Lord Snooty's Giant Poisoned Electric Head

Some years ago now, my kids were into an American group called Death Cab For Cutie. Weirdly, the advent of iPods, smartphones, and the universal preference of the young for earphones over speakers have combined to mean that I don't have a clue what that band actually sound like. Unlike my poor father, whom I subjected to more late 60s rock than a sometime semi-pro drummer, and fan of jazz and big-band music should ever have been expected to bear. And they say there's no progress.

But that name, "Death Cab For Cutie", always rang a distant bell. It took a surprisingly long time for me to recall that it was, in fact, a track on the album Gorilla, by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, released in 1967. An album I used to know very well, but haven't heard since somewhere around 1974. In fact, it had become a minor cult when I was at university: a group of us knew it and another Bonzo album, The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse so well that we could recite every song, all chipping in at the Good Bits ("Ecstasy, Bruce, ecstasy", "On my left, Sir Kenneth Clark, bass sax. It's a great honour, sir!"). When I described this to my kids, they said, "What, you all used to sit around listening to records together?" Um, why, yes... Yes, we did. Quite a lot. Sometimes there might be a dozen or more of us, sitting on the floor, passing around smokes and drinks and having a laugh and talking nonsense and, I suppose, generally killing all that wasted time until someone finally got around to inventing the internet. With the emphasis on "wasted".

The other day, in one of those revelatory moments that demonstrate (yet again) how wrong-headed most cultural history is, I discovered two things you would suppose I ought to have known, but didn't. First, that the Bonzos perform "Death Cab For Cutie" on the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. Blimey! At least, apparently they do in the original TV "video" version, which I haven't seen since it was broadcast in black and white into our family living room, to universal perplexity, on Boxing Day 1967; the song doesn't figure on the MMT album. Second, and even more amazingly, that the title comes from The Uses of Literacy, a rather solemn book by Richard Hoggart about working class education and the dilemma of the "scholarship boy", stranded in an uncomfortable limbo between his class of origin and his class of aspiration. I used to own (and may even have read) this book, in its blue-spined Pelican paperback incarnation. In a moment of uncharacteristic inspiration, it seems Hoggart made up the title "Death Cab For Cutie" as an example of the sort of trashy gangster movie that typified popular culture (he didn't much like popular culture), simply because the publisher wouldn't let him use any real ones. I expect you knew this already, but my point is that I didn't; despite my fondness for pop culture trivia, this fascinating set of connected dots had passed me by, despite having lived each one of them. Real Life 1: Cultural History 0.

But, ah, the Bonzos! One of the "nearly" bands of British pop. The result of what happens when nostalgia, trad jazz, art school, music hall, pop, and a joyous sense of the absurd all come together, but never quite settle into a consistent mix. Paul McCartney's fondness for the musical styles of the 1920s can seem perverse, until you recall the nostalgia for a re-imagined version of that era that permeated the 1960s (the Temperance Seven, anybody?) [1]. The initial taking off point for the Bonzos was an anarchic art-school urge simultaneously to parody and celebrate that nostalgia, but it never quite took flight as a pop vehicle. I suppose one point of comparison would be the Mothers of Invention, but the Bonzos lacked the edge, depth, and anger of Zappa's satire. Indeed, it was their very frivolity that made them funny: I defy anyone to listen to, say, "Jollity Farm", "I'm Bored", or "The Intro and the Outro", and not feel their spirits being lifted ("nice!").

But the collective energies pulled in two very different directions that were radically inconsistent: tracks inspired by Viv Stanshall's effete, surreal nostalgia (all of those above-mentioned tracks are his) sat awkwardly with Neil Innes' leaden-footed urge to parody pop styles, most of which come across now as exercises in envy, rather than satire. Stanshall went on to become a professional eccentric and loose cannon, a sort of alternative National Treasure (huzzah!), and godfather to the likes of Tubular Bells and Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters [2], whereas Innes' strange love-hate relationship with pop led to The Rutles (yawn) and Monty Python. Both are venerable strands of British idiocy, but my personal preference is for the former: less smug, and dangerously in love with failure.

Let "My Pink Half of the Drainpipe" be the band's epitaph, a monument to what might have been:

My pink half of the drainpipe
Separates me from the incredibly fascinating story of your life and
every day-to-day event in all its minute and tedious attention to
detail...
And was it a Thursday or a Wednesday? Or, oh, no, it wasn't, though, oh,
who cares, anyway, because I do not, so Norman, if you're normal, I intend to
be a freak for the rest of my life, and I shall baffle you with cabbages
and rhinoceroses in the kitchen, incessant quotations from "Now We Are
Six" through the mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant poisoned electric
head...
So theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere

1. Talking of pop history trivia, I also didn't know that McCartney more-or-less produced "Urban Spaceman", the Bonzos' one Big Hit. It's striking, though, that 1928 was as distant from 1968 as 1979 is from today. As I have commented many times before, pop and rock seems to have been stuck in a time-warp for decades... You wouldn't raise many eyebrows by imitating the styles of Elvis Costello or The Clash today.
2. One of the great overlooked albums, IMHO, a high spot among concept albums, Hawkwind-style Space Rock meets satire, and a 1975 favourite for sitting around wasting time, waiting for the internet. It, too, has quotable Good Bits, though not as many as, say, Gong's Radio Gnome Invisible. Now there's another music post...