Neil Innes

Probably the most important figure in British musical comedy since the heyday of vaudeville, Neil Innes is that rarity among musical comedians, a side-splitting satirist who can also write perfectly straightforward, catchy pop songs. Born in Danbury, Essex, England, on December 9, 1944, and spending a good part of his childhood in postwar Germany, Innes followed the traditional route for future English pop stars of his generation and went to art college, specifically Goldsmith's College School of Art in London. Unlike, say, Keith Richards, Innes had a genuine facility for art and flourished at Goldsmith's. Among other pursuits, Innes fell in with a crowd including Vivian Stanshall, Larry Smith, and Roger Ruskin Spears, all of whom shared Innes' taste for both old-fashioned trad jazz and the Dadaist art movement of the 1910s. The foursome, along with an ever-shifting cast of fellow students, formed the Bonzo Dog Dada Band to combine the two. Upon graduation in 1966, the group turned professional, altering their name to the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band because they were tired of having to explain to everyone what Dada was. Although the retiring Innes was never the onstage focus of the Bonzos, preferring to quietly play guitar and keyboards in the back while the master showmen Stanshall, Smith, and Spears hogged the limelight, he quickly became the group's musical leader. Although all of the Bonzos wrote, Innes' melodic gifts were soon obvious, and his talent for melding sharply satiric lyrics with sweetly catchy pop songs in a variety of musical styles was the secret weapon that kept the group from being just a wacky British version of the Mothers of Invention. Over the course of the group's four albums, Gorilla (1967), The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse (1968), Tadpoles...