Comedy

..in
our collective brain I had my subject.
The first thing to do was listen to Ad Nauseam and see whether it had dated
or indeed had retained any of the elements that made it funny – or shocking
– in the first place. I’d heard the first in the series (Live) many decades
ago and enjoyed it, but, apart from The Horn and Racing, I’d
not heard the bulk of the sketches on Ad Nauseam.
And, they are sketches by and large, rather than rants, which means that Peter
Cook had actually written a script, or he had a more or less developed idea
that he extemporised on, which Dudley interpolated sympathetic noises when he
could get a word in edgewise. (Incidentally, I didn’t discern that they
were in any way inebriated, which I seem to remember was part of the myth of
the first collection at least. Dudley plays the piano on a couple of tracks,
but apart from The Horn, where Cook allows him to run with the idea,
it’s the Peter Cook show).
The original Derek & Clive (Live) was presented first as a bootleg
tape, and it achieved quite some notoriety before a commercial release evolved.
I don’t think that even Peter Cook would’ve imagined it was destined
to get played on commercial radio, but it did well enough without the support
of radio for them to follow it up with another two collections.
I don’t imagine that even today, when standards have been relaxed to the
point that barely an eyebrow is raised when ‘fuck’ is uttered on
the national broadcaster, many of the tracks get radio play. This is partly
due to the fact that Pete & Dud/Derek & Clive are from a distant era
and are considered arcane and irrelevant, if they’re considered at all,
but it’s also because their railing against the more ridiculous restrictions
on ‘free speech’ is a battle that has long-since been won –
or lost, depending on your point of view. The interest lies now in exactly what
it takes to rouse the general public to react against some perceived crossing
of the boundaries of ‘good taste’, that most ephemeral of middle
class confections.
The Chaser’s War on Everything’s recent skirmish with the
bounds of decency is an indication of how hard it is to be shocking these days
and retain some vestige of your avant-garde manifesto, while not terminally
biting the hand that feeds you in the shape of that same national broadcaster
and its audience.
It’s not even true any more that TV is inherently more conservative than
radio – cable TV has seen to that. So, where there are so few restrictions
it comes down to judgement based on taste. I don’t watch a lot of the
Chasers’ shows precisely because they seem to get it wrong quite a lot
– to my taste, anyway. For instance, it wasn’t in this series or
possibly even in the last series, but the Chasers did a sketch based on the
premise that that people make certain negative assumptions about your intentions
when you wear a stocking mask, on the thin pretext that a stocking mask could
be regarded as a fashion accessory. The resultant chaos was so obvious I don’t
know why you’d bother for a start. Clearly you’re up to no good
if you wear a stocking mask into a 7-Eleven or some such place and the reactions
were predictably distressing and unnecessary. I was almost hoping that one of
the affected proprietors would produce a baseball bat and whack this idiot over
the head with it. I’m not sure why they thought this was funny, or even
instructive for that matter, and it seems every episode has at least one such
error in judgement that taints some of the more legitimately satirical, or just
plain silly material. (I can handle silly).

And, (perhaps) in the same vein, I got a call from my friend Chris Grosz
in NZ last Friday. He’s had some renewed interest in the historical
romance rock ‘n’ roll movie project he was toying with a number
of years ago, admittedly not from movie producers per se, but from the TV
producers of the Kiwi equivalent of Australian Story. Coincidentally
I had just been revisiting the song we were collaborating on called The
Jacket Formerly Known as Prince, about one of the great unrecognised
innovators in pop-rock music, The Pretty Things’ drummer, Viv Prince.
Viv was the prototype for The Who’s Keith Moon, not only in the unlikely
looking ‘pointy-stick’ drumming technique, which most people attribute
to Moon, but also in the department of conspicuous public misbehaviour.
Viv decided early on in the unlikely package tour of NZ back in 1965, (featuring
Sandie Shaw and Eden Kane with New Zealander popsters Tommy Adderley and teenage
sister duo, The Chicks), that the Pretties (and the tour) could stand some
free publicity, and proceeded to be a one-man headline for the rest of the
tour.
The biggest headline came after Viv lit some rolled newspapers during the
New Plymouth show and ran about the stage until he was ‘extinguished’
before causing any actual damage. Viv was nothing if not persistent though,
and managed to get himself written up as the ‘bad boy’ of English
pop music wherever they went over the next couple of weeks of the tour.
I saw both Christchurch shows and remember Viv coming out on stage during
Sandie Shaw’s set, distracting her to the point she said something quite
unlady-like, and getting everybody out on stage doing a knees-up behind Eden
Kane, who took it in his stride as I recall – he was probably getting used
to Viv’s pranks by then
I quite enjoyed the Pretty Things’ sets, and I think they ultimately
had more impact by way of influencing the local blues and rhythm & blues
scene, (like my band, The Chants for instance), than perhaps did The Rolling
Stones, but I also dimly understood that the anarchic posture that Viv Prince
adopted had fundamentally changed the way that popular musicians were seen
and the way they saw themselves. There’s probably a direct correlation
between the Pretties, or Viv Prince in particular, and the way Sex Pistols
were presented to the world by Malcolm McLaren, but by then Viv’s gut
instinct for publicity had been refined into an art-form by the mercurial
motor-mouth McLaren..(Bongo Starkie told us at the Wrokdown taping that he’d
chased Malcolm McLaren all over the shop to film an interview with him for
a show he’d devised, and when he finally nailed him he couldn’t
get a word in edgewise for the next hour while Malcolm raved on).
I guess the sad thing is that there’s nothing in the music and/or publicity
games that hasn’t been done, and done to death, since those naive times.
I guess that I – and probably you – can be grateful we lived through
such genuinely interesting and innovative times.
Anyway, I hope that something comes of the current interest being taken in
Chris Grosz’s project, whether it be in the preferred movie format or
as a TV special. (It’ll probably reach more people on TV). Today’s
kids must wonder where all the interesting stuff came from and the part we
played in it, as the history of pop music remains deficient while it doesn’t
come to bear on events like the Pretty Things tour of NZ back in 1965 and
the disproportionate effect it had on the NZ music scene and the pop music
scene in general.

Recommended reading: Tragically
I was an Only Twin – The Complete Peter Cook and Don’t Bring
Me Down.. Under – The Pretty Things in NZ, 1965