Still Barking
MADFISH
MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES GETTY IMAGES
“Cool Britannia, Britannia you are cool, take a trip/Britons ever ever ever shall be hip”
REISSUE OF THE MONTH 10/10
HEDONISM and angst, heartbreak and rapture, bombast and tenderness – rock music does them all with an often startling brilliance. Humour? Not so much. Randy Newman – possibly the whip-smartest, funniest songwriter who has ever lived – was once asked by this reviewer why rock’n’roll has such an underdeveloped funny bone. His answer was simple: rock stars take themselves far too seriously and want to be remembered for saving the world rather than playing it for laughs.
There are exceptions that prove the rule, of course – Frank Zappa managed to be a serious musician and to inject a caustic wit into the Mothers Of Invention’s early records. Yet no rock’n’roll band has ever set out with quite such an endearingly eccentric, consistent and overarching objective to make us laugh as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.