland Rivron on Nov 30 and Dec 14th with two more dates to be announced. Also added a January 21 date that I found out via Doo Dah Diaries via Louise: “In Conversation with Neil Innes” at the British Music Experience
Put up some new stuff; the NISA CD Live in Tokyo, one of our favorite live shows we ever heard and wished we were there to see. Also added a few kinda weird and obscure things on our YouTube Channel.
For today’s Spotlight video, Behold! Russian Slaves of Freedom by Roman Shebalin. Or at least that’s what Google translator tells me his name is. Check out the other videos on his channel where he performs Neil songs in Russian very beautifully. Search “neil innes” in the search box to find them unless you read Russian.
I’ve just updated the tour dates page with a lot of UK tour dates going into 2011.
And we got some really special pictures! A fan in the Netherlands scanned his scrapbook of photos & ticket stub & newspaper clipping from a 1984 show Neil did in Amsterdam. Thank you Harry for this wonderful addition to the site!
And finally a very special picture: Emo Philips & Neil performing live last month in England. I read some online rave reviews of Emo’s tour and it really made me wish I could go! He’s currently playing in Edinburgh so go see him if you can. And click on “Back in 64″ in the player to your right to hear his Back in 64 clarinet intro from our 2003 Neil show in L.A.! –>
And for the Video of the day/week/whatever, here is a pretty darn good
Rawlinson’s End performed by Ian Tanner. Brilliant!!
Added three NISA CDs to the NISA audio page: Live at the BBC 1973-1993, The Almost Complete Rutland Weekend Songbook, and the songs from East of the Moon.
Also added a few more videos to the NeilinnesOrg YouTube page a week ago in case you missed it.
Yvonne kept a tour blog while she and Neil were touring the US, which they’ve published on the innesbookofrecords.com website. And I’m not just mentioning that because Yvonne calls Laurie and I two of her favorite Americans! 
Emo Philips & Neil together live on stage! If you’re going to be in or near Essex UK on July 22, Neil will be appearing with his friend & fellow comedy legend Emo Philips at the Colchester Arts Center.
Today is neilinnes.org’s 12th anniversary, and we got a great anniversary gift: Our own interview with Neil & Yvonne! They talk about how they met, their early years together, and lots and lots of stuff we never knew before. Really interesting!
VIDEO! We’ve been digging through the VHS tapes we’ve collected over the years and launched a neilinnes.org YouTube channel. Some of the videos might already be on YouTube but they were put up back when YouTube ruined videos by compressing them to death, so here they are again nice and clear.
AUDIO! For a long time we’ve had broken links to ancient Real Audio files that wouldn’t play on today’s computers even if the links did work. After years of this criminal neglect, they’ve all been replaced with MP3s. I revamped the Main MP3 page and the page of Neil’s kiddie show songs.
And… AND… I’ve gathered up all my old NISA disks that I have all over the house and I’ve made a new NISA audio page where you can listen to songs and download them. I start with a concert by Neil & Vivian Stanshall from 1972 where Neil sings really weird early versions of some songs I had no idea were that old. The audio quality’s not that great, but the history makes up for it!
We’ve started a neilinnes.org Twitter account. We’ll only rarely Tweet about new stuff on the website or significant Neil news. We promise not to Tweet what we had for breakfast that day or that work is boring.
The audio links on the letter pages work now!! I’m still checking them so there might be some I haven’t caught yet. I’ve also added YouTube links for as many songs as there were YouTube videos, which surprisingly was most of them!
Neil just finished up his big North American Tour. I meant to include a recap with this update, but didn’t get to it yet so that’ll be done for the next update. We’ve also got to update the links page and we’re working on a “history of us doing the website” story. The Python Extravaganza is probably 50% broken links so I’ll get to that soon. I’ll also be putting new videos on our YouTube channel. So lots more to come in the next 12 years!
And now our new New feature: YouTube Vid ‘o the day! (or week or however long it takes to update the site again) We’re going to mostly feature Neil songs not done by Neil. Neil called YouTube “the people’s channel” so here are some of the people doing Neil songs on YouTube. The first one is this beautiful one-man rendition of the Rutles Let’s Be Natural.
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