Sinister: the original Death Cab For Cutie strikes back!

[carle groome]

(still mired in the backlog of weblog
)

and yet another piece of the sinisterine chapel comes into view out of
the rubble of the big apple (sliced)


hello all.
This goes out to the increasingly rare geezers and geezettes among the
dispatchers and dispatchees.  It was on the birthday of John Lennon that
me mate and me  went off to hear  the next best thing (arguably) in the
person of Neil Innes. I could cite the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band as a major
influence on my salad days, but that would short his work with Monty
Python as well. (I mean, at an audience request he even did "Brave Sir
Robin" to end with the aside, "I can’t believe it took some of the best
minds of Oxford and Cambridge to come up with those lyrics
")

And if I  say "The Rutles," there should be a rousing cheer and occasion
cause enough  for heads to nod  in agreement to the aforementioned
overweening enthusiasm spasm.

You see, whist in the throes of ecstacy (not phramochemically induced),
it occurred to me that the same reason I have an affection for the
Beatles is the same reason I love B&S: great huge whopping catalogs of
tunes of ultra-high quality in such a fantastic variety. Which brings me
back to Neil. You see, as much as The Rutles were a parody of the
Beatles, they were a truly stunning parody, and Innes’ innate melody
skills and talent for copying the Fab Four’s style and riffs could give
the brothers Gallegher  a run for their money. (And just to prove that
it isn’t just one Oasis that he visits, that it isn’t just one field of
study that he specializes in, he also showed an uncanny ability to ape
the Elton John-Bernie Taupin stylee with an eerily
familiar-but-brand-new number called "Godfrey Daniel." I mean stunning.)

But, of course, it was when he let the Dog out that I was happiest.
"Urban Spaceman" opened the show with Georgia and Ira on slide whistles.
(Oh, I forgot to mention that Yo La Tengo was his backing band.) And
yes, he did look mighty spiffy in his silver-grey mop-top cut. At the
conclusion of the number, "Well, that does it for the Show Biz part of
the show
" and prompty removed the wig to reveal a chrome dome. "Wot?
Don’t laugh—there are people all over California who look like that."

And it’s a good thing he did. Otherwise how would he be able to put on
the duck’s head for "How Smart To Be An Idiot" and a Stetson for the
"Donkey Song" (which defies immediate description). There’s that
showmanship thing that never leaves the stage for long, and, in that, I
guess I still see faint shadows of Lennon the Prankster.

Still, the songs
 To go from "Idiot" to "Doubleback Alley" to "You’re So
Pusillanimous" to "Cheese & Onions" to "Humanoid Boogie" is like saying:
so what else can you do to keep me grinning like a lunatic? And it
shouldn’t go without re-mentioning Yo La Tengo. Ira confessed (on his
only mike speech) that the week spent with Neil was one of the best he
could recall in a long time and that Neil responded with a remark that
Ira had made about them "being the best band around
in their price
range." Nobody who watched Ira go into his amplifier hunch on the
psychedelic Rutles/Bonzo’s numbers would doubt that.

Yes, a grand night for us anglophiliac geezers. You should check him out
if he passes by (with or without the back-ups) and the website’s funny
too. (www.neilinnes.org)

Oh well, time to "Get Up And Go"

Ta.


+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+
        +---+  Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list  +---+
     To send to the list mail sinister at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at missprint.org.  WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister
 +-+       "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper           +-+
 +-+  "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+
 +-+    "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000     +-+
 +-+  "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000  +-+
 +-+  "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001   +-+
 +-+               Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa                 +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+