5. BeckOne Foot In The Grave
Since hearing ‘Loser’ and those songs, I’ve followed Beck’s career and found him to be an inspiration. When I started doing The Mighty Boosh with Noel [Fielding], we wanted to make something that sounded like a mix of Morecambe and Wise and Beck. That was the mood! We were trying to bring in music at the time that was like that – I would mess around with beats, we’d try to do raps in a weird way. A lot of people do that now, but at the time we felt like we were going to a new place, making music that was hopefully quite good but had a comic element to do with the character singing it.
Beck is such a great comedian as well as a musician. One Foot In The Grave I love because you can hear him and his mates mucking around – it is so pared down. Within it there is poetry, music, beat boxing, it seems quite a brilliantly stripped down scene he came out of. He is so funny as well. Really funny. His comic voice is fantastic, the language and the surreal nature of it appealed to me and Noel, his juxtapositions and the poetic and non-sequiter nature of some of it.
He is clever. Some people don’t like him for that reason. This LP has beautiful songs, like ‘Hollow Log’. Really nice, moving songs as well. I was amazed when I first heard it. This is less produced than Mellow Gold, so it was quite wrong-footing – a little joke, there – I wasn’t expecting it. I was taken aback and was really into it.
He is such a mixture, really post-modern. His parodies are so weird, they are almost its own genre. There is no obvious angle. I need an angle to do music, a character to hide behind. I might at some point try to do a straight album, but I write a lot of stuff in a comic context. When I come up with ideas I like which aren’t funny and don’t know what to do with them. Maybe I will work with someone or work under a pseudonym. I don’t like the idea of being me. I find that quite difficult.
