The Comic Strip, Addendum - dubba dubba dubba cha

The Bad News Album - released sometime in the eighties. Apparently.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine went off on a trip to Australia and the Orient for summer vacation. Upon his return, the souvenir that surpassed all else from his long and eventful journey was a cassette tape. This was an illegal knock-off of some top-40 hair band that he picked up in a market somewhere for the equivalent of fifty cents. The thing that was so enticing about this (apart from the cachet of illegal-ness) is that the folks who made the tape added a track to the beginning - two minutes of a jet taking off. In stereo. So it started rumbling off way over in the right speaker and went "ne-e-e-e-e-Yowwwwww" through the room. Or, if you were using headphones, your head. And then Foreigner 4, or whatever the tape was, started, and we would shut it off, rewind and listen to the jet again.

In a number of places, The Bad News Album reminds me of that tape.

The conceit of the album is that the band last seen in the Bad News Tour episode has somehow been given a recording contract and is now in the studio attempting to cut their first album.

We hear some finished tunes that are hilariously over-produced - laden with sound effects of motorcycles gunning, horses galloping and so forth - the sort of thing that sounds cool when you're hanging out at three in the morning and you want to pass the headphones around and listen to the jet again.

We also hear a lot of them talking between takes. This stuff is utterly spot on. I'm not sure how much of this is improvised, but it feels exactly like the tapes that get passed around between recording engineers of bands that are thoroughly out of their depth attempting to create their vision (the tape of the Troggs in the studio trying to get the drummer to do what the lead singer wants him to comes to mind) or bands that are using the studio as a venue of discovery, in particular the discovery that they want nothing to do with each other (There's a hilarious moment in The Monkees' Headquarters Sessions where Peter and Mike are fervently discussing the folk scene with one of the engineers, while Davy tries futilely to interrupt with his thoughts on the new Wayne Newton album.) The discussion of their contract is particularly amusing - they argue about how the cash is distributed while ignoring the fact that they are supposed to pay for the studio time that they are burning up while arguing.

A moment of absolute comic joy comes during their attempt at "Bohemian Rhapsody" where Brian May (who produced the album) gets to dismantle his own guitar solo. You can feel every awful cover he had ever heard being exorcised. It is spectacularly, wonderfully horrible.

The whole thing ends with their attempt at a Christmas single. As it comes at an appropriate time of the year, and is stuck playing in my head, it merits a mention. "It's Christmas. Let's open a four-pack and snog." God bless us, every one.