NEIL INNES & MONTY PYTHON:

The Extravaganza

A pretty old but still pretty good section of neilinnes.org devoted to the work Neil did with Pythons and ex-Pythons. It includes video clips, stories and pictures, and Python memories Neil shared in an interview he gave us specifically for this.

Below are a few highlights from it in case you don't feel like
slogging through the whole thing! Click on the flash things to make
them play audio.

FROM OUR INTERVIEW WITH NEIL:

"...we started talking about doing records for Monty Python. And I said, 'Well, what sort of songs have you written?' I think Eric said, 'Well, Michael's written this thing about Agrarian Reform in the Middle Ages.' So I said, 'Ah. Ah. Right.' And they said, 'What sort of music do you think that would have?' And I said, 'Reggae?' And that's how it began. The collaboration, as it were.

"The thing was, a lot of the things, even Eric the Half a Bee or something like that, I had a lot of input into the tunes. A lot of them were just lyrics with nowhere to go, and I helped shaped them. So even though I'm not credited on some of the tunes, I did have a hand in quite a lot of them. Especially the Philosopher's Song."

"Everything I've been in with the Pythons usually ends with something being slung at me. I don't know whether they're trying to tell me something! In the Holy Grail I had a cow dropped on me and a huge wooden rabbit. In the Missionary I had a barstool thrown at me. There's something unpleasant happening to me in Jabberwocky I can't remember. In Life Of Brian I was hurled into an arena. I still have a scar on my chin from falling onto my spear."

Neil: Holy Grail was a bit disappointing for me, in that we only had a tiny budget, and we thought well as it's people banging coconut shells instead of having horses, it might also be funny to have just a few musicians, so I was trying to write all these great Arthurian themes, you know with just two french horns, so them going "papapapapapapa", you know all that stuff, it didn't sound big enough, so we had to junk it and put library stuff on with 140 people playing it.

Q: I remember in the film you being a wandering minstrel.

Neil: Oh, yeah, that was all right, all that other stuff was simple enough, but the real sort of film music you can't do, can you? You need at least 140 people playing. So all producers and film score bookers, please note, no skimping!

Q: That must have been quite a jaunt, nipping up to the Scottish highlands to make that film.

Neil: That's true. I think I learned how to do crosswords then. Halfway up a Scottish mountain in string chain mail — there's a giveaway folks, it's not the real stuff, it's made out of string and sprayed-on silver.

The Holy Grail scenes Neil is in Photo Gallery

New!!

Then there was the time in 2003 when we arranged a Neil concert that Eric Idle came to and they sang the Philosopher's Song together for the first time since 1980 at the Hollywood Bowl.* Here are a few pictures and then you can listen to it too.

Eric brought his Bruce hat!

Eric & Neil and Rutling Ken Thornton played a few Rutles songs too

Part One - Just Eric & Neil

Part Two, the sing-along -
This recording is just from their mics so you can't hear us
in the audience but we were all singing along heartily!

* To our fellow Python nerds: We saw the Hollywood Bowl show live when we were teenagers, so we fully appreciate how awesome this was!

Says Neil :

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? - court t.v. interview, 2000

Well, you never know that you can do these things until you're asked. I mean it wasn't as though I was sort of sitting there, waiting, 'oh if only somebody would ask me to parody the Beatles,' I mean literally it's your job to do it, and you do it." - Nicky Campbell radio interview, 1992

"And that's how I became a parodist. I didn't listen to one Beatles song, I wrote songs based on my memory of them. The hardest part was coming up with genuinely affectionate songs like Hold My Hand, working in stories from your own adolescent experience. We needed something from each period, because The Beatles never did the same thing twice. That was the brief for the film. The thing was to make the lyrics just parallel, or askew, and not use the same tune." Q Magazine, 1996

"I made a conscious decision not to listen to the records; I did everything from my memory of how it ought to sound. The psychedelic lyrics were easy, you just rhymed anything with anything else, but the earlier songs were difficult to get right, because of on the Beatles' trademarks is that the tunes and the words were always just a little bit unpredictable, so I was constantly throwing out tunes because they were too ordinary. The whole Rutles group could play. Ollie Halsall - who did a lot on the songs but is only in the film as Leppo, the fifth Rutle - was an incredibly underrated guitarist and singer, as was John Halsey. Rikki Fataar was a very accomplished all-rounder who'd played with The Beach Boys. The best thing I did was to insist that we all rehearsed together, playing live several times before filming started, so we became a proper band. Ollie did most of the Paul-type singing and Eric had to mime to his vocals. He never quite forgave me for that." - Q Magazine, 1996

Says John Altman, the orchestra arranger of the Rutle songs:

The Rutles, I think - I'm trying to think what stage they'd got to - they'd been rehearsing, and they'd recorded a few backing tracks. They hadn't worked out a hook for 'Love Life', how to get it going, so I came up with the 'John Brown's Body' idea, that was mine, at the beginning, to parody the marsellaise on 'All You Need Is Love', and then all the stuff at the end was my idea. And we just all threw ideas out and into the mix. And you'd start listening, you'd hear on 'Penny Lane', there's a flute playing behind the vocals. It's something you never actually notice, and it's just there for a couple of bars. So I put one in for a couple of bars in 'Doubleback Alley'. And I remember playing the tapes to Clive Franks who was Elton John's engineer, who'd been the tape op on all the Beatles sessions, and he was saying, 'How did you know that? That's what we did! Nobody's ever noticed that was there!' So I sort of dug into it. I was never really sure about how George Martin felt about all that. Obviously Neil talked a lot about what the Beatles thought about what the Rutles did, and then years later I sort of met him somewhere and someone introduced me and said, 'This is John Altman, he's...' and George Martin said 'I know who John Altman is!" - John Altman interview

"When we did the sessions on the Rutles, when we were doing 'Piggy in the Middle', one of the cellists - I mean, all the string players really got into it, they loved it - and one of the cellists said, 'Oh, the original record is Bram Martin and someone else, the guys who played on the original, and they really played it like this, with the bows like this, so should we do that?' And as soon as they did it, you went 'Wow! That's the Beatles!' And that was like, something that you wouldn't particularly know, but because the cellist listened to the cello on the original record, he would say 'This is how they play, those guys played like this' and as soon as they did it, bingo, you've got another element. You'd written half of it into the arrangement. They put the other half in. So that's why the string playing sounds so Beatley. It really does. They'd got the essence of the string sections that the Beatles used. And every single player who came on did what they knew worked on Beatles tracks. That's why it's so authentic." - John Altman interview