The Rolling Stones did a
fantastic job of their Glastonbury set, and indeed the rest of their last tour.
The inevitable jokes appear every few years when they announce yet another ‘comeback’
tour, with gags about pensions, slippers, Werther’s Originals and every other cliché
bouncing back and forth. The Who still get back together on occasion, and
despite being only half the original band are still as great as ever. In fact I
would go so far to say that The Who are better now than they were in the
beginning. When a band gets back together the worry is that they will be shit
and therefore ruin the memory of better days. I had that fear when I went to
see Axl Rose fronting a band called Guns and Roses last year, as it was a
different Guns and Roses to the one I saw in 1992. As luck would have it, the
band I saw in Nottingham was every bit as good as the band I saw at The Milton
Keynes Bowl when I was sixteen. People say that without the original line-up it
isn’t the band, which depends to a degree on who is missing. The Specials
reunited without Jerry Dammers, but would The Smiths be acceptable without
Johnny Marr or Morrissey? Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend are only half of the
original line up of The Who, but if one or both of them had died instead would
you want to see the band with John Entwhistle and Keith Moon working with a
different singer and guitarist? The Who are allowed to continue, but on that
principle then what sort of reception would Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr get
if they toured as The Beatles?
News of a band reuniting is greeted
with either joy or groans, as we want to hear the old songs and enjoy
ourselves. However, one of the most popular ‘bands’ of the 1970s have recently
announced a reunion, and I am dreading it.
I knew who John Cleese was as
a child due to Fawlty Towers of course, and also
from his appearance in The Great Muppet Caper.
It wasn’t until the death of Graham Chapman in 1989 when I was twelve that I
was introduced to Monty Python. The first thing I remember seeing was a tribute
to Python wrapped around footage of Chapman’s memorial service screened by the
BBC. It was on late at night and I watched it on video with my parents, just as
I had learned about Fawlty Towers.
Everybody laughed when John Cleese referred to Chapman as a freeloading
bastard, and I got away with still watching it. This was literally the first
time that I heard the big swear word on television, which was met with laughter
from my parents, especially my usually prudish mum. I was genuinely shocked at
first, maybe because I was watching with my parents, at John Cleese’s passage:
“I could hear him whispering
in my ear last night as I was writing this; ‘Alright Cleese’ he was saying, ‘you’re
very proud of being the first person to say shit on British television. If this
service really is for me, just for starters I want you to become the first
person ever at a British memorial service to say fuck’”.
This was a glorious slice of
bad taste and I fell in love with offensive, (but at the same time very clever)
comedy. I was delighted when the BBC repeated a series of Monty Python’s
Flying Circus, and Channel Four as part of a season of banned films
aired Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
John Cleese made Clockwise, in which he played a Basil Fawlty-esque school
teacher obsessed with timekeeping who ends up being late with hilarious consequences.
His career has been hit and miss ever since; cameos on American sitcoms purely
based on the fact that he is John Cleese, and a handful of vaguely amusing
adverts. Of course A Fish Called Wanda
is a modern classic, but it wasn’t followed up with Fierce
Creatures and he has struggled to hit those Python highs. Michael
Palin has carved a new career as a travel presenter, Terry Jones and Terry
Gilliam direct films, and Eric Idle counts his money from Spamalot.
Cleese had a very public shafting from his last divorce and went on tour to try
and earn some money, and Jones has stated that this reunion will hopefully pay
off his mortgage.
Whether or not they write new
material or not, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The
audience will want to hear (and shout) the old lines and sing along to ‘The
Lumberjack Song’, and their hearts will sink when they hear those words that
every nostalgic audience dreads; “here’s a new one”.
I hope they can sleep soundly
on top of all the money they’ll make.
===
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