It’s a strange cove, is your comedy. Obviously, when it’s fresh nothing can give greater satisfaction. But it does have a distinct tendency to go off like yesterday’s fish. That said, ladled down with enough rose-tinted nostalgia (for hearing it performed hot off the presses first time around when in one’s prime), it can retain a surprising level of palatability entirely baffling to the contemporary audient coming to the stuff almost 60 years later.
This, then, is the dilemma. As a former short-trousered oik who legged it home to witness the Bonzos anarchically tearing it up on Do Not Adjust Your Set back in ’68, it’ll probably come as no surprise that I pretty much arf myself insideout ever single time I hear The Intro And The Outro (“Adolf Hitler on vibes”? Never not funny). But, in light of this fact, am I the right person to recommend these proto-Python war babies, these pre-rock-era-weaned musical Dadaists to a generation who’ve grown up with Inside Number 9 and Fleabag?
Of course, in small portions, and when not wholly dependent on common room lampoons of prevailing summer-of-love-adjacent suburban manners, there’s gold here: future Rutle Neil Innes’s I’m The Urban Spaceman, representing one side (the more evergreen) of the Bonzo coin, Vivian Stanshall’s Big Shot the more comedically minded, culturally influential flip.
That said, Still Barking could not, under any circumstances, be mistaken for a small portion. There are 20 discs in here, 17 CDs (all the albums, two - Gorilla, The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse - also in mono, all the single As and Bs, yards of demos, rehearsals, BBC sessions, lives - some in less than perfect quality), three DVDs (Innes’s Art School film, numerous archive TV appearances, promo slots, all the Do Not Adjusts), a 78rpm shellac 10-inch, a one-sided vinyl seven-inch, and a sumptuous 148-page coffee-table book positively packed with revelatory context and content, that is in itself an example to all future box-set curators.
So yeah, there’s loads of it, making it an absolute must for serious collectors with upwards of 250 quid in their pocket. Existing fans will freak, all the favourites are here, sometimes in multiple incarnations. Too much of a good thing? Arguably. And again, there are those who will only hear unfunny acres of archaic old nonsense. And if that is you, you were warned, so don’t come running to me.
