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Listen to Purple Aeroplane
Spike Milligan parodied "Yellow Submarine", in his song "Purple Aeroplane" - which, like the Beatles'
song "Yellow Submarine", was released by Parlophone.
The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" (Parlophone R 5493) was released in 1966.
Spike Milligan's "Purple Aeroplane" (Parlophone R 5513) was also released in 1966, so Spike Milligan did not
waste the opportunity to get his parody recording out. It is interesting to think that perhaps both songs -
"Yellow Submarine" and "Purple Aeroplane" - might have been recorded in the same studio, and that
George Martin might have been also the producer of "Purple Aeroplane".
Incidentally, for those interested, Spike Milligan's parody song "Purple Aeroplane" is available on a CD called
"A Collection of Spikes".
Just added by me there is an album just released called
'Purple Aeroplane & Other Parodies' which is a 2 cd set of Beatles songs covered by other people, all comedy versions
by people like Bob Rivers, Weierd Al Yankovic and The Muppets (did I say comedy)
Good to see Spikes track being used as the album title, I've not got a copy yet but I will soon.
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From a spike forum - of which there are many out there -
SPIKE MILLIGAN, SUCH AS HIS ADDRESS OR EMAIL ADDRESS?
>> I hate to say it but I think Spike may have "shuffled off this mortal coil" and gone on to that great
green room in the sky - i.e. I think he died a few years ago.
Spike Milligan is very much alive, and I believe he lives not far from me.
Address your letter: Spike Milligan,
Woy Woy on The Central Coast,
New South Wales. Australia.
(Has he done an Elvis?)
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Spike Milligan was interviewed on GLR on Wednesday evening by Peter Curran. It was the best interview I've heard for ages,
mainly because Spike was totally honest about the interviewing technique.
Peter Curran is famed for his long, tortuous, rambling, waffling, obscure questions which occasionally invite the simple
answer "yes" or "no".
I'm sure I would be tempted to respond "what the .... are you on about?" instead. Spike Milligan came pretty
close to it.
First, referring to the previous guest, he said "I've been listening to this poor guy for the last 20 minutes, good
Christ, broadcasting is boring...I was really bored by it all".
They then talked about some war-time experiences. And Spike's preparation for his one-man show at the London Palladium
on Sunday.
In the following extracts, the ums, ers, and wh-wh-whats have been deleted.
PC: Why do continue to do stage work? I mean, surely you could just take your ease now and get a load of journalists to
turn up repeatedly with film crews and get you to talk about your life? What does the stage still have for you?
SM: I thought you'd never stop.
PC: Listen , I'm being brief today because it's you...
Later, following some banter about a joke that Spike told:
SM: ... I think he's a fixture here, he can't get out without screaming.
PC: That's it. Have you screamed recently or you, kind of, do you just hum contentedly to yourself?
SM: Why do you talk crap like that?
PC: Well...
SM: No, I don't hum to myself, why should I hum to myself?
PC: Well, because you have scr... I meant it as a sort of metaphor for inner torment.
SM: Inner torment?
PC: Yeah.
SM: You mean appendicitis?
PC: I mean more of the soul.
Later, following a discussion about the Goon Show, and Spike being in "mental hospital, I suppose":
SM: ... It broke up my health and my marriage. So [The Goon Show was] not a very happy show, but on reflection, still
very funny.
PC: What was the resumption of a performing career like for you then? Was it a shadow of what had gone before, albeit
with you in better shape, physically and mentally?
SM: Would you, er, would somebody translate that please? What you...
PC: Wasn't that obtuse. After you went back to writing and performing after The Goons, after your stay...
SM (interrupting): I wrote books and I wrote a show called Q for TV...
Well worth a listen - not that I would usually recommend a Peter Curran interview.
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THE BALD TWIT LION
Once, twice and thrice upon a time, there lived a jungle. It was called the Bozolika Dowser jungle because there was no
organisation there but everything worked out perfectly.
This is a hap, hap, happy story about animals. In the middle of the jungle near a village called Pongoland, a big lion
called Mr. Gronk had an attack of strongness. He was 21 that day and had been given the key to the jungle. So leaping in the
air he gave the biggest loudest roar in the world.
Roar, roar, roar, he went. And in fact he roared so loud it loosened all the roots of his hair and tinkle tinkle all his
lovely mane fell to the ground plip! plap ! plop! 200,000 times, one for each hair.
Suddenly, Mr. Gronk, the lion saw himself in the daily mirror and Oh! He found that he was now bald.
A bald lion, oh! Dearie me, Ill be the laughing stock of the hyenas. So he unroared. Roar, roar, roar, he went. But his
hairs didnt go back in. They just lay there smiling up at him. I look like a bald twit lion, as a passing hippopotamus said
Im a passing hippopotamus and you, you look like a bald hairless twit lion, Ha! Ha!
When the lion heard that, he got naughty, angry and was just about to give a big ro Ah! But no, he stopped just in time.
He better not roar anymore or something else might fall off. So from then on whenever he was angry, he could only say very
quietly Tsu, tsu, tsu. And there is nothing funnier than a big lion called Mr. Gronk roaring about the jungle going tsu, tsu,
and tsu.
The lion was heart broken, but God was watching. He liked lions. So He slid down from heaven on a religious giraffes back
to the ground.
And who are you, Sir? asked the lion.
I am Mr. God. If you dont believe me ask me a difficult question.
How much is 2 and 2? asked the lion.
Four, said God.
Oh! Yes, yes, you are God all right
Good said God. Now close your eyes and say Miggle Miggle cake. The lion did. And when he opened his eyes, God had gone
back home but now he had a lovely mane of beautiful black hair and he was so happy that he married a Roman Catholic giraffe
and lived happily ever after.. until the next day.
SPIKE MILLIGAN
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`I THINK I CAUGHT UP' with Spike Milligan
by Demetrius Romeo with Rahni Sadler
There are a series of adjectives that came into popular use after World War II, usually applied to absurdist comedy. They
may only be used with impunity in their ironic sense, bound by inverted comas: "wacky", "zany", "madcap",
"oddball". Unless, of course, they are applied to Spike Milligan. Then they stand in their literal sense. For Spike
Milligan is the last of the great British eccentrics. If, as Milligan suggests in It Ends with Magic (1991), "word of
mouth stories ... can often be more authentic than written records", then the tales of his antics during visits to Australia
stand as testament to this: there's the one where he appears from an antique shop with an expensive painting, only to put
his hand through the canvas, utterly destroying it, since he only bought it for the frame in the first place. Or the one where
the little old lady is buying fruit and vegies in small amounts: "half an ounce of peas, a potato, a carrot ...".
Spike edges up to her and declares "Madam, you are a glutton!"
Spike Milligan is currently in Australia, visiting family. "I came out for a holiday and my publisher got wind of
it and said `you'll have to do some book signings out there'. So, I'm doing some book signings, Out there. I just wait for
them to come in a taxi and pick me up and take me somewhere, and do something, get back in the taxi and come home. That's
the whole essence of it, you know."
But Spike's signings are not just in honour of his recently published books, the rewritten classics Lady Chatterley's
Lover, Wuthering Heights and The Old Testament. "If I start reading from Lady Chatterley's Lover, I'll get into a chapter
and afterwards they'll want to read it themselves but it will all be too familiar with them, having heard me read it. So I
thought I might read some of my serious poetry."
Many people don't acknowledge Spike's serious poetry. "I don't get recognised because they can't understand - Spike
Milligan, being a serious poet? They won't have it." But he offers an example of his work, composed "from an incident
that happened in my bedroom. He recites: Last night in the twilight gloom A butterfly flew into my room. Oh what beauty! Oh
what grace! Who needs visitors from outer space?
"I always have a turn in my poem; a little turn, a screw, at the end."
Milligan felt it necessary to rewrite the classics because of their "exquisites"; those parts of the text that
are "beyond us; they are, like, `off the moon'." He explains: "I was reading Lady Chatterley's Lover. I came
across a chapter where Lady Chatterley is naked, lying on an army blanket in a chicken house, with this gamekeeper rogering
her. I thought `How can they do it with all those fucking chickens?' This is what the aristocrats are like; Fergie, having
her toes sucked, that sort of thing. And the next thing she says, `it's no good, I must run naked in the rain'. So it's freezing
and she runs around with this yokel: `Aaaarrgh'; he's after her with his trousers down, and they start to do it on a bed of
nettles with his dog circling them, barking at them. I thought 'this can't be a classic; I must have a go at this one'. So
I did."
As Spike begins talking about Wuthering Heights, the author's surname eludes him. A dignified pause is left for him to
find it, but as it is not forthcoming, I eventually fall in with "Bronte".
"Bronte. Thank you", Spike says. "I thought you wouldn't get here. In Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte
only described Heathcliffe as being of dark visage; she wouldn't give him a nationality. So I made him a Pakistani. And then
this woman, 'Cathy', always wants to run through the wind and the rain across moors barefoot; she must step in it sometime."
With the The Bible According to Spike Milligan, Milligan admits "I just wanted to make fun of The Old Testament."
He opens with "The Creation According To The Trade Unions" which states that God said, Let there be light; and there
was light, but the Eastern Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.
Twisted parody is something Milligan has been indulging in since his days writing The Goon Show (first broadcast by the
BBC in the 50's, still heard on Radio National every Saturday at midday). Six Charlies in Search of an Author and 1985 (taking
off Pirandello's Six Characters ... and Orwell's 1984, respectively), are two such episodes. His current project is Frankenstein,
in which the monster "comes alive, stands up, but his trousers fall down. Then he starts to go amok through the land,
and they keep chasing him, trying to get these trousers up. They've done that and now he's spoken his first words: 'have you
got a cigarette? Have you got a fag? I'm gasping for a fag'. That's all he ever says. He goes around murdering people asking
if they've got a fag. That's as far as I've gotten.
Spike Milligan has produced a mammoth body of work: 50-odd books, 200-odd Goon Show episodes, the Q series. All this after
being in the army and attempting a musical career. "Not bad for someone who started at 33 years old; quite late in life",
he acknowledges. I suggest that he has, by now, caught up. "Did I? Did I?" he responds. "That's a nice title
for a book: 'I Think I Caught Up'. A lovely title."
Puckoon, Spike's first novel, was published in 1963 with an introduction that insisted it would also be the last. But
Milligan began publishing memoirs in 1971. Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall was designed to begin a trilogy; the seventh
volume, Peace Work, was published in 1991. It seems high time for the next instalment, but Spike claims that he couldn't remember
anymore. A pity, since we were just getting up to the bit about the Goon Show ... "Yes", he agrees, but with reservation:
"I ... I can't ... That's when I had a nervous breakdown, and, ah, kept having them, and I can't remember anything except
being unconscious in hospital under drugs. And that wouldn't make much reading."
However, he did recommend The Goon Show Companion (1992) as a suitable substitute. "It's a very good textbook! I
read it, and I didn't know we'd done so much in such a time." And his opinion of the Goon Show is that it hasn't aged.
"There's something built in without an age quotient" he says. "They still play it on Saturdays here, don't
they? It's only because it's free."
When I told him that a whole lot of episodes had just been released on CD, Spike's only reaction was to ask "How
do you operate a CD? I find the technology of a doorknob beyond me. I know you do this or that <motioning the turning of
a door knob> but as to how it works, I'm just baffled, really ....".
I offered the most perfunctory of explanations - light beam reflecting from pits in foil but to no avail: "I don't
believe you could write a thesis on that and be believed. You might as well say there's a beetle inside a CD. The Arabs who
sold watches to soldiers in the Eighth Army were going around saying there's a beetle walking on this cog-wheel'. that's a
story they told; I don't know if it's true or not."
Remember Spike Milligan's series, Q, on the ABC? My earliest recollection of the show was the sketch in which someone
plays the 'jewish piano', a cash register. Spike: "That's right, yes. And we had so many letters; a letter from the Chief
Rabbi. I said, `Look, please, I'm not antisemitic, I couldn't be, I wouldn't have fought in the war if I was'. `It's very
disturbing to Jewish people'. `I'm so sorry; what can I say?'" But at least Milligan used other religions for a springboard
into surrealism: "Two vicars, with suits, knock on this door, the door opens. They say `we are Jehovah Burglars'. `Oh
yes'. `Yes, we are being persecuted by the police, for our beliefs'. `Oh? What are your beliefs?' `We believe you've got a
lot of money'. "This sort of sketch was the essence of the show: "There were no jokes, just situations all the time."
While no longer desiring to wring television comedy, Spike readily admits his desire to "appear in a comedy episode,
like One Foot In The Grave, or Waiting for God. I could play one of those men."
I admit my own fondness for his cameo in Monty Python's Life of Brian. "Do you know what they never told me?"
he begins. "They said, 'we want you to make up a speech to the followers of the slipper, a Biblical little speech to
these people, with your back to them. And so I said.
`Surely they that goeth away do not seek the sun, they that cometh unto us do wee the serpent, and the apple of eel. We
that go, therefore, wherefore, and though shall see, therefore, and thou shall cometh again. Surely as the day is red ...'.
I went on talking this shit, all the while, they're being told to move away. So when I turned, there was nobody there.
They hadn't told me. That's why I walked sideways off the screen."
On the topic of contemporary music, Milligan proved a little shakey. Was he familiar with the band Ned's Atomic Dustbin,
named after that episode of the Goon Show first broadcast 5/1/1959? "No. I believe that there are 250 000 rock and roll
bands in the world, each with a different name, called `Cement', `Horse's Droppings' - they go mad to get a different name."
He continues "And what are the Rolling Stones doing touring? What do they need 35 million for? That's 60 000 people.
I don't understand. I understood Bunny Berrigan and people like him. I used to play the trumpet; I used to try and play like
Bunny Berrigan."
Spike can no longer play the trumpet. "My lip's gone. I must have blown myself out; I used to blow very loud."
Spike was also a crooner in his day, and, although claims that he can still sing, insists that he won't. "I listen to
Benny Goodman. I listen to people like that who swing. That's something rock 'n' roll can't do: swing."
Finally, it is time to ask this 76 year-old if there is anything that he wished he'd done. "I'd like to be an archaeologist",
he admits. "In fact, I discovered aboriginal cave carvings on a shelf that nobody else had reported to the authorities,
and I reported it to John Clegg, Professor at Sydney University. He went up there and they recorded it all." This discovery
is important because it contains a pictogram of "men in a long- boat, rowing. Captain Philip came that way in 1798".
Unfortunately, upon Spike's recent return to the site, he found that it had been vandalised.
A keen ecologist, Milligan sees the population is posing a problem for the planet. "Population has to be stabilised",
he says, "because the world is finite. What do we do when it is full? What's going to happen in the year 4000 or 5000,
when we're crawling on the earth?" And the solution? "You can not have children." That's a hard choice to make,
I insist. "But that's just ego, isn't it?" says Spike. "Me; I want. And children are a tender trap; once you
have them, they are divine. They overwhelm your logic; but then they are another creature to feed off the world's products.
They're going to defecate once a day and it's going to go into the sea. Mind you, I've got four children; I was blind, I didn't
know about it, otherwise I would only have had two. I used to complain about the traffic on the road in England. Now all of
my four children have got motor cars: I made my own traffic jam, what am I complaining about?"
Aside: Catching Up With Spike Milligan
"Spike Milligan's in Australia, and staying at his brother Patrick's house", said Jase, clutching the Herald.
But his brother's name is Desmond, according to Spike's memoirs, I said. "Says 'Patrick' here", Jase insisted. Desmond
Patrick Milligan was easy to track down, and "Excuse me Mr Milligan, are you Spike's brother?" was remarkably easy
to say, too, provided you didn't think about it much. Mr D.P. Milligan put me onto Mr S. Milligan, and an interview was arranged,
but not before I'd said something particularly erudite like "How are you?", to which Spike was bound to reply "Are
you a doctor? Well then, who do you want to know how I am?"
When I turned up to the interview with the companion who had driven me there, Spike was not impressed. "Oh, he's
brought someone to look at me. I should have known: It's Australia; they bring people to look at you. We had someone over
for dinner and she brought four people."
I was nervous. "There's no need to be", assured Spike. "I'm just a person; religion: Roman Catholic, blood
type: rhesus negative, inner-leg 21 inches ...."
Things really only became unstuck when I produced my hard-cover copy of It Ends with Magic and said "may I ask you
for an autograph?" "Please, don't ask me; I fucken autographed three this morning, you can be the person whose book
wasn't signed by Spike Milligan." And after I'd gone to all the rouble of erasing the cheap price from the inside cover,
too. There was nothing left to do but thank the man for his time. "That will be $3.20" he said. "And promise
you'll never bring a woman to our interviews again. You may bring a cheetah, or a rhinoceros, but not a woman." I thanked
him for his tolerance, to which he replied, "yes, I am tolerant, now bugger off!"
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Classic Milligan
The great British comedian Spike Milligan once telephoned an airline and was placed on hold while the dreaded "hold
music" (Muzak) chimed in his ear.
When he was finally put through to a human being, Milligan said: "Just a minute" - and proceeded to sing a whole
chorus of "Hey Jude."
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You can find a Spike Milligan Quiz at BBC 7 it's very good the link is below:-
How well do you know your Spike Milligan?
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