When Neil's Heavy Concept Album was first released, the accompanying publicity featured the luddite by-line 'Not Available On Compact Disc'. In fact the LP only graced the digital age as recently as 1998. Quite how this came about is unknown. The LP died a death in 84. It's nice to know that somebody cares though.

The 'concept' itself follows on from the singles - Neil, the faintly paranoid hippy, serving up personalised versions of obscure 60s prog classics. We'd tasted 'Hole In My Shoe' (a minor hit for Traffic) and 'My White Bicycle' (an even minor-er hit for Tomorrow) as the singles. Both feature on the LP along with similar readings of tracks by Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd ('The Gnome'), Caravan ('Golf Girl'), Donovan ('Hurdy Gurdy Man') and whoever it was who did the 'Amoeba Song'.

And, flowing nicely between these, spoken sections, sketchy bits and new 'songs' by Planer, all of this held together by a very late sixties-style production by Dave Stewart (of Stewart and Gaskin - not the Eurythmics one). There are also cameos by Stephen Fry as a narrator on 'Neil the Barbarian' ('Does anybody have a minicab number?') and Dawn French as a brutal policewoman who takes exception to Neil's nudey sandpit dancing at the close of 'Golf Girl'.

Another cover version not quite in the hippy mold is the Sex Pistols' 'God Save The Queen', sung as an enforced duet by Neil and a crooning Sinatra-esque Las Vegas lounge singer (also played by Planer) which continues a joke performed at the Comic Strip by Planer and Richardson as The Outer Limits. The production is well-conceived, from the whining feedback and gaggle of female backing singers to Planer's obsequious prattle ('Whaddaya mean 'sexist' - I bin doin' this routine for twenny years...').

There's an irritating viewpoint when it comes to comedy songs. Most people dismiss them immediately as an abomination, perhaps attempting too hard to distinguish between two types of enjoyment - yeah, music is a serious business which is appreciated in private, man, and comedy is for laughing at with your mates. True, unless the comedy songwriter has a far reaching sense of the ridiculousness of their actions the results can be painful (stand up, Dan & Nick, you absolute and collective waste of skin), but the same can be said for all songs, regardless of their NME-bestowed seriousness tag. Baring one's soul and having to make it rhyme is a silly thing in itself. At least a comedy song has comedy � to fall back on.

Planer's 'Neil', let's not forget, started life (at the Comic Strip) as a composer of bad folk songs (check out the 'Outer Limits' cassette release for further evidence) and he continues this here with acoustically strumbled ditties like 'Ken' ('…I've known you since you were ten…and you were a complete bastard then') and 'Bad Karma In The UK' which is interrupted by a phonecall from his mother (Gaskin) who attempts to turn the song into a hip hop rap track ('Let me hear you say mushroom...').

'Lentil Nightmare' meanwhile isn't nearly as bad as the title suggests. Lentils are, after all, to Neil what turnips are to Baldrick, i.e. an easy reference point for the plebs to latch onto. Luckily the track itself is a damned good heavy metal pastiche with Neil in Robert Plant mode. The lyrics aren't a million miles away from Bad News but the music is perfectly executed. As Stephen Fry's narration - detailing Neil's mighty battle with his bedroom - reaches a crescendo and the final bars of music echo away into the ether, the way Neil moans in the aftermath ('Oh no, I've smashed my whole room to pieces now…') could rightly be described as his funniest moment ever.

Neil's Heavy Concept works as an affectionate send up of hippy music in the same way as The Rutles sent up the Beatles. It's a celebration of the music by people who quite obviously adore it. Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin's own output unashamedly flaunts its influences with continuous references to 60s icons and musical motif samplings. Freed from the trappings of 'serious music', Stewart's production on Heavy Concept is allowed to run riot, playing 'spot the reference' throughout. The songs covered come from an innocent silly period in musical history so Planer as Neil didn't have to do much more than sing those songs in character. Indeed, a few of the tracks are little more than just that - 'The Amoeba Song' is done completely straight with no comedy asides or chatter. 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' almost manages it, but for the silly lyric-changes at the end: 'Here comes the freaky bogey man - he's selling double glazing…' Donovan would no doubt adore such frivolity.

The cover featured Neil in a sort of 'Welcome To The Pleasuredome' shot, sitting, wizard-like, amidst a scattered explosion of hippy disarray, a sitar, sunflowers, whole earth paraphinalia, old copies of OZ and a few of the LPs he's culled tracks from, not to mention a copy of Saturday Night Fever… The rest of the LP's packaging is yer average Sgt Pepper parody - Neil quadrupled up on the back cover (one of him with his back turned obviously) against a red background and the lyrics pasted all over him. A sleevenote announces 'a heavy time is guaranteed for all'.

Inside, a cut-out page featuring individual pictures of some of the cover props, a shot of the silver disc awarded to Hole In My Shoe (with its glass ominously smashed) and a notice about 'two books to change your life': 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintinence' and Neil's Book Of The Dead!

The CD version sadly drops practically all of the design but, curiously, the backprint and label appear to parody the typeface of the Pepper CD so somebody understood the 'concept'…

The CD release has also missed a golden opportunity to feature the extra tracks recorded specially for the original cassette edition. These featured Neil complaining that the 'scratched record' laffs of 'Cosmic Jam' wouldn't work for those who favour ferric and hastily improvises an unaccompanied alternative called (far too appropriately) 'Cassette Jam' ('…oh no, the tape's got all tangled up, scrunch scrunch…scrunch scrunch…er…') before pissing off out of the studio and encountering some buskers murdering the Stones' 'Brown Sugar'. The latter may have been omitted for legal reasons as the Rolling Stones' management are renowned for not posessing a sense of humour. Also included on the cassette was the original B-side to 'Hole In My Shoe', the lavishly layered 'Hurdy Gurdy Mushroom Man' which starts as a 'whole earth acoustic vamp' and ends, much to Neil's utter dismay, as an horrifically overproduced sea of kiddie-choirs strings and saccharine.

'Neil's Heavy Concept Album' is a fab chapter in the Young Ones legacy and every home should have one. It may not be the greatest piece of comedy ever produced but why should it be? As a grey area between throwaway laffs and yer serious music (man) it's damned good. So fuck off with your NMEs.

LP: WEA WX12 240524-1
CD: East West 4509-94852-2

Side One
Hello Vegetables
Hole In My Shoe
Heavy Potato Encounter
My White Bicycle
Neil The Barbarian
Lentil Nightmare
Computer Alarm
Wayne
The Gnome
Cosmic Jam
(extra cassette tracks: Cassette Jam; Brown Sugar)

Side Two
Golf Girl
Bad Karma in the UK
Our Tune
Ken
The End Of The World Cabaret
No Future (God Save The Queen)
Floating
Hurdy Gurdy Man
Paranoid Remix
The Amoeba Song (From A Very Cellular Song)
(extra cassette tracks: Go Away; Hurdy Gurdy Mushroom Man)

• 'Neil' performed 'Hole In My Shoe on 'Top Of The Pops' three times - twice when it was actually in the top ten (hilariously interspersing the song with chatter - apologising to Frankie Goes To Hollywood for knocking 'Relax' off the number two slot and shouting 'Listen to the lyrics, Paul Weller!') and once on the end-of-the-year show. During the latter performance he proceeded to sing the chorus of My White Bicycle before adding 'What? Oh, you mean the other one…alright…', a joke which was, not unnaturally, lost on all those present.

• The 'promo video' for the song was put together by BBC's Breakfast Time and featured lots of arty shots of Neil walking around looking miserable.

• In an interview/factfile in Smash Hits at the time of release, Neil intimated that the Young Ones' untimely death at the end of the second series was a scam dreamt up by Mike in order to ensue good sales of 'Hole In My Shoe'. However there seemed to be a slight unrevealed antagonism between the authors of the two concepts. In 'Batchelor Boys' - the Young Ones book - there are two direct references to Planer's solo efforts: a joke about propping up your TV with unsold copies of 'Neil's Book Of The Dead', and, in a piece about becoming a pop star, an anonymous hand has added a scribbled margin note: 'On the other hand why not find a crappy old hippy number from '67, rip it off for loads of cash and go straight into the charts at number 5'… Morover, the cover of Neil's Heavy Concept Album features a shopping trolley with a large cut-out of Rik Mayall in it (a photo from Batchelor Boys) but, curiously, the face has been obscured, post-photo session by a stick-on CND badge. The picture of Frankenstein's monster at the front of the debris also appears to be covering something up but this is less obvious...

• Neil's Book Of The Dead, a thick (yet still lightweight, material-wise) tome by Nigel Planer and Terence Blacker features the full lyrics to 'Hurdy Gurdy Mushroom Man', not to mention a comic strip which features a scenario not dissimilar to the enforced lounge act duet of 'End Of The World Cabaret'. The strip also has a reference to 'The Bastard Squad' (the cop show which had them all transfixed in 'Boring'). There are fewer actual references to the Young Ones concept aside from, at the end of the book, when Neil refers to all the things 'the guys' did to stop the book from being written. Interesting to note that he spells 'Rick' as 'Rik'…

• Neil promoted the LP on Saturday Superstore, singing 'The Gnome' (with acc-ompanying rubber-plant amusement) to a bunch of disinterested children who would rather have been watching Bananarama.

• Both the Hole In My Shoe and My White Bicycle singles were released with 12" alternatives. Hole In My Shoe featured a longer mix of the song ('Paranoid Remix') which continues where the 7" leaves off with Neil doing the washing up, moaning about his diarrhoea, realising that he's on the radio (the track is still playing), then being confronted with a twisted mix of the song. His shoes tell him they hate him, his mother hassles him on the phone, everything speeds up and we experience a final crashing Pepper-esque piano note which goes on for ages while a backward message repeats itself throughout. Neil ponders on what it means before concluding that, if you play it backwards then it probably says something like 'Neil Is A Pooh-Brain' or 'Jimi Hendrix Is Alive And Well And Living In Dagenham'.

The extended section of the mix was later hived off , remixed again and presented as a track in its own right on Neil's Heavy Concept Album. This LP mix features further obscure 60s refs including a quotation from The Troggs Tapes ('Sprinkle some fairy dust on the bastard…').

The 12" of My White Bicycle is less well-endowed and simply features a longer mix of the song (with little to recommend it), a slightly better 'Xmas Ripoff Mix' which is topped and tailed with a monologue and, as per the 7", 'Cosmic Jam'.

A final curious note: the CD version of Neil's Heavy Concept Album features the middle eight on My White Bicycle which was edited out of the original LP edition. No idea…

If you saw the last episode of The Young Ones, you’ll know that Rick, Vyv, Mike and Neil are all dead. They were in a double-decker bus and it suddenly fell over the edge of a cliff and then sort of blew up. Shame, really. Amazingly enough, Neil has still managed to release a record: it’s called "Hole In My Shoe" and the lyrics are over the page. Perhaps even more amazingly, Smash Hits managed to get an interview with him (just before that tragic event) and get him into a photographic studio (though he didn’t seem terribly sure what was going on most of the time). The whole thing wasn’t, er…how can we put this? …a great success. Here’s what happened:-

"Well, listen, just before we start, right, you will remember to tell them I’m dead, right, and this was recorded before I died. Because otherwise I’ll get into real trouble."

"Well I just went along to this studio to, like, do some of my poetry and sing some of my songs and have a really mellow experience and then they got this really heavy producer in who said, you know, that we had to use tape-recorders and things and then, you know, the whole thing escalated from there and just became, like, a real hassle."

"No, no. I think it’s a sell-out. And all the films and books and everything and all the t-shirts and all the little mugs and everything that are going to come out to promote the single, the jingles on the radio and everything, all the "sell-out" stuff, right, was done, like, before we died and we’re all going off to a special island that’s a tax haven… Oh no we’re not. Oh no. I’ve blown it already…a special tax exile island where we can rest and watch the royalties come in."

"Well, hopefully they won’t hear it ‘cos well like they’re dead, aren’t they? But if they do happen to switch on the radio it’ll be like really heavy for me so the main thing is, like, don’t anyone play it on the radio and don’t do any publicity about it!"

"WHAT! They’re selling it! Oh no. Oh no! Why don’t people just give records away? Like, go up to people on the street and say, you know, like ‘would you like a record? ‘Cos it’s got some really good chanting on it and everything.’"

"What like people throwing their underwear at you? No, no. I’m not into all that being hassled by the media but I wouldn’t get any of that anyway because I’m dead, right?"

"Yeah. I’ve got to be dead as otherwise this whole thing won’t work. Mike said."

NAME: Neil Weedon Watkins Pie.
BORN: 5.7.1984. Today is the first day of the rest of your life and it could get WORSE!
EARLIEST MEMORY: Ga ga baba doodoo bub mama.
FIRST RECORD: Record number of bogies swallowed in a double geography class.
PREVIOUS JOBS: Previous to what? Am I being paid for this?
FIRST CRUSH: Lulu.
DID YOU HIDE IN THE SHOWERS WHEN IT WAS TIME FOR P.E.? I used to pee in the lavvy like everyone else. What a pervy question.
COLOUR OF BEDROOM WALL: Oh, haha, I suppose you thought that’d be a really good question to ask Neil, right? Because you think I spend loads of time just staring at the bedroom wall and I’d know all sorts of really boring details about it, like the bit on the edge of the damp patch where there’s like all green and red patterns and if you look at it long enough without blinking you get those sort of twizzely bits in front of your eyes. Well I’m not going to tell you.
LAST FILM: Greystoke. The Legend Of The Nazi Lord Of The Fascists more like.
IDEAL HOLIDAY: Well I’d probably end up crashing in a DC10 in the middle of the Bolivian jungle and having to live on nothing but a packet of Refreshers for 18 days while ants slowly eat me alive, eventually to be rescued by an Argentinian police helicopter and sent to live in Paraguay for 12 years and come home really old with a long white beard.
FAVOURITE FOOD: Aha. Trick question. You’re just trying to get me to mention lentils, aren’t you? So you can all laugh at me. Well, it’s not going to work.
FAVOURITE EXPRESSION: The one on Scoobeedoo’s face when he’s just seen a ghost.
MOST HATED PHRASE: "We really like you Neil" ‘cause I know they’re lying.
WHAT I’D DO WITH A MILLION QUID: Buy two million copies of Smash Hits. Can I go now?
HERO: Probably Steve Hillage.
FAVOURITE JOKE: Where does Napoleon keep his armies? Up his sleevies.
HAPPINESS IS: Yeah, that’s all very well, we all know that. But remember, just because happiness is, it doesn’t mean that happiness isn’t.

WORDS: MARK ELLEN, PHOTOS: MIKE PUTLAND