bill oddie's band the goodies - C or D/S & D

words on the goodies coming up in my 1974 blog epic. however, given that four months after starting it i'm still at the letter C you may not wish to hold your breath until it appears...

bill oddie likes good music.

xpost oh someone beat me to it

Bill Oddie:
You won't believe the musical pretensions that went on in my head. I listened to a lot of jazz and a lot of funk, and that period of the '70s for me was fantastic - it was really the era when fusion started. The people I liked were Sly Stone and early Parliament, and I listened to what was happening in jazz at the time, when Miles Davis was coming up with some very interesting hybrid music. With 'Funky Gibbon', I started off - it's almost unbelievable considering how stupid the song is - trying to get the feel of a Miles Davis track, I can't remember which, probably just after Bitches Brew and that sort of era: some really choppy Miles Davis-type rhythm, again with a Sly Stone influence.
We had marvellous musicians on those sessions, but they couldn't get it. They knew what I was sort of trying to do, but I probably listened to that sort of thing more than they did, and it was driving us nuts, so we sent the drummer and the bass-player and the guitarist home. And I had a keyboard player called Dave Macrae, who'd played with Matching Mole and Robert Wyatt and people like that - governor player - and he started playing some clavinet, very Stevie Wonder-type feel to it, and I said, 'That's fine; could you do a synth-bass on it?'
And then I literally started whacking the top of the grand piano. So the actual rhythm-track of 'The Funky Gibbon' has only got me and Dave on it - he plays clavinet and synth-bass and we miked up the top of the piano. Then we got the horn section of Gonzales playing a Memphis Horns-type thing. It was lovely for me to be able to use musicians I liked and try to reproduce sounds which I also listened to. And then put the stupid song over the top of it. The idea that all that effort went into 'The Funky Gibbon'!
It sounds like Parliament on a bad day, or something like that [laughs], that kind of thing. I think subconsciously people feel it - this was always my theory about it, I thought: I want the music to sound good or authentic, whatever style it happens to be in.

(x-post)

300 plays later........

as for the Goodies, their - and indeed just about anyone's - finest half-hour is "Earthanasia".

Have you let the kids watch it yet?

Incidentally if you really want to try to untangle the complexed creossed paths of the various members of The Goodies and Monty Python prior to either of those series starting, you could do a lot worse than to start here.

it would be self-parodic of me to know which school Graeme Garden went to, so i don't - i do know that Bill Oddie went to one of the King Edward schools in Birmingham, however. watching it on the DVD recently (a DVD that most of the people who say "why haven't they repeated the Goodies?" still don't seem to have heard of, and there's a second DVD coming which will include the contentious-from-all-sides "South Africa" episode) i came to the conclusion that there's something psychologically quite fascinating about "Saturday Night Grease", but again, not even i am willing to go into that.

although "Saturday Night Grease" did give us the amusing spectacle of Mary Whitehouse calling the series "too sexually orientated".

what????

http://www.fistoffun.net/downloads.htm
http://www.loadofold.com/boots/oddie.html

I have to say I was quite unaware as to how much it tied in with early to mid '70s UK politics though.

other than that, you're right, they never did anything as political as, say, final-series Python. the Goodies was never shown as part of children's TV and in fact they consistently felt that the BBC was treating it as though it was a children's series, and using their popularity with kids as an excuse to censor the show and stop them exploring certain subject areas and using certain content (c.f., especially, the postponed anti-royal episode from the 1977 series).

Yes, Robin, I do remember that "Gender Education" episode from 1971, (It is also on the DVD, but I do remember seeing it before, I'd be 10). Its that sort of thing that shows you how laughable the authority figures are (bit like the "Little Red Book")...

The SatNightGrease thing was a case of all the surreal humour's done, lets make a mainstream episode. It was still good, but done to death at the time. It looks better now, for some reason.

Earthanasia I hadnt put on for the Kids, seemed a bt dark humor, but they watched it when I was out of the room anyway...

Robin, yes, sorry, was being a little jokey there. Thanks for the response anyway; it is interesting. Jonathan King and Genesis (apart from Phil, who was a street urchin) went to Charterhouse I think. Chris de Burgh went to Marlborough, with Nick Drake I think too. I think you mean particularly toff schools though don't you?

the ultimate point is that the old guard shouldn't have worried about the Wilson government; they should have been worried about global capitalism. i was listening to Alan Price's "Jarrow Song" while looking through the Times Digital Archive the other day and, for all that many readers of the old Times would have sympathised with the Wilson Plot and would have felt no affinity whatsoever to Price's NE England Socialist background, the song *still*, despite everything, does not feel anything like as inherently opposed to the England evoked by the pre-Murdoch Times as the front page of today's paper - essentially a Bushco love-in front-page editorial - does. maybe it did at the time, but it's all water under the bridge now.

if the old Left and the old Right had foreseen that what they had in common - namely a desire to prevent their country from becoming the 51st State - would ultimately, once the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, ideologically unite them and separate them from the scum of the new elites, Britain would be a far healthier and far stronger country today. people who had that much in common *shouldn't* have fought, they really shouldn't.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00079ZB9O/ref=pd_ys_h_slot_003_nr/202-0623257-2077410

Actually Phil was a stage school brat: the closest he got to be "a street urchin" was playing The Artful Dodger in a west-end production of Oliver!

Don't believe me?

http://www.philcollins.co.uk/images/dodger120.jpg

The Fukny Gibonn

(what episodes are on the new DVD, btw?)

I would kill for this.

I downloaded an application form to write questions for quiz shows and I am supposed to give them some sample questions, but the programmes don't exist, except In It To Win It, which I once watched all the way through.

Otherwise, well done, Mr Mental Quiz Freak.

I don't know what Goodies epsiodes are on that DVD, it is a closely guarded industry secret.

Good luck!

I might get the old one again.