What? A Monty Python Bootleg?
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| Don't go looking for this vinyl edition of HCTFAFB album cuz it doesn't exist. |
Now wait a minute... There's a whole 'nother Monty Python album out there? Well, kind of, yes. It's not a physical album, like the one shown above --
that is just some computer-generated artwork I conjured up for my own CD-R packaging (yes, I do have too much free time on my hands, thank you very much indeed) -- but the audio files exist. They're out there on the internet
SOMEWHERE!
It's called "Monty Python's Hastily Cobbled Together For a Fast Buck Album" and it contains leftover sketches from Python recording sessions of the past -- many of which seem to date from around the time of
Contractual Obligation -- plus some unreleased songs, and has been floating around the internet for many years. According to a
Wiki I read, it was compiled by Andre Jacquemin, the Python's Go-To Man for almost all their aural projects, at his Redwood Studios around 1981 (the year after
Contractual Obligation came out).
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| Unofficial cover art, source unknown |
The phrase "Hastily Cobbled Together," of course, is a self-effacing Python joke, but quite the contrary, this is, in fact, a very listenable and entertaining album. The bits are recorded just as professionally as anything Python released commercially (though it would be nice to hear it re-mastered and added to the official Virgin
Python oeuvre) and the tracks all seem to be nicely linked (except for the third-party announcer who turns up a couple of times in the proceedings, evidently a Redwood Studios employee). Apparently the album was ready to be issued in the UK in the early 80s, and reportedly even had album cover artwork created. There exists a yellow, green, and red graphic featuring a 1978-era color-tinted group photo that is usually associated with HCTFAFB, but I don't know if this was the design they had planned for release, or if this is so-called "fan art" so as bootleggers had something to print out and slip in the jewel case when creating CD-R discs of the album. The version of the album that appears on the internet is said to be a copy of a demo tape that Andre Jacquemin had given to Michael Palin who subsequently lent it to English musician Lemmy, a Python fan whose metal band
Motorhead was in the recording studio at Redwood when Jacquemin and Palin were sequencing the tracks.
Citation needed for all of this.
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| He and Him. The Two Ronnies. |
The enigma of
HCTFAFB is the number of original sketches and songs it contains, considering the album "prior" to this one
(Obligation) featured so many "old" sketches from pre-Python and solo projects (
Bookshop, String, Rock Notes, to name but a few). One wonders why, if they had to choose between
String, an old sketch from Cleese's
Frost Report days and, say, an excellent previously unheard Chapman and Jones bit called
Radio Shoppe, they didn't choose the newer one, especially since
String had already been committed to vinyl on the 1968
Frost Report on Everything album (albeit performed by Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, later of
The Two Ronnies).
Radio Shoppe along with one or two other tracks from
HCTFAFB eventually found commercial release as bonus tracks on the Virgin Records 2006 re-issues of the Monty Python catalog on CD.
More about that coming up...
Hi, Thanks for this. Really interesting. Hope you don't mind, but I took your cover (a fantastic homage to TAKRL) and used it to create my own CD version of this album, just one copy for my own use. BTW, I think Radio Shoppe didn't get chosen because it's too much like Parrot Sketch. Of course, one of the reasons Cleese originally left Python was because he thought they were repeating themselves - and that was in the early '70s!
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Grant