Music

Once upon a time, thousands of children around the country would awake on Christmas morning, scurry down to the foot of the Christmas tree, and unwrap a slim, square present containing a comedy LP. It may have been a Goodies or a Python or a Billy Connolly, but it would be the most subversive aural document that a teenager could own, something that would be transferred to a C90 and distributed among school playgrounds like samizdat literature.

Given that albums like Alexei Sayle’s ‘Cak!’ or ‘Derek And Clive Live’ were as thrillingly punk as anything by the Sex Pistols, it’s odd how the British comedy album slipped off the radar in the ’80s. Even the 1990s dictum that ‘comedy is the new rock ’n’ roll’ failed to create anything musical – if anything, sketch shows of the 1990s largely eschewed comedy songs, reacting against the old-school song-and-dance numbers that punctuated ‘The Two Ronnies’. Feature continues

In doing so they also jettisoned an adventurous British musical ancestry, one that can be traced back to the novelty records George Martin produced for Peter Sellers, Charlie Drake, Bernard Cribbins, Rolf Harris and Flanders And Swann, or the ensemble works of The Goons, Beyond The Fringe or Round The Horne. Unlike American comedy albums – which, from Bob Newhart to Bill Hicks, have essentially been straight recordings of stand-up routines – the British comedy album was always a much more musical beast. One recalls Jerry Sadowitz comparing Derek And Clive to Lennon and McCartney (‘Peter Cook played rhythm, Dudley Moore harmonised over the top’).

'Shrigley forced to speak with others' by David Shrigley

Chris Morris’s ‘Blue Jam’ reconnected with that spirit of sonic adventure. Now Morris’s methodology – bleak comic monologues and dialogues set against trippy, ambient aural collages – finds itself being echoed by the artist David Shrigley. Shrigley is best known for his endearingly daft cartoons in the Guardian, his animated promos for Blur and Will Oldham and some conceptual art pieces that you’ll find in the Tate. But his new album ‘Forced To Speak With Others’ also confirms him as a twenty-first century Ivor Cutler. Like Cutler, Shrigley’s poetry teeters between playful, whimsical, bleak, silly and horrifying (‘daddy was bound to die sooner or later, he was a very clumsy man’) and, like Cutler, his hypnotic voice can be both soothing and unsettling (‘I want my beer to be strong and have integrity, like my father, and I want it to be kind and forgiving, like my mother; I do not want my beer to be bitter and unreliable like my uncle Pete’). Instead of Cutler’s miserable, asthmatic harmonium, Shrigley uses post-rock guitar drones, brittle hip hop beats and clanking industrial noises. It’s the kind of record that leaves you unsure whether you should laugh, dance or cry.

Morris and Shrigley are revisiting a comic tradition that’s only now being embraced all over again by comedians. Not just by Bill Bailey, who has proved himself to be something of a latterday Dudley Moore, or by New Romantic parodist Gary Le Strange’s, or from Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee’s ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’, but also by TV series like ‘The Mighty Boosh’ and ‘Snuff Box’, who each possess gifted and credible musicians in the shape of Julian Barrett and Matt Berry.

'Matching Tie and Handkerchief' by Monty Python

But it’s the Monty Python releases of the ’70s that remain the high-water mark for the comedy LP. EMI’s recent batch of Python reissues (starting a cataract of EMI comedy remasters, including rumoured box-sets from The Goodies, The Goons, The Rutles, Peter Sellers and Derek And Clive) remain a salutary lesson for both comedy and music fans. TV repeats of ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ are sometimes distorted by age – that grainy film stock, that seemingly ancient footage of a now extinct surburbia, those suits! – but the albums seem ageless. They are also magnificent pieces of sonic workmanship, aural voyages that use the studio as an instrument as effectively as any Beatles album (‘listen to the sound of an African anteater rubbing Vicks on his chest!’).

There are dozens of classic songs scattered across these eight CDs (‘Denis Moore’, ‘Yangste Kiang’, ‘Spam’, ‘The Money Song’, ‘Finland’), but even the verbal sketches obey an almost operatic sense of pace and rhythm. Their masterpiece may be 1973’s ‘Matching Tie And Handerchief’, especially the Open University lecture on medieval agriculture, where assorted history professors present their theories on open-field farming in the style of Elton John, the Glitter Band or Bob Marley, concluding with Michael Palin playing a Cambridge professor who conducts himself like a drug-addled rock star in an ‘Old Grey Whistle Test’ interview. Comedy, it seems, was always the new rock ’n’ roll.