portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Monday, March 21, 2022

HAPPY 300TH ISSUE - UNCUT MAGAZINE!

 


Happy 300th issue, Uncut Magazine! The new issue features “The 300 Greatest Albums of Uncut's Lifetime,” since the magazine's launch in 1997. That includes Nonesuch releases from Wilco, Brian Wilson, Emmylou Harris, The Black Keys, Scritti Politti, Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabate, Dr. John, Randy Newman, Billy Bragg, and Buena Vista Social Club. You can see it all in the latest issue, out now. And listen to the featured Nonesuch albums on our new playlist at https://nonesuch.lnk.to/Uncut300




Also on this day . . . . . . 



Vivian Stanshall was born as Victor Stanshall in Shillingford, Oxfordshire on this day in 1943. He's the urban spaceman, baby, he can fly. He's a supersonic guy.






In a strange little coincidence, on the day the world learned that it lost NEIL INNES, the Tuesday 30TH DECEMBER 1986 10 p.m. broadcast on Channel 4 was a repeat of a 1968 episode of 'Do Not Adjust Your Set', the fledgling Thames Television show that included early appearances of David Jason, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.That very broadcast featured THE BONZO DOG DOO DAH BAND performing I'M THE URBAN SPACEMAN, the video here."I'm the Urban Spaceman" was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's most successful single, released in 1968. It reached #5 in the UK charts. The song was written by Neil Innes - who won an Ivor Novello Award in 1968 for the song - and produced by Paul McCartney and Gus Dudgeon under the pseudonym "Apollo C. Vermouth".The B-side was written by Vivian Stanshall. A well-known staging of the song involves Innes performing solo while a female tap dancer performs an enthusiastic but apparently under-rehearsed routine around him.
This skit originally appeared in a 1975 edition of Rutland Weekend Television, with Lyn Ashley as the dancer, and was more famously revived in the 1982 film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl with Carol Cleveland taking over the role.


And here's Vivian Stanshall in action, this is the b-side of their single, sports fans.
It may be slightly worrying to note that this blog's author knew this song word for word and learned it by rote!
1:15 / 2:59
Here's a little number from the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to lighten up your day. Nobody understood the BDDDB. We just learned to love them. I have a story regarding Viv Stanshall and didn't know he was native of Oxfordshire but I am sure I have told the tale ad nauseam . . . . . I will check and get back to you!

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