Neil Innes at the Phoenix Arts Centre Exeter

The multi-faceted Neil Innes visited the Phoenix Arts Centre in Exeter last week, a man who can claim to be a founding Bonzo, honorary Python, compiler of the Innes Book of Records (release it on dvd, BBC!), amiable children’s TV presenter, ex-Rutle and current and full time Neil Innes, singer, songwriter, humourist, raconteur and clown. He played a solo show which embraced pretty much all of these multitudinous selves, ranging from cheerful vulguarity to more profound meditations on time and memory, truth and illusion. In keeping with his art school background and the strongly visual and theatrical aspect which was always a part of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, he was flanked by a couple of pieces of junk shop sculpture – readymades, to cite Duchamp or the Bonzo b-side to Mr Apollo. A distended hat stand angel of the north spread its arms to his left, head capped with a flying ace helmet and goggles, wingspan formed of copied tabloid front pages with screaming headlines mostly decrying the nefarious evildoings of asylum seekers. Innes christened it Icarus Allsorts (he’s takes a shameless pleasure in wordplay and tortuous punning), its newspaper wings destined to send it plummeting into the lower depths. On his right was a bicycle wheel mounted no a table, his Wheel of 4 Tunes. It blended another nod to Duchamp (via his bicycle wheel readymade) with game show randomisers (the fixed grin showbiz falsity of game show hosts having long been a target of the Innes/Python axis), a spin of the wheel by an audience member causing an arrow to point to one of four colours affixed to the spokes. This would indicate the colour of an envelope to be opened, with all due hushed anticipation, revealing which of four potential songs would be performed. The mixture of the childish, the populist and the cerebral which it represented summed up the polarities at play within Innes’ music and approach to life and art. The Bonzo Dog Band were originally the Dada Band, after all, the twinning of the 1920s children’s cartoon character with the absurdist early 20th century art movement neatly setting out their stall.



Innes retains a resolutely non-conformist outlook, which partly finds its expression in gleefully childish behaviour; Thumbing the nose is used as the secret club sign of his nascent ‘ego warrior’ movement and he gets the audience to blow a defiant group raspberry which rumbled through the tiers of seating. It’s a more honest form of rebellion than the eternally extended adolescence of rock, and is more true to the gadfly instinct at the heart of the anti-authoritarian impulse, the desire to mock the powerful and deflate the pompous in the most direct and playful manner. Innes’ childish absurdism also connects with an open-minded inquisitiveness, an ability to view the world with an imaginative clear-sightedness which untangles needless complexity whilst admitting of illogic, paradox and grim irony, sometimes with delight and sometimes sadness. He may not have sung How Sweet To Be An Idiot tonight, but it could stand as something of a signature song. Other numbers like Disillusioned and City of the Angels, which he did sing, voice discontent with the state of the world without ever descending into cynicism or nihilistic hopelessness and hyperbole. Disillusioned details the process of coming to see things as they really are, the narrowing down of vision which can come with knowledge and time (a literal disillusionment, or disenchantment, which means that ‘my eyes no longer play tricks on me’). City of Angels’ central image of a man shot by the police whilst reaching into his pocket to produce a card explaining his muteness was all the more horrifying for having derived from a news story Innes heard whilst staying in LA. The ‘paradise lost in the city of angels’ which it bleakly conveys was ironically counterpointed in musical terms by what he described as LA chords; those smooth, gliding progressions of major 7ths beloved of Joni and the Eagles.



City of Angels witnesses Innes at his angriest and most direct, his ironic couplets and wordplay comical only in the most desperate sense. Other songs dealt more obliquely with the passing of time, memory, regret and mortality – grand philosophical themes (or thinking about thinking, as he put it) which are also the stuff of universal human experience. Stealing Time was one such, which ‘takes a lifetime’ as the chorus gnomically points out. The wistful quality often found even in his comical songs draws on his love of clowns and clowning, and also of the great silent and early sound movie comedians. The raised eyebrows and cheeky side-smiles with which he accompanies certain lyrics definitely have something of the Stan Laurel or Charlie Chaplin about them, and he later paid tribute to the sublime silliness of Max Wall. His song Eye Candy updated Buster Keaton’s short The Cameraman for the multi-channel age, with its passive TV viewer finding himself inhabiting the worlds on the other side of the screen, making disorientating, channel-hopping jump-cuts between programmes, much as Buster did in his cinematic dream montage many years earlier. Innes ended his final pre-encore song by getting the audience to sing a Country Joe style cheer, spelling out SOD OFF. At which point he shuffled disconsolately towards the wings with the slump-shouldered and headhung pathos of an old pierrot clown, the odd pitiful backward glance inviting sympathy which was duly given in a series of ‘aaaahhs’.



Innes is also an expert pasticheur. He reminisced about the early days of the Bonzos, and their recording of a novelty song (My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies) at Abbey Road. The Beatles were putting together Revolver at the same time. Having heard the sound of George Harrison’s dense, pounding chord from I Want To Tell You forcefully echoing along the corridors, he had to go back to playing rinky dink piano on the silly 20s number they’d dusted off from a 78 unearthed in a junk shop (and he demonstrated the gulf between the two to amusing effect). Clearly his musical radar wavered more towards the future which George and the others were sounding out as opposed to the archaeological artefacts which he and his enthusiastically amateur cohorts were digging up from the past. He did sing a song drawing on the charmingly contrived rhymes of those corny old songs, though, which he accompanied on his ukulele, an instrument for which George showed an increasing fondness in his later years. Innes got to be the next best thing to a Beatle: a Rutle, and there was a splendid medley of Rutles songs which he played at the piano. He folded together choice extracts from the nostalgic Doubleback Alley; the psychedelic Good Times Roll (‘written after we’d discovered tea’, as he observed, and ending with a discordant swell full-stopped by a distinctly unresonant piano ping parodying the lengthy decay of the final Day In The Life chord); the McCartney bright Another Day, which includes the marvellous rhyming of pusillanimous with animus; and my favourite, the nonsense-filled Cheese and Onions (from the film Yellow Submarine Sandwich, of course), with its fantastic ‘do I have to spell out’ chorus (C.H.E.E.S.E. etc.). Unlikely as it may seem, this song was covered by the late ‘80s dream pop band Galaxie 500 (just as long running indie rock stalwarts Yo La Tengo covered the Bonzo’s Readymades in 2000). So his modern pop sensibilities been disseminated wide and far over the years, finding receptive ears in surprising places.

Another Rutles song provided the encore which, with typical subversion of conventional logic and order, came immediately after the interval. Shangri-La (originally a song from a 70s solo album) was included on the Rutles’ Archaeology LP, their response to The Beatles’ Anthology releases. It has a long fade-out chorus which combines elements of Hey Jude and All You Need Is Love, inducing a similar impulse to singalong in unison. It would indeed have been a good way to end it all, but for Innes, that would have been far too obvious and odiously showbiz. Protest Song, of the tunes randomly thrown up by the dada gameshow wheel, offered pastiche of another 60s musical titan, Bob Dylan. Prefaced by some hilarious comic fumbling with guitar strap and harmonica stand (which demonstrates that Innes is a skilful clown himself), and endless peg-twiddling tuning which only succeeded in returning to the same wincingly off-key note (‘I’ve suffered for my music, and now it’s your turn’, he warned us), this caught his Bobness circa ’65 (or perhaps one of his many subsequent imitators) with keenly observed accuracy, both vocally and lyrically. His harmonica solos were excruciating in a manner similar to his ‘ecstatic’ guitar solo on the Bonzo’s Canyons of Your Mind, a transcendent awfulness which could only be achieved by someone possessed with real musical talent and the ability to thoroughly abuse it. In his final song, Surly Morning Blues, his Roland keyboard provided the Beach Boys pastiche through a preset sound (another readymade?) which, he suggested, seemed to indicate that Brian Wilson was trapped inside (something on the order of the keyboard in Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchausen, perhaps). It produced some hilarious faux-vocalising, which he put to use with great comic timing.



As an acknowledgement of his various collaborations with Eric Idle in The Rutles, Rutland Weekend Television and Monty Python (as well as in Do Not Adjust Your Set, before they hit the big time) he sang his Philosopher’s Song (which he put forward as his most clever lyric). As originally sung by a professorial chorus of Bruces in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, its elucidation of the drinking habits of various famous philosophers provided a suitable way to herald the interval exodus to the bar. The Wheel of 4 Tunes also blessed us with Quiet Talks and Summer Walks, a Bonzo song from the Keynsham album (‘when the madness had set in’, Innes added with a touch of Vincent Price melodrama). It’s a gorgeous ballad sung from the perspective of a flower observing strolling young lovers passing by. Its Donovanesque surface of summer of love whimsy is underlaid with a more poignant reflection on time and love, which was in tune with the philosophical themes of the evening. It also provided the basis for a memorable Innes Book of Records film, with Innes going all Peter Gabriel-era Genesis and donning the guise of a giant daisy. The evening did in fact have a loose overall structure, without ever becoming too ‘slick’, as Innes put it with evident aversion to going through over-rehearsed routines. Random events (or mistakes) were still given space, and welcomed. A running theme had adds from his purported sponsors, ‘Fiasco Superstores’, intruding upon songs or forming interludes, a pop art device reminiscent of The Who Sell Out. The blue-striped Fiasco motif (now who could he be thinking of?) also extended to the banner hung above the merchandising stall outside.



There was also a deal of anecdotage, stories of Viv Stanshall, the Bonzos, George Harrison and others, with jokes thrown in along the way (I particularly liked his retelling of Barry Cryer’s Stannah Stairlift gag). They were all related with a natural ease and self-effacing warmth and wit, remembrances of someone who ‘went through the 60s and is now going through them again’. Some of his recent CDs have themselves provided a kind of aural set of memoirs. Such modesty leads him to praise the work of others, heroes and collaborators. He finished (before his non-encore encore) with a rendition of a routine which Max Wall used to end one of his shows, involving two sticks of rhubarb and two potatoes (here imaginary specimens). It was a hugely enjoyable from a consummate (but not too much) professional who can stand proudly amongst such company, thumb firmly pressed to nose. And as a bonus extra-mural encore, I got his jokes about air of freedom and freedom air (fruits de mer) and his satnav telling him about the mysterious Exeter Head on the way back home. The old brain’s a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.

Bruce Lacey at the Camden Arts Centre

PART ONE

Bruce Lacey is one of those characters who has seemingly moved in the peripheral vision of British popular and counterculture for several ages. His name many not be widely known, but once noticed, you find yourself recognising him in the background of or exerting his influence upon all manner of significant movements, from the 50s up until the present day. I first became aware of him in his professorial role (his self-awarded title of ‘professor’ Bruce Lacey fitting the mad scientist role which he adopted) in the 1967 George Melly scripted film about the not so fab 60s, Smashing Time. An electrical mishap unleashes his self-built robots on a helpless art gathering at a Roundhouse style venue, and he looks on with manic, gesticulatory glee from behind a lectern. He looks for all the world like Rotwang, the robot-builder in Metropolis, throwing silent movie shapes. This scene is probably still the best way to see his remote controlled robots in action. They’re hilariously inventive and at the same time a little bit threatening, as mechanical facsimiles of the human form generally are. I had also heard of him through Fairport Convention’s song Mr Lacey, which also sang a song of praise to his robots and his ‘loving machine’. The latter presumably referred to his orgasmatron-style sensory stimulator which he manufactured for the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968. This was an encapsulating pod in which the willing entrant was exposed to ‘non-specific erotic images’ whilst being massaged and caressed by an automated system of rollers and soft pads. It was a device to set against Kafka’s mechanical punishment machine from his story In The Penal Colony, one devoted instead to the fulfilment of the pleasure principle. There was an element of criticism or moral questioning behind the surface fun, however, as there was with many of his madcap actions and inventions – a constant assertion of the authentically human over the mechanical or simulated.

Knowing his place - Lacey prepares to gnaw George's lawn in Help

Had I but realised it, I also knew Lacey from his brief appearance in The Beatles film Help as the resident yokel gardener in the fab four’s surreal pad, trimming their artificial lawn with the aid of two pairs of nibbling false teeth. The Beatles’ patronage puts him in the lineage of other British oddball artists such as Ivor Cutler (who sometimes appeared on the same bill as Lacey in the 60s) and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, both of whom featured in The Magical Mystery Tour. Lacey’s connection to the Goons no doubt endeared him to John Lennon, but it was probably his previous association with Dick Lester (he’d appeared in his Goonish short The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, for which he also designed the props) which led to his presence in Help.

Lacey has received renewed attention recently on account of The Lacey Rituals, a new 2-dvd collection from the bfi of his film work, both as director, performer and prop builder, and an attendant exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre, which looked back on the entirety of his profligate and restlessly mercurial creative life. I went and saw it on its last weekend in mid-September. The first of the gallery spaces you entered on the first floor was a spacious, light-filled corridor on whose walls a good number of framed posters and flyers were hung. These formed an effective and visually absorbing survey of Lacey’s work and appearances over the six decades, as well as offering an incidental insight into the changing styles in graphic poster design from the 50s to the present day. The range and mutability of Lacey’s activities soon became apparent through this introductory display. He was part of a Goonish vaudevillian troupe in the 50s and 60s called The Alberts. It was a name entirely apposite for their aesthetic of scavenging and using with irreverent and at the same time affectionate and sincere humour the junkshop flotsam of Victorian and Edwardian England. Their colourfully antique style anticipated the tatterdemalion motley of swinging 60s and summer of love fashions. The confusion and rapid changes between space-age futurism and a nostalgic resurrection of Edwardian and Victorian formal finery is also reflected in Lacey’s work – his robots and rockets set off against top-hatted, one-man band buffoonery.

Pre-punk graphics - The Alberts' lost album

Centred around Lacey and the Gray brothers, Tony and Douglas, the Alberts’ enthusiastic demolition of early jazz and novelty tunes, gleaned from the cracked and dust-filled grooves of rediscovered 78s, paved the way for The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Roger Ruskin Spear’s kinetic robots and automata, and the many theatrical props incorporated into the Bonzo’s stage performances, may also have drawn on Lacey and The Albert’s example. The Alberts, whilst remembered with great affection by those who witnessed their unpredictable, chaotic but energetic and committed shows, endure as an obscure footnote to 60s London pop culture. This is largely due to the lack of any substantive documentation of their performances. In the new documentary on Lacey, The Lacey Experience by artist Jeremy Deller (who also co-curated the Camden Arts Centre exhibition) and film-maker Nick Abrahams, included on the bfi discs, he reveals that The Alberts recorded an LP for EMI, produced by George Martin. EMI objected to the cover, a union jack with torn out lettering from adverts ornamenting the red crosses of St Patrick and St George. As Lacey elucidates out in the documentary, he regarded the flag as representative of the lingering arrogance of British imperial attitudes, and the messages mischievously attached point to its negative associations and paint it as a redundant symbol. The ‘ultimate toilet paper’ byline suggests a possible alternative usage. The rough, collaged graphics and provocative use of the flag resemble Jamie Reid’s God Save The Queen cover for The Sex Pistols, and punk graphics in general, to a striking degree. Lacey refused to compromise over the cover, and the album remained in the vaults (although Lacey states that he has a copy in his possession too). George Melly, in his 1970 book on Swinging 60s London, Revolt Into Style, offers his own perspective on why the Alberts were destined to obscurity. ‘As to why they have survived in the shadows while those they engendered swam out into the light’, he stated, ‘I believe the reason is that they are totally serious. Surrounded by extinct musical instruments and ancient machinery, dressed in daily life as if they were Victorian lifeboat skippers or First World War German pilots, they preserve a grave courtesy which holds mockery at bay, but at the same time worries people’. Melly also makes a prescient connection with the punk generation to come when he describes Lacey as being ‘barely in control of his hatred for whatever seems to him to be unloving or morally dead…with his rolling eyes and filthy Edwardian evening clothes…he gives off an aura of real if ludicrous menace’. This sense of underlying violence, of a savagely satirical and slightly despairing outlook on the dehumanising aspects of the technologised post-war landscape, counterbalances the charmingly whimsical and childlike aspect of his creations.

Flight of fools - doomed Hampstead launch

A hint of the barely contained anarchy of their performances can be found in the short film The Flying Alberts, included on the bfi disc. This documents and attempt, clearly doomed from the outset, to launch a rocket from the slopes of Hampstead Heath, piloted by a gasmasked Lacey with the brothers Gray in tweedy tow. The whole endeavour ends in sopping ignominy in one of the nearby ponds, and can be seen as a tribute of sorts to the hopeless dreamers whose inept early attempts at flight are captured in bathetic turn of the century film footage. A celebration of British failure. The marching band whose ragged fanfares give them a wavering send off includes future Bonzos Neil Innes and Rodney Slater, revealing an even more direct link between Alberts and Bonzos. Perhaps The Humanoid Boogie, Innes’ infectious automaton pop number for the Bonzos, was influenced by Lacey’s robots too. The film also displays Lacey’s skill at making imaginative props out of whatever he could lay his hands on, props which were often treated in a less than gentle manner (shades of Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art, violently impinging on popular culture via Pete Townsend at about the same time). Lacey had made or found props for Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine’s post-Goon TV shows, and props from his personal hoard (kites, spyglasses, Victorian cameras, amusing hats etc) can also be seen in Dick Lester’s short The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film. This was made in 1960 with a half-Goon cast of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, Leo McKern acting as a more than serviceable Secombe stand-in. Lacey himself himself appears briefly as a music lover, laying his chosen LP down onto a treestump ‘turntable’, producing an old gramophone arm and stylus connected to a trumpet speaker, and running around the stump in a giddy circle, pressing the needle into the groove and the speaker against his ear.

Lacey's DIY gramaphone method - The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film

Lacey’s antic role within the Alberts’ set-up is hinted at in the poster for the 1950 Carnival of Jazz held, appropriately enough, at the Albert Hall, and headlined by Chris Barber with the late Ottoline Morrell. The design is a simple two-colour textual delineation of the bill of artists, with an announcement at the bottom that it will be ‘compered by The Alberts and interrupted by Professor Bruce Lacey’. The Alberts staged a number of shows which pre-empted criticism by announcing themselves as ‘An Evening of British Rubbish’. It’s a billing which manages simultaneously to fly the flag and make a mockery of it. As they used to proudly declare when the whole thing shambled to its conclusion, the smoke of exploding dummies drifting from the stage, ‘I know it’s rubbish, but by jingo, it’s British rubbish’. The rubbish could also be the Victorian detritus, wartime surplus equipment and health service cast-offs which Lacey cobbled together into comically grotesque anthropomorphic automata (junk people) or Heath Robinsonesque props destined for noisome destruction.

ROSA on the rampage - Smashing Time

Lacey’s professorial qualifications were self-bestowed, and indicated his penchant for rubbish dump invention and mad scientist affections (a disconcertingly intense and abstracted gaze, manic glints of sudden inspiration, disarrayed clothing and electrostatically charged hair). This culminated in the multi-purpose robots he created in the early to mid-60s, powered by old aircraft voltage motors and lent limbs and extremities by courtesy of the NHS. These made their appearances at various countercultural London hotspots in the swinging summer of love 60s – places like the Roundhouse at Chalk Farm and the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden. His star robot was probably R.O.S.A B.O.S.O.M. (that’s Radio Operated Simulated Actress, Battery Or Standard Operated Mains), who was best ‘man’ at his wedding to Jill Smith (Lacey’s regular collaborator under the name Jill Bruce). It’s fairly typical of Lacey’s refusal to make a distinction between life and art that he should turn his wedding into another performance. As he tells it, he simply couldn’t leave her at home, regarding her as an integral part of the family. ROSA can also be seen trundling about the Middle Earth dance floor in a short film on the dvd, Lacey discretely manipulating the antennaed control box from the shadows. She went on the rampage (along with a battalion of Lacey’s other robots) in the 1967 film Smashing Time, menacing our Rita (Tushingham) with big wet smackers from her extendable red sponge lips. Lacey observes the mayhem his mechanical offspring cause with hysterical, bug-eyed delight, playing the mad scientist to the hilt. Showing little signs of her age, ROSA also ended up winning the Alternative Miss World Contest in 1985, snatching a crown usually claimed by an outrageously inventive drag queen.

ROSA was initially created for the theatrical show The Three Musketeers at the Royal Court in 1965, where she, Lacey and The Alberts appeared alongside the likes of Valentine Dyall and Rachel Roberts. A mutated version of The Alberts, genetically re-engineered (in name if not dress and outlook) for the times (1967 by the looks of it), appeared at The Marquee with the pre-Kraftwerk robots in what the psychedelically bedazzling poster styles as ‘An Antique Freak-In with Pink Albert’s Collapsible Orchestra, Bruce Lacey and the Red Army Combo’. Having mocked the lingering tatters of British Imperial bluster, Lacey and the Alberts were happy to extend the privilege of being the target of their piss-taking to the linguistic affectations of the counterculture. With an evening of such unpredictable delights in prospect, tickets were a steal at 6/- for members and 8/- for guests.

Lacey’s artistic credentials were given substantial recognition through several appearances at the ICA from the late 60s onwards, including participation in the Cybernetic Serendipity symposium in 1968. Our backstreet, homegrown professor took his place amongst the heady company of Professor Herbert Brun, Professor Lionel Penrose and the avant-garde composer, mathematician and architect Iannis Xenakis. The ad for this august gathering was in the style of Polish surrealist film posters, with the central image definitely based around Lacey’s robots. A 1975 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery suggests that he was now firmly established, earning a career retrospective looking back on ’40 years of assemblages, environments and robots’. That forty year span makes it clear that Lacey traces his creativity back to his childhood, and makes no clear distinction between mature and ‘juvenile’ work, valuing early efforts as much as the work of his adult years. He was born in 1927, in the South London borough of Lewisham, so counting back from 1975, the Whitechapel exhibition would include things he made when he was 8 years old.

A Robot Lilliput reproduction

The first room of the Camden Arts Centre exhibition proper (if we regard the poster hall as a prelude) looks at his early work, life and influences, and is perhaps best summed up by the declaration, included in the introductory remarks, that you should endeavour ‘never to lose the child within you’. Various relics of Lacey’s childhood were on display, precious personal artefacts safely encased in museum glass. At the far end of the room, by a window which lent it backlit prominence, a wooden fort was placed on a table, with a note from Lacey telling us that it had been built by his dad. It was the perfect stage for a young boy’s imagination, and a demonstration for him of what could be created from the sawn-off discards of the lumber yard. Its placement at the rear centre of the room made it a natural starting point for a journey through Lacey’s life, a progenitive object which sowed the creative seed in little Bruce’s imagination. Also present were some of his childhood toys (part of Lacey’s art lies in a natural hoarder’s tendency to curate their own lives). There was Robot Lilliput, an early Japanese version of the wind-up tin robot toy, one of the first to be produced; and an Indian doll (of the Native American variety) which, as he told us on one of the neatly handwritten cards he placed beside each artefact, ‘I took to bed every night as a young boy and cuddled’. Here in nascent form, in these objects placed side by side, were two of the enduring, counterbalancing poles of his artistic obsessions – visions of mechanical men and the space-age future, and an instinctive embrace of a pre-industrial worldview as filtered through popular culture, and re-interpreted in personal terms. A 1953 sketch of ‘my ventriloquist dummy’s head Tommy’ suggested an early facility (or need) for adopting alternative personae, and also forged a link with fellow eccentric spirit, explorer of personal mythologies and stubborn follower of his own path Ken Campbell, who would carry out his own distinctively interrogatory ventures into the ventriloquial arts in his latter years.

Art as impulsive therapy - 1980s Earth Rituals

Costumes from childhood gave a foretaste of a life spent dressing up and playacting. Indian, harlequin and clown outfits hung from the wall next to a red post-box one-piece, an early indication of a sense of the surreal and the absurd. The centrality of wartime mythologies and the dreams of flying were represented by his Uncle Jim’s helmet and goggles from the First World War. Lacey himself went into the Navy in 1945, his one brief voyage largely spent in cramped conditions below decks, where he contracted tuberculosis. He was confined to a TB ward, where he was rendered immobile for a period, and witnessed the confinement and decline of others whose cases were far worse than his. Some of his later assemblages using health service odds and sods, crutches and body-covering plaster casts draw on his experience of this time. It was in the ward that he started seriously sketching and developing his interest in art, as several sketches of his immediate surroundings, and of ranked skeletons attested. He also set up an episcope projector, which could throw magnified pictures of his fellow patients’ photos onto the walls. Again, the roots of his future gadget building ingenuity and improvisatory instinct for going beyond the standard boundaries of ‘serious’ art and entertaining and surprising people through whatever means were available or came to mind were plain to see. Lacey, in the documentary on the bfi dvd, talks about having taken up art in the ward as a kind of therapy, and there’s something of that therapeutic impulse which has persisted throughout his life. Certainly, when he talks in the documentary about the ritual to the Earth Goddess he performed at a festival in 1982, which was a naked (literally) public act of ceremonial rebirth after the end of his long-term partnership with Jill Bruce, he is still palpably emotional about it. It was his way of coming to terms with a great disruption in his life, creating a performance piece almost as an incidental side-effect. The experience of war and of the drawn out death of the TB ward is reflected in his truly horrific assemblage Wartime Marriage from 1965, in which two bodies are tied onto a camp bed with lengths of string. Their skin is covered with sores and open wounds, and parts of limbs have been messily snapped off. The woman’s face has become fused with a gasmask, and the man’s arm is raised, as if in a futile gesticulation for help. They look like fossilised Pompeii-esque relics from the far future of a post nuclear catastrophe. In a wartime gas ‘cradle’, a baby’s face can be seen peering innocently out; another of Lacey’s disturbing uses of dolls. This is a work which amply demonstrates that Lacey, beneath (and sometimes coexistant with) his whimsical and madcap persona, could draw on and give powerful expression to deep-seated personal and political fears, anxieties and terrors.

On the near wall hung some of the paintings he produced after leaving the Hornsey College of Art to study at the Royal College of Art from 1951-54. They are surprisingly subdued, even drab in tone, and realistic in their depiction of everyday scenes and landscapes. Their rather depressing air of brownness is maybe a reflection of a general disaffection with the shattered, weary world of post-war austerity Britain. Or maybe the paint has just faded and lost its colour with time. Suspended above all of these representative markers of his childhood and youth was a sculpture which spanned most of the upper space beneath the ceiling. A large prick in a spectrum of primary colours was outlined in framework form by broken, bent and rejoined hula hoops, ceremonially bedecked with ribbons to add a ritualistic air. White tubes issued from its tip to swirl and spiral out across the room’s upper expanse. Baby girl dolls of varying size and shape were attached to these looping pathways at different intervals, new life launched off into the world. Just as Lacey’s story begins below, they are setting off to create new stories, and to build up their own personal mythologies along the way. It’s a cyclical symbol of generative forces, the straight male member issuing its brief cannonade before giving way to circular forms with their conjoined female travellers – the daughters of Albion flying away into a new world very different from the one laid out below them.

Neil Innes Night at the BFI Southbank

The Neil Innes Night a the bfi Southbank last month was a part of the Flipside strand of programming, a nook for film and TV from post-war Britain which has a cultish sheen and which has, for one reason or another, fallen into obscurity and neglect. As curated by hip bfi archivists Vic Pratt and William Fowler, it has spawned an eclectic dvd catalogue, which has just been re-released in its entirety (to date) in dual dvd/blu-ray editions. The evening was also shoehorned into the month long Scala Forever season, fitting in with the old Kings Cross repertory cinema’s fondness for oddball artists, offbeat imagination and colourful pop surrealism, as well as its penchant for 60s and 70s retro before it gained the widespread currency it now enjoys. Neil Innes is neither obscure nor someone stuck in the past, of course, and was present on the night to prove it. He is not always given his due as a prominent part of the continuum of quintessentially British comic surrealists. This is partly perhaps because of his eclecticism and ability to absorb and wittily recast the work of others, and partly because, as a person, he is very balanced and evidently quite sane, with none of the cultivated eccentricity or ingrained oddness which often seems required of comic icons. The esteem in which he held many treasured British eccentrics, who were often fairly marginal figures at the time, was made explicit in his series The Innes Book of Records, which featured regular guests, who appeared with little fanfare as part of the ongoing associative progress of the show. Old Bonzo Dog Bandmate Vivian Stanshall was given space to air some of his intricately punning semi-Joycean prose, and it was here that I first came across the likes of John Cooper Clarke and Ivor Cutler, who made an immediate and lasting impression. As I remember, Ivor did his routing about Gruts, and Clarke rattled through Chickentown, each sentence beginning with a slightly toned down ‘bloody’. Much of Innes’ work onscreen is currently available only in random fragments trawled up from Youtube, which made this evening, gathering together the various threads of his performing life, particularly welcome.



We started the programme with How Sweet To Be An Idiot from the Innes Book of Records, in which Neil played the yellow duck-hatted clown, wandering through an exhibition of surrealist art (which sets the tone for the series as a whole), bestriding a model village, looking at the animals in Bristol Zoo surrounded by raucous children, and riding the vertiginous, water-driven cliff railway connecting Lynton and Lynmouth on the North Devon coast. Oasis borrowed heavily from this song for Whatever, as DJ Simon Mayo demonstrated by playing them back to back on his show. Innes’ agent promptly got on the case, and he (Neil, not the agent) now has a co-writing credit, which must earn him a few welcome extra pennies.

Choreographed head revolutions - Music for Head Ballet

The Bonzo Dog Band were an obvious focal point, with a rare chance to see the amateur film The Adventures of the Son of Exploding Sausage. It’s fair to say that this is one for the fans, consisting of little more than aimless goofing about whilst the band were ‘getting it together in the country’ at an old farmhouse during the rehearsals for what became the Keynsham album. Still, Neil sports his stylish, wide-brimmed, pastel felt hat, Viv shows off his sporting prowess with a giant beachball (a disavowal of any autobiographical elements in Sport, the Odd Boy?), and we get to see Roger Ruskin Spear’s perpetual bubble blowing automaton (used, naturally enough, during renditions of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles). Music for Head Ballet is a piece of choreographed (roughly) deadpan headturning, the Bonzos turning themselves into impassive automata, whilst Equestrian Statue finds our merry troubadours raiding the dressing up chest and cavorting around what looks like Hampstead Heath. Hooray!



There’s a lengthy extract from a 1975 Rutland Weekend Television show, in which The Old Grey Whistle Test was parodied as The Old Gay Whistle Test (not the height of sophistication, I know). Eric Idle made for a hilariously earnest Whispering Bob Harris, greeting everything with a ‘wow, great’, and the cosmic prog noodling of Toad the Wet Sprocket was spot on (didn’t sound half bad, actually). Neil stepped up to the mic for a take off of glam rock, fronting a band called Sprint (‘on the Abbatoir label’) performing at the Gerrard’s Cross Festival with a number called Bandwagon. The song demonstrated Innes’ fine ear for musical pastiche, which had already been evident in the Bonzo days (Equestrian Statue is a great take on toytown psychedelia). This came to the fore with his emulation of Beatles songs for the Rutles, a prefab band often described as sounding more like the Beatles than the Beatles did themselves. We saw the ‘re-union’ video from 1996 of the song Shangri-La, with its host of celebrity vocalists and look-alikes gathering for the final Hey Jude-style singalong. Neil denied claims that he had mistaken the Elizabeth Taylor impersonator for the real thing. He also revealed that George Harrison (who produced and played an in-disguise role in the film) was fine about the Beatles parody songs, although when he heard With A Girl Like You, he commented ‘that one’s a bit close’. He may have been bearing in mind his recent travails over the Chiffons’ claim that My Sweet Lord had plagiarised their old hit He’s So Fine. Someone apparently told Neil that they had heard John Lennon wandering along the New York streets toward his apartments in the Dakota Building singing the Rutles song Cheese and Onions to himself, so it would seem that he was not averse to Innes’ pastiche of his style. Innes played Ron Nasty, the Lennon figure, in The Rutles film, and Cheese and Onions (do I have to spell it out?) is a perfect distillation of his psychedelic period dream songs. In this context, the ’96 reunion (timed to coincide with the Beatles Anthology archive releases) becomes quite affecting, with Ron’s presence unsentimentally (well, he is called Nasty) imagining a celebration in which Lennon might have participated, had he been so inclined by this point. However, Eric Idle, who played Dirk McQuickly, the Paul McCartney figure, didn’t take part in the video, so there was an equivalent absence.

Neil’s talent for pastiche was also on display in Protest Song, the number from the 1976 Pleasure at Her Majesty’s concert, taken from an edition of the BBC Omnibus arts programme. Here he takes off protest era Bob Dylan, complete with excruciating harmonica breaks. Put alongside his epically painful guitar mangling sole in the middle of the Bonzo’s Canyons of Your Mind, this shows how a very talented musician can somehow manage to make himself sound completely hopeless (not an easy feat, I’m sure). The pastiching of various musical styles, along with a love of surrealism and a sidewise satirical perspective on the modern world, led someone in the audience to ask Neil whether he felt any affinity with or was influenced by Frank Zappa. He affirmed that he loved the Mother’s records from the 60s, especially We’re In It For the Money, with its air of real social engagement giving bite and focus to the comedy. He tactfully drew a veil over some of Frank’s later efforts, suggesting that they were more particularly American in their concerns. In fact, We’re Only In It For the Money is very much attuned to the America of the times, whether that be in terms of hippie conformism, the machinations of power or police brutality. Zappa simply became less engaged and more narrowly focussed, and therefore (lyrically, at least) less interesting as time went on. Innes never displayed anything resembling Zappa’s caustic misanthropy, the unforgiving eye which he cast on human foibles (but never his own). He is more likely to respond to human folly with a wistful melancholia, regretful but not judgemental. This may partly derive from the love of old-fashioned clowns which he professed, as well as his fondness for the great silent film comedians (The Innes Book of Records includes routines which show him playing Chaplin and Stan Laurel). They all tended to shade their personae with a touch of pathos, painting themselves as innocent fools at the mercy of a cruel and manipulative world (the fate of Pierrot in the Harlequinade). Any hint of Zappa’s subversive provocations is rather blown by Innes’ 1977 Top of the Pops appearance singing his Silver Jubilee ditty, without any hint of irony, to a cod-reggae beat. He denied that this was a riposte to the Sex Pistols, and said that it was written at the suggestion of his agent. He brushed the idea aside at first, but then found lines and rhymes coming into his head. It’s a harmless enough song, a catchy singalong which makes Paul McCartney’s Her Majesty at the end of the Abbey Road LP sound like a radical Republican call to arms. Neil’s appearance on 3-2-1 singing an updated version of I’m the Urban Spaceman with light entertainment dancers doing their spangly thing around him was hilariously incongruous, however. The bfi audience cracked up at a particularly cryptic stream of rapidfire word association from Ted Rogers, which only someone who finds Finnegan’s Wake a light read would be able to make any sense of. There were also a couple of his assured and enjoyable ads for Holsten Export from 1980, each finding Neil, in smooth, ivory tinkling Noel Coward mode, and his stoically mute companion marooned in some remote or exotic location, with the awkward encounters related in the song leading to the refrain ‘that calls for a Holsten’. Neil was evidently brought in to lend the lager an air of class, a tall order which he did his best to fulfil. There must be some subconscious association between ex-Bonzos and beer. Viv Stanshall advertised Ruddles ale and Tennents lager in ads from the late 80s (the former drawing on Sir Henry, the latter on his punning Chandleresque Bonzo song Big Shot). The Bonzo’s Mrs Slater’s Parrot also changed its feathers to become Mr Cadbury’s parrot, remaining equally annoying and relentless (he’s ‘the fuhrer’s favourite’ in the original).

Finally and most enjoyably, however, we were treated to a full episode of The Innes Book of Records. Someone in the audience subsequently asked why this had yet to make it to dvd, and whether there were any plans to release it. Neil ruefully replied that it was entirely in the hands of the BBC, who didn’t seem in any hurry to do anything about it. A lot of it was filmed on location on 16mm film, meaning that the picture is not of the quality that people are used to seeing these days, but he favoured releasing it in its original state, without any further digital fiddling or cleaning up, leaving it in all its grainy, textured glory. Each episode of The Innes Book of Records consisted of a series of Neil’s songs performed in character and linked by a framing device which located them in a particular landscape or narrative context. Here, this consisted of an archetypal scene cinematically shot in faded black and white in which an old man pushes a rickety cart which bears an old gramophone along a cobbled street in a poor northern town in the early twentieth century. He stops and picks out one of a pile of old shellac 38, whose labels read Innes Book of Records, and winds them into motion, the needle’s crackling contact with the surface conjuring up the colour films which accompany the songs. Some of these are evidently written with this visual element in mind, music videos at a time when they didn’t have the ubiquity they would later attain as essential promotional adjuncts, and later as primary elements of a pop song (sometimes, in fact, more memorable than the songs itself). Recurring characters turn up from show to show. Here we had the downtrodden, raincoat-wearing everyman (or no-man), traipsing around after his wife and dreaming of a more colourful life, which is tauntingly projected at him from the bright packaging of various products prominently displayed in the supermarket he drifts through. The song which accompanies his daydreams, Et Cetera, is one of Innes’ gorgeously sad tunes, reflecting the yearning ache and lightly ironic shrug of its lyrics, summoning up and dispelling banal fantasies of escape.

Innes’ slightly sinister, white-faced a rouged clown crooner, with his tailcoat, kid gloves and swept back mop of black hair, also made an appearance. He wandered down a wilderness road winding across a bleak and remote moor, singing the ‘we will go on’ song Down That Road in the surviving against the odds Frank and Judy style. As he walked on, disconnected mic cable trailing uselessly behind him, he passed various tableaux of medieval death and plague, as if he had strayed onto the set of The Seventh Seal or Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which Innes was in, of course). There’s a man in the stocks, an Inquisitorial procession, a cart piled with corpses and a skeleton filled gibbet. It’s all hilariously grim and makes the song’s sentiments seem hopelessly unrealistic. If there’s one species of performer whom Innes likes to have a go at, it’s the insincere and schmaltzy showbiz crooner. There was another clip from the 1986 Channel 4 programme Comedians Do It On Stage in which he played a grotesque nightclub singer with prosthetic pot belly and oversized medallion swinging between an unpleasantly wide-open shirt singing the song Let’s Be Spontaneous. Of course, this is the last thing such a singer would be, and it was theatrically repulsive. Viv Stanshall also liked to nail the phoney crooner (partly because it gave him the opportunity to put on his exaggerated ‘relaxed and sophisticated’ voice), which he did in Bonzos songs such as Canyons of Your Mind (which he tended to adorn live, after the ‘I mean it’ line, with a belch or vomiting sound), I Left My Heart In San Francisco (hey, leave Tony alone – he’s OK), Look At Me I’m Wonderful and The Sound of Music. Someone in the audience asked if there was a particular target against which he would like to unleash some real bile – whether, in effect, there was a dark side to Neil Innes? He replied that this wasn’t really in his nature. He didn’t want to belittle or demean anyone through his comedy, which didn’t really extend beyond occasionally thumbing a nose or blowing a raspberry at certain targets. He mockingly added ‘I’m just so perfect’, in this sounded too self-important or -congratulatory. However, if there has been one target against which he’s consistently aimed a mildly stronger degree of satirical mockery, it’s this kind of unctuous showbiz character with their feigned intimacy and false humility.



Apeman (or Ungawa) was another song in the show, with its catchy chorus combining the Weismuller yodel with an uh-huhhed ‘ngawa’, a melding of Tarzan with Elvis. It sees the Lord of the Jungle finding love (‘ape man go ape dancing/ape man stay out late’), settling down and having kids with his ‘ape-girl’, vowing that ‘ape man raise ape family/ape man will provide’. Amoeba Boogie is a funky disco number in which a white-coated Neil shakes his bootie whilst squinting at cell divisions (represented by a bunch of dancing school kids doing their thing and having a fun time, by the looks of it) through his microscope lens. His excitement at all the ‘matter dividing’ gets the better of him in the end, and he breaks out into a few choreographed dance moves with his two female lab assistants. Catchphrase is a mock Top of the Pops performance by a new wave band, with Neil as the gum-chewing, low-hung guitar toting front man in the Paul Weller mode. It contains the line ‘a poet for a lie and a clown for the truth’, which could well be Innes’ own catchphrase. It’s another great pastiche (and a good song), and demonstrates how he is able to convincingly adopt the latest styles. There’s none of the crude and embarrassing caricaturing which many other comics of the time indulged in when it came to punk and new wave. In the Q&A session at the end of the programme, Innes was asked if he liked all of the kinds of music which he took off, since there always seems to be real knowledge and affection behind his pastiches. He said that yes, by and large he did appreciate them in one way or another, and always tried to keep up with what was going on. A particular song could also be adapted to different styles, too. Catchphrase had also been performed in an old time dance band style, he revealed. In another episode to the Innes Book of Records (which you can find via the SHARE site, since it features Viv), Neil sings the old Bonzo song The Humanoid Boogie in a seaside cave as a prancing Scottish Frankenstein’s monster to accordion accompaniement and with yelping backing vocals from a trio of limbless shopfloor dummy busts. Yes, it’s that kind of show. Funnily enough, it works really well.

Neil stayed on for a good hour and a half or so after the programme ended, answering questions fully and considerately and with a wealth of amusing anecdotage. He finally picked up the hat which he’s placed at the foot of the stage, brim upwards in the hope of catching a few coins tossed his way, and exited to warm and fulsome applause, with a hint that he might be found in the bar for further convivial exchanges. It was a real pleasure to have spent time in the company of such an easy going, engaging and down to earth fellow. An unsung legend innes own time, as we all felt assured by the end of the evening.