Personally I thought it was a stupid, lazy and wrong thing to say at the time. And if it made anyone behave in a different way than they were going to then more fool them.

Who coined that phrase anyway? Maybe it was a joke?

Comedians should never be cool. Cool people are so busy being cool they don't have time to think about what they're doing, ie acting like prats. Comedians can see through all that bullshit because they're smart people who don't care about being seen in the right places and wearing the right clothes. Or at least they should be.

People thought the Pythons were on these cool young things on drugs because of the crazy stuff they came out with. Can you really imagine those guys taking drugs? They look like they should have been doctor or teachers or lawyers, which they were going to be.

I think the "comedy is the new rock and roll" thing wasn't a great label, but I would have hoped that comedians had the sense to not get caught up in it.

Chicken or egg?

Comedians can see through all that bullshit because they're smart people who don't care about being seen in the right places and wearing the right clothes. Or at least they should be.
>


You'd think, wouldn't you?

I thought it was Janet Street Porter who coined the phrase.

Wouldn't be surprised. I first heard it about '93.

40 years ago TV (and radio too to an extent) was new and exciting, these days we've had it for, well, over 40 years. The people who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s (the golden years of TV) thought it was great and were inspired and wanted to be like the Monty Pythons, The Goodies, Kenny Everett or whoever it was that they thought was the most hilarious thing.

So when they had reached their 20s in the 90s, they'd write a few jokes and because the comedy industry had been through the golden years there are loads of clubs and all these new TV channels and there are heaps and heaps of opportunities. All the ground work had been done by all the golden era comedians and it was relatively easy.

In this kind of environment you're bound to become complacement aren't you?

Also with so much great stuff that's happened before you, the very stuff that inspired you it's got to be difficult to write new funny stuff. (I've tried and I think that's my problem, you feel you'll never be as good as your heroes!)

Add to this the fact that everyone is media saavy these days and anyone vaguely connected with showbiz is aware of publicity and image and so on, it must be difficult not to get sidetracked by this.

Very few people have the strength to ignore all this bullshit as best they can and just do what they do and do it well. I applaud those who can.

If the original comedy as rock and roll was indeed like rock and roll, then by my reckoning that would make The Mary Whitehouse Experience into Merseybeat, and Morris/Lee/Herring/Iannucci into psychedelia, which is fair enough. But I haven't seen any traces of Glam Rock yet, let alone anything that could be good enough to be called Punk...

>I haven't seen any traces of Glam Rock yet

Izzard?

>let alone anything that could be good enough to be called Punk...

Hicks, maybe?

I dunno, though, never took this "new rock 'n' roll" thing seriously and I don't think I ever met anyone who did for that matter.

I always thought Lee & Herring were the new My Bloody Valentine.

...check your email.

And straighten that tie.

And get a haircut.

And eat your greens.

I got a haircut today, actually...

...and that's a pretty nice haircut...



(spot the quote. win a prize)

Did football become the new rock 'n' roll after comedy, thus making football the new comedy?

If so, I suggest rock 'n' roll becomes the new football.

Call that music? It's just noise. In my day comedy had nothing to do with Rock 'n' Roll. People only wiggled their hips if they were falling down in an amusing manner.

Ewar: it's from 'Cut Your Hair' by Pavement.

>I just think it gave comedy - in particular TV comedy- the wrong set of priorities. We all suddenly had to be cool, even if it was at the expense of being funny. Thoughts?
>

I suspect it was a myth perpetuated by bored NME/Melody Maker hacks who thought comedy was more interesting than the British music scene of the early nineties, when they nothing to write about until they came up with the remarkably similar 'Britpop is the new rock & roll' thereby annoying a similar number of people, albeit in a different media.

I don't recall there being THAT much comedy in NME/MM at that point. The occasional Newman and Baddiel interview, and very brief references to the wrongdoings of Chris Morris, but very little else.

It was all wall to wall Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine as far as I could tell.

And that bloody Jim Rose Circus thing too.

That Jam/Blue Jam is just noise those isn't it? There's no obvious tunes (jokes) or melodies (punchlines) or anything - its just all distorted (views on the world) and sounds horrid. It wasn't like this in my day.

The Day Today was publicised in Select ( I think) by a mock interview with the team proclaiming "NEWS is the new rock'n'roll!"

Anything David Baddiel is interested in is the new rock and roll.
Pornography next then

Funnily enough, it all happened when Madonna's Sex book was turning music into the new pornography.

Shock, horror, but I disagree with Richard.
I think that it was a fair enough simile to draw at the time. A distinct youth/pop awareness of 'alternative comedy' occurred in the eighties, so it wasn't unreasonable to draw comparisons to the 50s rock 'n' roll phenomenom. The problem wasn't/isn't the labelling, it's the buying into it by comics/producers/media.
Also general rule of thumb:every comic wants to be a rock star, just as every rock star wants to be a comic .
Unfortunate music and appalling humour frequently occur. Any attendee of festivals will find themselves subjected to these things. [Hey, I'm proudly pleading 'guilty, your honour' for my dubious efforts this Melbourne Comedy Festival - there was a band, they let us do songs...]

Melody Maker did quite a lot of comedy coverage in the mid to late 80s - that was the first place I read about Sadowitz. They used to have centre page interviews with Ben Elton and Rik Mayall all the time. This would have been about 86 or 87.

Ironically, I don't think "Comedy is the new rock'n'roll" was too harmful at the time. Comedy was in a pretty good state in 1993, really (I'm not bothering with a list, we all know who - suffice to say it was a time when Radio 1 actually broadcast comedy during the evenings (mostly good, too)). The problem, perhaps, is what such a movement (if it was a movement) has spawned since....

>And that bloody Jim Rose Circus thing too.

I met them at Hull University five years ago. They were very nice, polite chaps and the interview that Jim Rose gave the radio station was funny as fuck

I first saw it cropping up as a phrase around '93, and saw it then as a typical journo phrase. (Mr Herring got it spot on in his earlier posting). Worse still, there were those who seemed to be feeding on this as a way of justifying their existence on the comedy circuit (with obvious notable exceptions).

Since then, *cookery* and even *housekeeping* have been labelled as the new Rock 'n' Roll. So it seems, as always, it is easy to label things, but harder to explain why. And I've never read one reason to support the tagging of comedy in this manner.

The Comedians wanting to be Rock Stars / vice versa problem goes way back.

John Lennon once said that he'd far rather have been in Monty Python than The Beatles.

Look how little incitement it took to get Lennon to cavort round a public toilet in Not Only But Also.

(And I notice in the new Beatle book that Harrison seems to have replaced all his actual memories of the acid years with scenes from The Rutles.)

Similarly, Eric Idle was quite clearly a wannabe rock star - hanging out with Mick and Bianca, George and Patti etc etc.
And look at Spinal Tap, The Blues Brothers, or Steve Martin and the coke-comedy generation.

We'll skirt tactfully round Bad News...


PS: Mitch Benn started this thread. Remember, without "comedy is the new rock and roll" any comic on stage with a guitar round his neck would be Richard Digeance.

Whatever happened to him?

I've always associated the line (rightly or wrongly) with the TV incarnation of The Mary Whitehouse Experience, dating it to about 1991-2. There's even a line in my TMWE write-up which goes:
'It was probably the reaction to the television /Experience/ which caused one writer to pen the immortal line "Comedy is the new rock 'n' roll"'

But I've been none too sure of this for a while now. Can anyone provide a quotation which would settle things one way or the other?

Don't know, but you can get hold of all the Mary Whitehouse Exp. scripts at:

www.compsoc.man.ac.uk/~katie/whitehouse.html

cool, huh?

I've had a bit of a rethink overnight. If comedy is to be likened to any music form, I think it's closer to pop than rock. Especially indy pop - where the good looking boys also deny that their looks have anything to do with it. "It's all about the art, man".

>I don't think "Comedy is the new rock'n'roll" was too harmful at the time.

Where it went wrong was Newman and bloody Baddiel taking it literally and thinking it would translate to stadium bigs. They fell on their arses, the media went 'Whoops', and the public edged away grinning nervously before inventing Oasis.

Frank Skinner once said that all the fuss was about Rob Newman, who caught the eye of young ladies.

Stewart Lee was also billed as "the new Rob Newman" during the early 90s for similar reasons.

And the baton now passes on to the Boosh boys.

Yes, Boosh certainly does it for me.

Stewart and Frank in one message... oddly enough they were on the same bill once when I saw them in '91. I think it was 'cos after baggy and shoegazing and the scene that celebrates itself had got a bit boring and shuffled off, there was nothing else to write about apart from yoof TV/comedy stuff.

I don't think it did any of the main culprits in that era much good by being tagged like that however. The Newman/Baddiel Wembley thing was probably the true sign that a big mistake had been made and whoever coined the phrase needed a good kicking. People starting to believe in their myth is always a bad thing.

Richard Digence turns up on Countdown quite often and I'm sure he has a series on Radio 2. You could always add Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrott and Mike Harding to that list. And Jake Thackary. Saturday nights TV would have been fun again...

Remembering very little of any eighties comedy leads me to believe only the muppets had it down with both style and comedy.
But that's what being an eighties child of exhippies does to you I suppose.

RHC, it was that way for the rest of us too.

The first time I remember the recent RnR/Comedy crossover happening was when The NME and The Melody Maker had a row about whether Vic Reeves was any good.
There was nowt interesting going on in music (Camden Lurch, anyone?) and the two inkies decided to have a fight.

If I remember rightly, MM just didn't get the joke with Vic and Bob.
Memorably they did a weekly spoof piece where Vic would juxtapose a piece of brisket or bacon with, say, a motorbike and introduce it.

The spoof backfired, because, when you think about it, that's very funny.

RHC, are you really a child of ex-hippies? They've become a pair of fascists nowadays, the way you tell it. Which is highly plausible.

Don't smoke the reefer no more.

I first time ever I saw the phrase was in that book A Decade of Comedy At the Assembly Rooms by - I think, all my comedy books got stolen a few years ago - John Connor, from about 1990. If memory serves it wasn't even a major theme,just a sentence from the prologue.
I think the fact that there was so little happening on the music front at the time was crucial - my main memory of all that is of people like Emma Forrest bleating on about how excited they were to meet Vic and Bob,or Newman and Baddiel...
Also,even at the time you couldn't help but get the impression that it was something that Avalon in particular absolutely loved, and were actively encouraging - again the main memory of the Wembley Arena farrago as quite how expensive the tickets were...is it me or on the video do there seem to be very many empty seats?

I'm fairly sure it was John Connor, it's just the Terminator connection that's making me unsure. Still, we could always send a robot back in time to kill his mother, ensuring he never says it....

>>And that bloody Jim Rose Circus thing too.
>
>I met them at Hull University five years ago. They were very nice, polite chaps and the interview that Jim Rose gave the radio station was funny as fuck

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees... but television has never stooped so low as when they appeared on "The Word" and offered Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder the chance to drink his own bile...

After prolonged exposure to his presence, I thought Jim Rose was a right prick. Most of the others were cocky, but ok.

Mind you, I liked the female sumo wrestlers. Local comic icon Sue Ann Post (6ft ex-mormon lesbian hammer-throwing genius) wrestled with them topless. We all went along to cheer, and were quite shocked - Posty wore makeup.

Emma Forrest, eh? Er... who was she?

She was a columnist for the Guardian who was about 20 and wrote rather gushy stuff, always mentioning how young she was as if trying to get brownie points. She was in a documentary about people who live in Brighton, following Julie Burchill around like a mooncalf. It was quite funny to watch because Julie is so enormous and Emma is so tiny, Or maybe she wasn't tiny but julie made her look so.

She (Emma) also wrote a novel which got some good reviews. Funny how journos always close ranks when a journo writes a novel.

>Mind you, I liked the female sumo wrestlers. Local comic icon Sue Ann Post (6ft ex-mormon lesbian hammer-throwing genius) wrestled with them topless. We all went along to cheer, and were quite shocked - Posty wore makeup.
>

Janet - So glad you mentioned Posty! Did she get into the olympics then? P-O-T-S-Y!!!

Emma Forrest's prime journo 'gig' was writing a column for the Sunday Times Culture Section called,zeitgeist-hoppingly, Generation X. This was about 93-94. I'd thought she was meant to be even younger than 20, and yes she was very small - kind of a Catlin Moran for the anorexia generation. She was sold as a spokesman for disaffected Sunday Times Culture reading youth, and was always doing something, actually quite good, but then writing about it in a way that made you want to punch her (e.g seeing Red House Painters in San Francisco; interviewing Vic and Bob and annoying Vic by pronouncing 'Moir' incorrectly; declaring Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo an incredibly sexy name and suggesting that hey, politics is the new rock 'n roll). She did get David Baddiel to say 'sometimes I think Rob Newman has a heart of stone', which was quite good, but I think generally she summed up that lowest common denominator journalism which so jumped on the new rock n'roll debate: If her column were now, she'd be banging on about that Coldplay/Alan McGee tiff, it was that standard of generic, bandwagon-jumping journalism basically.

More columnist bile!
More columnist bile!

Let's just review journalists! Set up the feedback loop! Then, when our postings are collected into book or magazine form, we shall review ourselves and become some kind of Celtic arse-eating snake creature! Hurrah!

I have just looked at my chum's copy of that assembly rooms book and can't find that quote...arse biscuits....now I am confused...

right here it is, but i have got it arse about tit: Of American stand-up 'it has been claimed that it is actually rivalling rock for bums-on-seats' and then 'stand-up developed with the madness of original rock'n roll but slowly and surely it is quietening down'.....sorry......so I am left thinking that william cook is the culprit....

right here it is, but i have got it arse about tit: Of American stand-up 'it has been claimed that it is actually rivalling rock for bums-on-seats' and then 'stand-up developed with the madness of original rock'n roll but slowly and surely it is quietening down'.....sorry......so I am left thinking that william cook is the culprit....

Bean, Posty didn't make the Olympics (managed to develop diabetes and was stuffed up for awhile until it was diagnosed) but is aiming for the Commonwealth Games in 2002. She writes for the Age now, so you might even be able to access her online. Don't you wish these UK folk could experience her splendour?

Oh good, someone's talking about early-90s Brit music-press again.

>If I remember rightly, MM just didn't get the joke with Vic and Bob.

Well, it was just Steve Sutherland really - calling Mr Moir 'Prick Reeves' throughout an album review. Oh, my sides.

Odd character, Sutherland. On one level he seemed to embrace that whole cathedrals'n'glaciers MM aesthetic, on another he was Mr Meat'n'Potatoes indie-bore. Elsewhere in MM at the time, I recall someone (perhaps Everett True) making a case for Vic'n'Bob being the My Bloody Valentine of comedy. Not as lazy obviously.

NME, though I loathed much of its music writing, *was* funnier. Of course, Quantick, Wells, Maconie and Collins have gone on to greater (and lesser) things...

One of Sutherland's last acts at MM was to slag off Paul Weller's first solo album, and for that he deserves our respect.

Simon Price has always hated R&M. Everett True & Sally Margaret Joy gave an apparently positive review to the live show once, but I've never been sure if they were themselves taking the piss out of people who droned on about how 'post-modern' R&M were.

MBV aren't lazy - in fact they are STILL constantly recording, but are mad genius perfectionists and are never happy with the results. The fact that they have actually had taped product to display is possibly the sole reason why Island Records have continued to pump money into the project.

As seen at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/

Is peasant farming the new rock and roll? Former Genesis drummer Chris Stewart talks about the sequel to his smash hit
book Driving Over Lemons. More

>MBV aren't lazy - in fact they are STILL constantly recording, but are mad genius perfectionists and are never happy with the results. The fact that they have actually had taped product to display is possibly the sole reason why Island Records have continued to pump money into the project.

Are you sure about this? I heard that Shields had reached a state of complete inertia around '95 (when their d'n'b-influenced LP was shelved) and has barely recorded anything since. The remix and guest-musician gigs keep the rent money coming in; meanwhile Colm is producing and Deb is driving a cab (or is it Bilinda?).

His 'Invisible Jukebox' feature in The Wire a couple of years back wasn't very encouraging either - he gave the impression that he wasn't even *listening* to much new music anymore, much less making any.

Kevin lives near me - I keep hoping he'll get on my bus so I can pester him with precisely these questions.

It is annoying though - it's clear that if it's taken *this* long, then he'll *never* be sufficiently happy with any recorded material to put it out under the MBV banner. It's not like Scott Walker - who basically did something else for the best part of a decade before feeling it was time to record again. Apart from anything else, this 9-year hiatus gives ammo to those friends of mine who reckon MBV were the worst kind of slack-jawed psychedelia anyway - "look, the drug-addled wasters can't even get out of bed now!".

Everett True?? Everett BLOODY True!
Guess what he went and did this year? He moved to Melbourne, and gave me the absolute screaming irrits during the Comedy Festival by being a) opinionated beyond belief despite a striking lack of knowledge about the modern comedy scene (any reference he made was from the 70s); b) by slagging off comics and shows just to be controversial; and c) by being an unforgivably poor writer. His spelling was almost as appalling as his punctuation, but neither could be rivalled by his unforgivably poor grammar and sentence construction. (He wrote for the same street-mag as I do - all writers do their own sub-editing, thus the horrors of his 'talents' went straight to print).
Please, can't you take him back?

MBV are (notionally) now Shields and Bilinda Butcher. Deb Goodge is in a band called Snowpony, with Katherine Gifford, who was in an early line-up of Stereolab.

The story I heard was that Island were going to cut the money off, but Shields presented them with some tracks that were amazing, and so the money continues to flow.

Dunno what happened to Colm Cusack. Think he has anew band as well.

What I heard: the only time when no recording has actually taken place was when they had trouble with their self-built studio, which ended up in litigation with the equipment suppliers. Admittedly, this may have lasted for up to two years...

The 1995 album was indeed shelved, but about eighteen months ago Island (or whoever owns them now) sent an A&R man to check on the situation, who was shown reel upon reel of rejected studio tapes, and then told that from these tapes, six or seven completed and mixed tracks had been culled.

I think it was Debbie who was spotted driving a cab (in fact, one of my friends claims to have been the person who spotted her). She also made an album with Snowpony in 1998.

And to be honest, I really don't know very much more!

It's like all the stories about The La's - very difficult to nail down the truth...

We nailed one of them, though:

They weren't as good as The Beatles.

Absolutely!

Consider: The Beatles have embraced all the backstabbing-fuelled litigation antics of the music industry, rather than fighting against them...

Everett True used to share a flat with Huggy Bear.

Which is why he wrote about them all the time. Then they moved out, he started slagging them off, and they became a really good band in the face of sudden music press indifference.

Can we just start a music press hating strand here?

Huggybear were great.

'Her Jazz' was alright, and so was all of that Peel Session I taped in '92. But I finally bought their album 'Weaponry Listens To Love' a few weeks ago and it was awful.

I'll probably have to give it to Ewar Woowar.

>I'll probably have to give it to Ewar Woowar.

fnar!

I had Debbie in the front of my cab once.

I liked Huggy Bear's "Weaponry"
But it has a long time ago... I could be wrong.
When Ewar Woowar listens to it, can we have a review?