Sealed LP: Monty Python: Rutland Times (Idle & Innes)

$

35

Monty Python: Rutland Times (Idle & Innes)
FACTORY SEALED LP Format: Album
Country: U.S.A. Condition of the cover: Mint
Condition of this Album: Sealed - Assumed Mint Record Company & Release Number: Passport Records: PPSD-98018
Original release date: 1976
Bar Code: NONE My inventory number: 209146
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds, 0 ounces
Notes: Sticker on the shrink wrap as shown in the photo below. Please contact me if you have any difficulty viewing the photos.
Songs

• L' Amour Perdue
• Gibberish
• Front Loader
• Say Sorry Again
• I Must Be in Love
• 24 Hours in Tunbridge Wells
• The Fabulous Bingo Bros.
• Concrete Jungle Boy
• The Children of Rock and Roll
• Stoop Solo
• Song O' the Insurance Men
• Testing
• I Give Myself to You
• Communist Cooking
• Johnny Cash
• Protest Song
• Accountancy Shanty
• Football
• Boring
• L' Amour Perdue Cha Cha Cha
• The Hard to Get
• The Song O' the Continuity Announcers

• Dave Ballby: Vocals
• Billy Bremner: Guitar
• John Halsey: Drums
• Brian Hodgson: Bass
• Eric Idle: Vocals
• Neil Innes: Guitar, Harmonica, Keyboards, Vocals
• Roger Rettig: Guitar, Guitar (Steel)
• Dave Richards: Bass
• Andy Roberts: Guitar
• Roger Swallow: Drums

The Beatles had Hamburg, the Rutles had Rutland -- Rutland Weekend Television to be precise, the spring 1976 BBC TV series in which former Bonzo Dog Band Neil Innes and Monty Python's Eric Idle first aired the fascination that would shake the world. The pre-Fab Four appear only once in the RWT chronicles, reuniting "for tax purposes" to perform "I Must Be in Love (Is All You Need, Apart from Money Which Can't Buy Everything)," but the aftershocks of that performance can still be felt. Rutland Times is the soundtrack to the TV series, a 21-track masterpiece that really is as funny as it ought to be. An effortless parody of the last decade or so of British television's most treasured conceits, it takes the form of a full broadcast day, from the opening overture by the Rutland Light Orchestra, to the close down message from the Two Nobbies. In between times, the rock institution The Old Gay Whistle Test, children's TV flagship Wash with Mother, sports (the Foul of the Month competition) and television itself (Boring) are all highlighted via Innes' uncanny knack of sounding precisely like what he puts his mind to. But the highlight has to be "another in the series of Classically Bad American Films," 24 Hours in Tunbridge Wells, which not only sounds precisely like an outtake by Rodgers & Hart, it will probably send you off in search of more of the same. Hamstrung just a little by its distinctly British demeanor (with the most Anglophiliac will in the world, few folk who haven't lived there will quite understand why Nicholas Parsons raises such guffaws), Rutland Times stands among the highest of all high points in Neil Innes' lengthy career. And Eric Idle's pretty funny as well.

Probably the most important figure in British musical comedy since the heyday of vaudeville, Neil Innes is that rarity among musical comedians, a side-splitting satirist who can also write perfectly straightforward, catchy pop songs.

Born in Danbury, Essex, England, on December 9, 1944, and spending a good part of his childhood in postwar Germany, Innes followed the traditional route for future English pop stars of his generation and went to art college, specifically Goldsmith's College School of Art in London. Unlike, say, Keith Richards, Innes had a genuine facility for art and flourished at Goldsmith's. Among other pursuits, Innes fell in with a crowd including Vivian Stanshall, Larry Smith, and Roger Ruskin Spears, all of whom shared Innes' taste for both old-fashioned trad jazz and the Dadaist art movement of the 1910s. The foursome, along with an ever-shifting cast of fellow students, formed the Bonzo Dog Dada Band to combine the two. Upon graduation in 1966, the group turned professional, altering their name to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band because they were tired of having to explain to everyone what Dada was.

Although the retiring Innes was never the onstage focus of the Bonzos, preferring to quietly play guitar and keyboards in the back while the master showmen Stanshall, Smith, and Spears hogged the limelight, he quickly became the group's musical leader. Although all of the Bonzos wrote, Innes' melodic gifts were soon obvious, and his talent for melding sharply satiric lyrics with sweetly catchy pop songs in a variety of musical styles was the secret weapon that kept the group from being just a wacky British version of the Mothers of Invention. Over the course of the group's four albums, Gorilla (1967), The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse (1968), Tadpoles (1969), and Keynsham (1969), Innes subtly moved the group's focus from '20s jazz to '60s pop, with gems like the U.K. hit single "I'm the Urban Spaceman" and the genuinely beautiful flip side "Ready-Mades," an oblique ode to Marcel Duchamp's prankish art, being among the most unforgettable songs of their time.

• The Bonzo Dog Band appeared weekly on a 1968 British children's television show, Do Not Adjust Your Set. During this project, Innes became friends with Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones, which in turn led to Innes becoming a sort of unofficial seventh member of Monty Python. Contributing songs to Python's stage show, albums, and films, and even acting in a few sketches in the last year of their television series, Innes eventually became an integral part of this classic comedy troupe. However, Innes' work with the Pythons was never more than a part-time affair, and he spent the years after the Bonzos' 1969 breakup pursuing his own projects.
• The first of these was the World, a straight rock group Innes formed with former Bonzos bassist Dennis Cowan, drummer Ian Wallace, and guitarist Roger McKew. Their sole album, 1970's Lucky Planet, was a Beatlesque pop album that bears a certain resemblance to early Badfinger. Lucky Planet was preceded by a fine single, "Angelina"/"Come Out Into the Open," but neither song appeared on the album. Shortly after the World split up, the three members of the Liverpool comedy pop group the Scaffold, Roger McGough, John Gorman, and Mike (McCartney) McGear, contacted Innes about forming a new band. Adding guitarist Andy Roberts, the five formed GRIMMS, taking their name from the members' initials. GRIMMS released three albums combining poetry and music, GRIMMS (1972), Rockin' Duck (1973), and Sleepers (1975), before breaking up mid-decade.
• In between GRIMMS records, Innes began his solo career with 1974's How Sweet to Be an Idiot. That album and 1977's Taking Off are about evenly split between Innes' playful and pop sides. (How Sweet to Be an Idiot has since been reissued under two different names, the 1980 budget-price LP Neil Innes A-Go-Go and the 1994 CD Recycled Vinyl Blues, which combines the album, the 1970 single by the World, and four later single sides.) Innes' next two albums, 1979's The Innes Book of Records and 1982's Off the Records, are collections of songs performed on Innes' first television show of his own, The Innes Book of Records, which ran for three seasons on the BBC.
• Innes has spent most of his time since the mid-'70s working in television, writing and starring in children's shows like The Raggy Dolls and Puddle Lane for British television, as well as collaborating with Python alums Terry Jones and Eric Idle on various projects. One of those collaborations, an Idle-scripted series called Rutland Weekend Television, which spawned the Idle and Innes duo LP The Rutland Weekend Songbook (1976), eventually led to the project for which Innes is probably best known, the loving but dead-on Beatles parody the Rutles. Besides starring in Idle's film All You Need Is Cash as Rutles leader Ron Nasty, Innes wrote 20 perfect Beatles parodies for the soundtrack. In 1996, Innes regrouped the Rutles to record Archaeology, a similarly faultless parody of the Beatles' Anthology CDs. Innes regularly appears at Beatles conventions, both as himself and as Ron Nasty.
Eric Idle biography by Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide

• A founding member of the renowned Monty Python comedy troupe, Eric Idle was born March 29, 1943, in South Shields, England; when he was just two years old, his father, a member of the Royal Air Force, died in an automobile crash. After attending boarding school in Wolverhampton, Idle studied English at Cambridge University, where he also served as president of the famed Footlights comedy group in 1964. He first met future Python collaborators John Cleese and Graham Chapman while appearing on the 1967 sketch comedy series At Last the 1948 Show, with the troupe -- also consisting of Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and American-born animator Terry Gilliam -- beginning to truly take shape during production of the children's program Do Not Adjust Your Set. In May of 1969, the BBC contracted the group to produce their own 13-week program; Monty Python's Flying Circus, a weekly sketch comedy series, premiered that October, becoming a major hit throughout Europe and later a cult phenomenon overseas as well.
• In addition to their television series, Monty Python yielded a series of hit films and albums; Idle, one of the group's chief writers, typically played bizarre singers and other entertainer caricatures. In 1975, he published his first novel, Hello Sailor, and with the Bonzo Dog Band's Neil Innes created another sketch comedy series, the short-lived Rutland Weekend Television. The show later gave rise to the Beatles parody group the Rutles, the subject of the fan-favorite mockumentary All You Need Is Cash. Following the last official Python project, the 1983 film Monty Python's the Meaning of Life, Idle accepted small roles in a number of films, among them Gilliam's 1988 classic The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but otherwise focused on writing until accepting the lead in 1990's Nuns on the Run. He also wrote, produced, and starred in 1993's Splitting Heirs. In 1999, Idle inexplicably accepted a supporting role on the misbegotten Brooke Shields sitcom Suddenly Susan; after the show was abruptly canceled, the following year he mounted a solo tour in support of his album Eric Idle Sings Monty Python.

This record came from a record store called "Phantasmagoria" which was located in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Phantasmagoria went out of business in 1978. I purchased most of their unsold inventory some years later when I owned "Music Madness" - a new & used record store in Catasauqua.

Phantasmagoria used round colored stickers to indicate the price of the albums. They had a sign on the wall with the color sticker combinations for the customers to use so they knew the price of the albums. Most of the albums still have these stickers on them, and in some rare cases, the stickers are written on. Some of the records have prices on them. This is the price you would have paid for the record in 1978 if you would have bought it at Phantasmagoria. Please don't confuse these prices with their current value.

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