The Comic Strip, Part 20 - Who knows where we will go at the end of this rainbow.

"More Bad News" - February 27th 1988

One of the few concert bootleg recordings that I have been on the lookout for in the past few years is David Bowie's appearance at the 2004 Norwegian Wood Festival in Oslo. As I understand it, the performance was interrupted when a lollipop was thrown from the crowd, hitting Bowie in the eye. Bowie then (again, as I understand it) halted the music to give a lecture about how it is rude to throw lollipops at people, concluding with the demand that the lollipop thrower identify themselves and apologize.

We've come a long way from Altamont.

I'm reminded of this by the conclusion of this episode, which was filmed in the middle of the 1986 Monsters of Rock Festival at Castle Donnington. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Look who's back! It's Bad News!

Every once in a while, I'll be poking through my records/tapes/CDs and I'll find something that makes me say "I haven't thought of this band/artist in ages -- I wonder if they've done anything since this thing that I am now holding..." So I go to look them up in Allmusic and discover that they've put out 10 albums that I somehow never noticed. That's sort of how I feel here. MTV seemed to show the original Bad News episode every third week or so, but this never made it to broadcast so far as I know. Both episodes were slapped together into a videotape that was released in America for roughly 13 minutes.

And here they are - doing the same schtick. And as one is twice as long, we get a lovely heaping helping. Where before we get a few hints at Colin's (Rik Mayall) comfy upper-class home life, here we get to see him still living in his parents house, trying desperately to look anarchic. We get Jennifer Saunders' rock journalist trying to interview Nigel Planer's thick Den. We even get another gag about the film crew filming the tour bus driving down the highway.

Much of the new stuff seems cribbed from Spinal Tap: the absurdly tasteless music video, the management shenanigans (there's a great moment when the band discovers that the cost for the catering on their video shoot is being taken from their pay, so they all start eating as much food as they possibly can) and album release trouble. Finally, there is the concert-falls-apart sequence, which is where this episode blows Spinal Tap out of the water.

One of the things that has always amazed me about Spinal Tap is how much they have been embraced by the culture that they are mocking. I suspect one of the factors of this lie in the fact that Spinal Tap is supposed to be a successful band. (As a fun double feature some evening, sit down to a viewing of This is Spinal Tap followed by Legend of a Band - The Story of the Moody Blues. It's quite illuminating.) By being an unsuccessful band, Bad News are closer to the sorts of people that the average heavy metal fan "is," as opposed to "wants to be." Because of this, it can't be as much fun to watch.

When they hit the stage, many in the audience were probably delighted to see the fake comedy band that they saw a few years before on Channel 4 show up on stage to put on their foolery, but a sizeable portion seem to have been rather upset. They start throwing things. This is not footage of an audience throwing stuff at some other band spliced into the episode - it is real. In the image on the left, you can see a water bottle in mid-flight just over Ade Edmonson's (on the left) head. Nigel Planer is on the right walking towards the right. As the shot continues, the bottle will hit Planer on the arm. In the photo on the right, Edmonson is getting hit on the head with some sort of plastic box.

I have no idea what they were thinking was going to happen, but I don't think that they were anticipating the reaction that they received. You can see it on their faces - this strange mixture of "we're going to get killed" and "this is great." As I've mentioned before, I am purposely keeping away from the extras disk, but I hope more than anything that they have a segment on the shooting of this sequence.