Drip My Brain in Joy: A Life With Neil Innes, by Yvonne Innes.
I was at work on the afternoon of December 29, 2019 when I heard the news that Neil Innes had died. I cannot tell you at this point how I heard, but it may have been through Twitter, in those days when Twitter was useful, and an update from the BBC. (I followed a dozen-ish BBC news accounts in those days.) I had an autographed note from Innes on my bulletin board, something he'd packed in when I'd ordered a copy of
The Wheat Album in 2018. I don't remember that I cried, but I certainly sat there in silence with my hurt for a time.
Innes was an artist and musician. He worked with Monty Python, was a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and was the musical side of The Rutles, not to mention much more, like children's television in Britain, that I was completely unaware of. He was also an inspiration to decades of British comedy talent, including Stephen Fry, Adrian Edmondson, and Diane Morgan. (I discovered Morgan through
a 2016 BBC documentary about the Bonzos and fell madly in unrequitted love.)
I didn't know a lot about Innes as a person, and what I did know was a bit unfortunate and sad -- his rift with Eric Idle, which I learned of in 1999 through a series of posts on rec.arts.beatles (of USENET fame) about the history of the Rutles. They seemed to have patched things up by 2002 -- Idle and Innes performed as part of Monty Python at the Concert for George, and they appeared on stage together in Los Angeles about the same time -- but they fell out again after the release of
Spamalot. While Jem Roberts' 2020 book
Fab Fools, a comedy-focused history of the Beatles, covers Innes and the Rutles (to the tune of about a quarter of the book), I wasn't sure that I would be interested in a book focused solely on Innes' life. But it's been a strange, weird, depressing year, and for self-care I ordered a copy in February which, for reasons, took months to cross the Pond.
I'm glad I did.
Yvonne Innes, the wife of Neil, penned a lovely, warm, beautiful, funny, sad book about her husband and their life together. As a biography, this is on that focuses more on emotion and feeling than dates and places. This is the way Yvonne remembers it, this is the Neil Yvonne remembers, and his absence in her life is palpable from the first page. There were so many times my inner historian wanted more facts, more depth, but I was always willing to meet Yvonne's narrative on her terms. I wanted more about Neil's relationships with, for example, the Beatles (all but Ringo get at least a mention) and Monty Python, and sometimes I felt, in the way she wrote about his personality, that there was something large in Neil's life she was leaving unsaid. Yet, that's not the story she wants to tell, this is her truth and the Neil she knew, and her prose was always beautiful and moving.
This was a lovely book to read.
