Neil Innes: Musician who masterminded the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Rutles

A supreme musical parodist, he also worked extensively with the Monty Python team

Innes wrote and sang Top 5 hit ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ (Getty)

The musician and actor Neil Innes, who has died of a heart attack aged 75, made a career out of parody, with contributions to popular culture that remain etched in the minds of those growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.

His group the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, formed by art students originally paying homage to old-fashioned trad jazz and the Dadaist art movement, moved into the mainstream to have a Top 5 hit single in 1968 with “I’m the Urban Spaceman”.

It came in the middle of their run of weekly appearances in the cult TV children’s sketch show Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967-69), which quickly won a loyal adult following for its blend of satire and surrealism.

Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin, regular writers and performers in the programme, went on to create the television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus – and Innes was sometimes referred to as the “seventh Python”.

He wrote many of the songs for that show’s final run, in 1974, in which he also made two cameo appearances, as a “singing airman” and “hesitant guitarist”, in sketches that he wrote himself.

Also, as well as doing turns as a monk, minstrel and others in the team’s 1975 King Arthur film spoof Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he composed all the songs, including “Knights of the Round Table”, a madcap ditty sung by the Knights of Camelot.

One of the greatest screen moments to which Innes contributed, uncredited, was his whistling along to the chorus of Idle’s ironic song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” at the end of the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

In between these Python productions, Innes created another cult while performing in and writing music for Idle’s 1975-76 TV series Rutland Weekend Television – the spoof Beatles band the Rutles, who appeared in one of the sketches.

This “pre-Fab Four” – singing pastiches of the group’s early singles, with Innes as Ron Nasty, the John Lennon character – starred in their own mockumentary, All You Need Is Cash, in 1978.

Alongside Gwen Taylor in Seventies sketch show ‘Rutland Weekend Television’ (Getty)

Innes was also back in the pop charts that year, making the Top 20 with the band’s self-titled album, which spawned a minor hit single, “I Must Be in Love”.

He then had small-screen success in his own right with three series of The Innes Book of Records (1979-81), parodying post-war music – from Roger Whittaker and end-of-evening wine bar crooners to Leo Sayer-style “runaway lover” songs.

Neil James Innes was born in Danbury, Essex, in 1944 to Rita (nee Hudson) and Edward Innes, a warrant officer in the Royal Artillery. When he was five, his father joined the British army on the Rhine and the family moved to Germany.

They returned to Britain in 1955 and Innes attended Thorpe Grammar School, Norwich. With a talent for painting, he then studied at the city’s school of art (1960-62) before graduating in fine arts from Goldsmiths College’s School of Art, London (1962-66).

In 1963, while there, he was recruited by the Bonzo Dog Dada Band on guitar, alongside lead vocalist Vivian Stanshall and others. It went through various line-ups, but Innes’s musical skills – he could also play the piano – were crucial to keeping the band going through stylistic and name changes, ending up as the Bonzo Dog Band.

The psychedelic nature of some of their performances led the Beatles to invite them to perform in their 1967 TV film Magical Mystery Tour, singing “Death Cab for Cutie”, written by Innes and Stanshall. Paul McCartney and Gus Dudgeon, under the joint pseudonym Apollo C Vermouth, produced “I’m the Urban Spaceman”, which Innes both wrote and sang.

When the Bonzo Dog Band broke up, Innes and other members formed The World, releasing just one album, Lucky Planet (1970).

Then, he teamed up with Mike McGear, Roger McGough and John Gorman – members of comedy group the Scaffold – as well as others, including Liverpool poet Brian Patten, in Grimms, but their three albums failed to chart.

Innes’s solo singles included “How Sweet to Be an Idiot” (1973), which he sang in Monty Python stage shows in Britain and the United States. When Oasis “borrowed” part of the melody for their 1994 single “Whatever”, his publisher, EMI, sued for plagiarism and he received royalties and a co-writer credit.

On TV, he wrote the music for Jane (1982-84), a serial featuring the legendary Daily Mirror strip-cartoon heroine, blending live action and animation.

He also joined individual Pythons in feature films, playing a singer in a gin palace in The Missionary (with Palin, 1982) and taking a cameo role and composing the music for Erik the Viking (with Jones and Cleese, 1989).

As he grew disillusioned with the music business, Innes had a sojourn into children’s television. He starred as the magician in Puddle Lane (1985-89), wrote and narrated The Raggy Dolls (1986-94) and was the storyteller in East of the Moon (1988), composing the music for all of them.

He later resumed touring as a musician and eventually formed the Idiot Bastard Band with Adrian Edmondson, Phill Jupitus and others, gigging between 2010 and 2012.

In 1966, Innes married Yvonne Hilton. She survives him, along with their sons, Miles, Luke and Barney.

Neil Innes, musician and actor, born 9 December 1944, died 29 December 2019