14

A VERY NAUGHTY BOY

From the moment Monty Python’s Life of Brian opened in the summer of 1979, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” began to take on a life of its own. To help promote the movie, it was released as a double-sided single, paired rather oddly with another of my songs, “All Things Dull and Ugly,” a parody of the rather bland Victorian hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”:

All things dull and ugly

All creatures short and squat

All things rude and nasty

The Lord God made the lot.

It got nowhere, of course, but then our singles never did. (Though the evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins reprinted the lyrics in his book The Greatest Show on Earth.) When the film opened in California, Harry Nilsson and Timothy Leary were going mad for “Bright Side,” and Harry told me he was going to record it for his new album. The recording sessions went on for days, culminating in an all-star celebrity chorus. I have never been one for spending hours in the studio, so I was less than happy to sit around listening to someone doing overdubs on my song, even if it was Donald “Duck” Dunn. In fact, I wrote a waspish little song of my own, called “Harry”:

He’s a pretty nifty guy

Always looks you in the eye

Everybody passing by will sigh for Harry,

which includes the little stinger:

Here’s a little gentle song

A sorta sentimental song

At least it didn’t take us very long, Harry!

We recorded it at Redwood Studios in a single day with John Du Prez producing and my lovely singer-songwriter friend Charlie Dore singing along with me. John and I had begun working on “The Life of Brian” with the Otto song, and we would spend the next forty years working together. We did many Python songs for the Contractual Obligation Album, recorded about six for The Meaning of Life, produced Monty Python Sings, and wrote several musicals before eventually having a Broadway hit with Spamalot. John was the most perfect partner you could ever wish for. He did everything I couldn’t. Effortlessly. Once we were recording “I Like Chinese.”

“Damn,” I said.

“What?” asked John.

“If we’d thought ahead we could have had it translated and sung a verse in Chinese.”

“Well,” said John, “I only speak Mandarin…”

While he filmed Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, Robert Altman had had the insane idea of taking rock musicians with him to Malta to work on the movie’s soundtrack. This led to legendary drug excesses and predictable madness on that Mediterranean island. Amongst the ringleaders was Harry. Now we sent Derek Taylor off to hand-deliver our new song, “Harry,” to its eponymous subject. The gift took him completely by surprise. Harry responded like a child at Christmas. No one had ever given him such a present. A song about him! He played it to everyone on the movie and then for everyone on the island. He couldn’t get enough of it. So fond was he of this little song that not only does his version of “Bright Side” close his final album, he actually opens Flash Harry with me singing my song “Harry.” That’s right, I open a Harry Nilsson album. Sadly, Flash Harry was only released in the U.K. at the time; it would be another thirty years before it was released in the States, along with a fine documentary film, Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him?) which features my little ditty.

There were many nights of madness with Harry in Hollywood, because he liked a good argument and a good drink, and when Harry turned up on your doorstep people often disappeared for days. Not me, I hasten to add, for I had my own Bright Side by my side. In fact, Tania says Harry offered her a huge plate of cocaine at a party at Timothy Leary’s house when she was eight months pregnant. She pointedly gestured at her enormous stomach.

Harry said, “Oh sorry, love.”

On another occasion, he accidentally knocked his own toddler into the pool. Oops. Harry never really recovered from the Beatle praise from John Lennon: “Harry Nilsson is our favorite group,” but he certainly wrote and sang like an angel until all this boozing and schmoozing and smoking and snorting finally put paid to his golden voice, and in the end, far too soon, it put paid to him. He died on the eve of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which struck in the middle of the night while he was lying in his casket in an Agoura Hills funeral parlor. When the 6.7 tremblor hit, he was thrown clean out of his coffin. A perfect Harry thing to do. Still falling off the stage.

Brian opened to huge controversy. Tania and I were supposed to fly Concorde from Paris for the opening of the movie, but the night before we were due to leave, a thousand rabbis suddenly appeared on the streets of New York protesting the movie. A thousand what, now? Everyone seemed puzzled. Didn’t they get the memo? The rabbis went away as quickly as they had appeared and were replaced by angry Christians, who picketed the Burbank Studios in LA, claiming that Warner Brothers were the agents of the devil, though everyone knows that’s CAA’s job. Bob Daley and Terry Semel stood firm. In fact, for them it was a blessing. These controversies were on the TV news. We were making headlines round America every night. There was no need for us to fly to the States and do publicity. There’s only one thing you can’t do, and that is stop Americans watching what they want. Hey, even pornography is called Freedom of Speech. So, while the movie was being pulled from cinemas across America, people would simply drive across state lines. This pattern repeated itself everywhere. Half of the U.K. banned it and the other half flocked to it. Sweden advertised it as the movie so funny that Norwegians weren’t allowed to see it.

One nice footnote to the Brian controversy: in our movie, Sue Jones-Davies, a Welsh actress, played Brian’s revolutionary girlfriend Judith. She was fiercely naked in one of the scenes. When the movie was first released in her hometown of Aberystwyth in North Wales, the local council banned the film from public screening. Thirty years later she became the mayor of Aberystwyth and overthrew the ban. Isn’t that great?

Thanks to all the fuss and protests, the movie did extremely well at the box office, but after this madness I ran away for a while with the lovely Tania. I was tired of fame, and sick of being recognized as Monty Python. Hey Monty! Thank heavens we didn’t call it Whither Canada? or people would be yelling Hey Whither! at me. We fled to France, where for many years I remained anonymous, just this whacko Brit who lived on a hill in the middle of nowhere. I had bought a little property with Lyn in 1971, thinking I could write just as badly in France as I did in London, and now I bought her half from her. It was really only a glorified cowshed, with a bedroom, bathroom, and tiny kitchen, but it had beautiful terraced views over the Var, with ancient olive trees and a pine forest at the top and bottom of the hill. We’d had the place for eight years with no electricity, and had even had to find water, hitting a crystal-clear source eighty meters below the ground. Tania and I now decided to build on, behind our little shackeau. We called it the House of Brian.

Who could fail to love Provence? Lavender, rosemary, fennel, thyme, and a wind so furious it has its own name, Le Mistral, which sweeps the sky clean of clouds, taking all meteorological depression away and lifting the spirits and filling you with energy, but then stays for days, banging away like an old quarrel, grating on your nerves, making you irritable and cranky. But then, one beautiful morning, it stops and the sun shines and the countryside twinkles. It’s like magic.

When I first discovered the Var, it was officially the most underpopulated Department in France. There were hardly any French, it was mainly Spanish and Italians, and a few pieds-noir (Algerian colonists) who had fled from Algeria. Of course, I didn’t make it easy on myself by buying a property with no road, no water, and no electricity. Sometimes I feel I experienced all stages of civilization, and that was a good thing. No water? A forage. No electricity? Oil lamps. Music? Cassette batteries. No cooker? Gas bottles. No fridge? Camping gas. No road? I’ll hump the gas bottles in a wheelbarrow over the terraces. No shade? I’ll plant trees. And fires? You bet. We were burned twice in forest fires, once in 1979 and again in 1999. Shortly before Électricité de France came bringing electricity, poet Stephen Spender had given me his magic lamp, a superior pumped-up oil lamp from his home in the Alpilles, on the day he got electricity. Now we too were being connected and I no longer had to hump up the hill in the cold dark night and attempt to start an outboard motor to fill the cistern. Of course, the water always ran out at night. Sod’s Law is written in French. Everything stops, everything breaks. I used to call it “Fuck Provence” to the intense delight of my fellow-suffering, equally obsessive neighbor, Richard E. Grant. Another acquaintance was a very tall blond-haired man who could often be seen pushing around one of his first inventions—a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel. He and his lovely wife, Deirdre, and their delightful children were poor and very thin. She taught art and even sold some jewelry to help him build an improbable vacuum cleaner that no one wanted. He was, of course, James Dyson. You have to be completely obsessive to have a house in Provence…

After Brian, I took a long sabbatical, immersing myself in astronomy, learning about the immensity of our Universe, and generally self-educating myself in cosmology. I spent the nights gazing at the unbelievable numbers of stars wheeling overhead in the Milky Way, and wrote a lyric about it. I also read life science books, trying to understand evolution and the extraordinary appearance of life in the Universe. I could understand the physical Universe expanding and banging away, but why does life evolve over billions of years to become you and me? This opened my mind to the central question of the Universe: What is life? To my mind, nobody has yet answered this question adequately. Well, alright, Professor Brian Cox did, but we were both pissed at the time, and we have completely forgotten what he said. Steve Martin, a philosophy graduate, said that life exists so the Universe can experience itself.

In France, friends came to stay, I played guitar and read, and now and again the odd Python would drop in. George and Liv visited, Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher came to stay, Paul sitting in the garden writing lyrics.

One day Art Garfunkel drove up on a motorbike with Penny Marshall and gave me a long ride down to the coast through the Gorges du Verdon. My first time on a motorbike. David Bowie came to visit. People loved the rustic simplicity of Provence.

I also wrote a play. I had built a dirt-floor shack in a pine wood up the hill, and every morning at dawn I would walk up with a thermos of tea. I had finished the play, and we were going back to the U.K. for a couple of weeks, when Tania asked me to read it to her, so I went up and brought it back down. Just as well, because while we were away the whole forest burned down in a devastating fire. When we returned, nothing remained of the forest. The shack was gone. Paradise looked like the Somme. The smell of burnt wood was everywhere. But Tania had saved my play. In 1982, Pass the Butler, directed by Jonathan Lynn, toured the U.K., and then Michael White brought it into the West End in 1983. On opening night, a lady said to me just before the curtain went up: “Well, now let’s see whether Tania did right to save the play from the fire.” Nice. With friends like that…

Pass the Butler ran at the Globe Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue for six months to howls of laughter, and only closed late in the Falklands War when people stopped going to the theater entirely. Early on in that war, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” was sung by the crew of the destroyer HMS Sheffield while they sat on the deck for three hours awaiting rescue from their sinking ship, after being hit by an Exocet missile. It was also sung by the crew of the stricken HMS Coventry, and they particularly enjoyed the ironic line “worse things happen at sea, you know…,” an ad-lib of mine from the playout. I found this very moving; and also, when it was sung by RAF Tornado Pilots as they suited up to fly dangerous low-level missions during Operation Desert Storm in the first Gulf War. What had started off as a caricature of a wartime song was now a real war song.

The Rutland Weekend Television Center. Before and after.

One odd footnote from the Falklands. Michael White, the producer of my play, had a dinner party at his Egerton Crescent home, and Koo Stark entered to a flash of paparazzi. Meanwhile her boyfriend, Prince Andrew, slipped over the back wall, aided by his protection detail. I was seated next to him and found him to be quite charming. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was in the Falklands flying helicopters.

“Jeez,” I said, “what exactly do you do?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s my job to fly around dropping chaff to lure the Exocet missiles away from our ships.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “The Queen is your mother and you’ve got the job of being a decoy for French missiles?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Thank Christ I’m working-class,” I said.

Michael White was always funny, and at one Cannes Film Festival, Tania and I played a little trick on him. He was employed by Vanity Fair to go to all the parties and take pictures of the stars. We watched him going from table to table clicking away. This was pre-digital time and cameras had real film in them, and because they were on a tight deadline Michael’s unprocessed film was rushed to New York at the end of each day. During the party, I noticed that Michael had for once left his camera on the table while he went off and schmoozed. I looked at Tania.

“Come on,” I said, seizing his camera and setting off for the gents. Giggling naughtily, we took a series of semi-pornographic selfies of a couple apparently having sex in a stall, without of course showing our faces. We then returned to the table and put his camera back. We tried hard to keep a straight face when Michael returned to collect it, but he didn’t seem to suspect anything, picked it up, and went off in search of more celebrities. We could hear him going: “Nicole. Tom. Over here.” Click click click.

Safely back in our hotel room, we laughed and laughed at the thought of Vanity Fair processing and reviewing the footage. In the middle of all those glittering stars they would suddenly come across our porny pictures taken in the toilets. We laughed at this for many years, though without ever telling Michael. It still makes me laugh. Michael “Chalky” White was for many years a fixture at Cannes, where he would play tennis in carefully torn shorts. Once he served a double fault and said unforgettably, “Sorry, I wasn’t ready.”