Week 23 - Freaky Laughter

After the seriousness of the past few weeks, I'm going to get a bit more light-hearted in this blog.

I'll be combining two of my favourite genres which I didn't think went well together. Until I thought about it. Those two genres are comedy songs and psychedelia.

I like humourous tracks, be they downright silly or those that contain lyrics to make you smile. However, I also like psychedelia - in particular mellow, trippy psyche. So yeah, why shouldn't there be some songs that fit into both categories?!

Thankfully there are a few, otherwise this blog would be thankfully short.

When you think of comedy songs from the psychedelia era, you probably think of the Bonzos or the Rutles - Neil Innes at least! So did I. However, arguably the Bonzos' best psyche track, Keynsham, isn't particularly 'comedy' - apart from the ending: "Tell me more about Keynsham.... 'I don't want to talk about it'". Probably the finest purveyors of the chanson comedie are Half Man Half Biscuit (surely, more on those in a forthcoming blog). Again though, they don't really touch psychedelia, prefering to stick to indie, folk and post-punk.

The comedy song genre has been ridiculed in the past - quite rightly in many circumstances - but in the past 15 years or so, it has seen a revival. A couple of TV shows and some Radio 1 DJs have overseen this. Don't worry folks, the DJs don't include Chris Moyles.

Those DJs were the original (and best) saviours of the breakfast show - Mark and Lard. I was never a fan of Radio 1, but these two were a huge reason to listen to it. Their afternoon show was simply a must-listen-to, packed full of nonsense segments and good music. Lard, who was a one-time member of Mark E Smith's The Fall, and Mark Radcliffe, who had spent many years trying to gig round the Manchester area, formed a 'band' - The Shirehorses.

The premise of The Shirehorses was simple enough. They were the true creators of contemporary hits and the acts that had seen chart success with the tracks had ripped them off: John Squire's Seahorses being a rip off of The Shirehorses, and the former's hit, Love Is the Law (containing the lyric 'now we know where we're going, baby') being a rip off of the latter's Now We Know Where We're Going, Our Kid. Both The Shirehorses albums are worth getting, indeed the second one (Our Kid Eh?, which was later 'ripped-off' by Radiohead) contains a brilliant spoof of Eminem's Stan, called Tony.

But it's from the first album that my first track is taken from. Sir John Mills begat Hayley Mills who, in turn, begat the lead singer of Kula Shaker - the leaders of the 1990s' Indian psyche revival. Actually, they were the only ones in it, weren't they? Kula Shaker had a hit called Tattva. But, according to The Shirehorses, they had a similar song first! Judge for yourself - here's The Shirehorses doing Ta La. It involves the duo mucking around with sitars, so that's a good start, and also contains the lyrics: 'Shall we take a pilgrimage to our spiritual Mecca, oh bollocks to it let's have curry and rice'. Brilliant.

Next up, an all-consuming cult (I said cult, I wasn't on about Chris Moyles again) TV show. I stumbled upon The Mighty Boosh when it was still being shown late at night on BBC3. I couldn't believe the BBC had commissioned it, it was hilarious, surreal and had bizarre but good songs.

Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett's show originally saw two zoo keepers getting up to all manner of odd scrapes, but in the second series they moved in with their shaman friend, Naboo, in Dalston, north London. Barrett's character, Howard Moon, is a pretentious oaf who is convinced he's a jazz supremo and adventurer.

It's in his guise as the latter that the crew visit the wilderness. Howard is desperate to photograph the yeti, but he gets entranced by them, leaving Fielding's Vince Noir, Naboo and his familiar, a gorilla called Bollo, to save him from 'yeti magic'. See how that goes here - The Mighty Boosh, Yeti Magic.

There's some similarities between the Boosh and the next lot. Fans of each seem to put themselves firmly in one camp or the other. Why?! I'm a fan of both. Just because something you've been waiting for has finally happened twice, why just like one of them?

You've probably guessed who I'm on about. This lot are a duo from New Zealand. In fact, they billed themselves as New Zealand's 4th most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo. I think the main difference between the Boosh and Flight of the Conchords is that the latter started off with the comedy songs and then went into television.

In the show, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie are two innocents abroad. They've gone to New York in search of fame and fortune, but have found it hard to come by - largely thanks to the incompetence of their manager Murray (the excellent Rhys Darby). Like I said, they are quite innocent, which segues quite nicely into details of the next song.

At a gig, the duo are wooed by two hot girls and go back to their flat. Bret is given an acid tab, but only swallows a tiny amount. However, this has an effect on him and we get to see his velvet-clad psyche alter-ego: The Flight of the Conchords - Prince of Parties. I love sitar in psyche, and the reversed loops are great too. I've had a certain bit of this in my head all week, the bit where it goes a little like this (hit it): 'Rava shalank a lank a Ravi Shankar'.

Enjoy!