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LISTEN TO MY FIRST WORDS OF 2020
Jan. 1st, 2020 12:17 am
Jan. 1st, 2020
DEATH OF AN IDIOT
Jan. 1st, 2020 02:24 pmNeil Innes has gone.
You may know him as a Monty Python associate and one of the Rutles. Like a lot of people, Python was my gateway to Innes, but he (along with Viv Stanshall) was how I discovered the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and from there his post-Bonzo work, from GRIMMS to the Innes Book Of Records and the Raggy Dolls theme, among others.
Aside from being funny, Innes was a highly underrated singer-songwriter who has been a huge influence on me. Songwriters who do comedy tend to get short shrift, and some people wrote off his Rutles work as pastiche. I think that’s unfair – the “pastiche” part is only in terms of arrangement, sound production and Innes singing in a Liverpudlian accent. The songs themselves hold up on their own – indeed, some of them had been written and recorded by Innes years before the Rutles project. Somewhere on the Internet there’s an interview with Eric Idle in which he explains that Innes had a knack for writing “Beatle-y” songs, so when they needed more songs for the mockumentary, Innes was able to raid his own back catalog to fill in a few gaps.
Anyway, for a long time he’s been my idea of what a good singer-songwriter ought to be – gifted, accessible, unique and an ability to not take themselves too seriously.
He just released a new album just recently, which famously was delayed because he'd funded it via PledgeMusic, which then lost all his money and went belly up, forcing him to start all over again. With no distribution deal he ended up selling the CD at shows and via his own website. I hope to get a copy one day, but buying one outside of the UK is pricey.
There's nothing sharable from it yet, so in the meantime here's a few tracks of his worth checking out.
How sweet,
This is dF
You may know him as a Monty Python associate and one of the Rutles. Like a lot of people, Python was my gateway to Innes, but he (along with Viv Stanshall) was how I discovered the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and from there his post-Bonzo work, from GRIMMS to the Innes Book Of Records and the Raggy Dolls theme, among others.
Aside from being funny, Innes was a highly underrated singer-songwriter who has been a huge influence on me. Songwriters who do comedy tend to get short shrift, and some people wrote off his Rutles work as pastiche. I think that’s unfair – the “pastiche” part is only in terms of arrangement, sound production and Innes singing in a Liverpudlian accent. The songs themselves hold up on their own – indeed, some of them had been written and recorded by Innes years before the Rutles project. Somewhere on the Internet there’s an interview with Eric Idle in which he explains that Innes had a knack for writing “Beatle-y” songs, so when they needed more songs for the mockumentary, Innes was able to raid his own back catalog to fill in a few gaps.
Anyway, for a long time he’s been my idea of what a good singer-songwriter ought to be – gifted, accessible, unique and an ability to not take themselves too seriously.
He just released a new album just recently, which famously was delayed because he'd funded it via PledgeMusic, which then lost all his money and went belly up, forcing him to start all over again. With no distribution deal he ended up selling the CD at shows and via his own website. I hope to get a copy one day, but buying one outside of the UK is pricey.
There's nothing sharable from it yet, so in the meantime here's a few tracks of his worth checking out.
How sweet,
This is dF
