2019 kept taking away till the very end. Not content with removing Alasdair Gray from us it managed to take Neil Innes on the same day.

It was only four months ago I featured his big hit with The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, I’m the Urban Spaceman.

That was the least of the band’s eccentricities. Innes contributed the most bizarre guitar solo to the utterly indescribable Canyons of Your Mind. Try out this video from the BBC’s Colour Me Pop for size.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band: Canyons of Your Mind

Innes’s Beatles parodies for Rutland Weekend Television and subsequent recordings as The Rutles were sublime. The haunting Let’s Be Natural is the perfect example.

The Rutles: Let’s Be Natural

Neil James Innes: 9/12/1944 – 29/12/2019. So it goes.

A piece of one-off absurdism from 1968. One-off in the sense that the Bonzo Dog (Doo-Dah) Band didn’t trouble the charts again. The brackets I put in the name are because the band changed it – dropping the Doo-Dah (which had originally been Dada) – at around the time Urban Spaceman was released.

Yes, they were bonkers, but in a Monty Pythonish way. There was something in the air in Britain in the late sixties.

The song’s writer Neil Innes was a genius as his later work with The Rutles and The Innes Book of Records proved.

I remember a TV appearance where Viv Stanshall “played” the last musical phrase of Spaceman on a hose-pipe, while whirling it around his head.

The recording was produced by one Apollo C Vermouth (otherwise known as Paul McCartney.)

The Bonzo Dog Band: I’m the Urban Spaceman