June or July 1968 ?
Recording "I'm The Urban Spaceman"
Last updated on December 4, 2024
June or July 1968 ?
Last updated on December 4, 2024
Recording studio: Chappell Recording Studios, London UK
Session May 31, 1968 • Recording "Revolution 1"
Article Circa June 1968 • Mary Hopkin is filmed for Apple promo film
Session June or July 1968 ? • Recording "I'm The Urban Spaceman"
Film June 1968 • Shooting of "Apple promotional film" promo film
AlbumSome of the songs worked on during this session were first released on the "I'm The Urban Spaceman / Canyons Of Your Mind" 7" Single
In 1968, Paul McCartney, under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth, produced the most successful single for The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, “I’m the Urban Spaceman.”
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, formed by British art-school students in the early 1960s, blended music hall, jazz, and pop with surreal humor and avant-garde art. In September 1967, they were invited by Paul McCartney to participate in the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.”
While sources such as “All Together Now” by Harry Castleman & Walter J. Podrazik (1976) suggest the recording occurred in March 1968, Paul was in India for most of that month, returning to London on March 26. Neil Innes of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band recalled in January 2001 that “[Paul] sat down on the piano and played ‘Hey Jude’ all the way through. No one had heard it then. He’d only just written it.” However, “Hey Jude” was not written until June 1968 by Paul McCartney. Therefore, it is likely that the recording session took place around June or July 1968.
I’d like to go on record as saying that the record would have been nothing like [as successful] without Paul’s touch
Neil Innes – Member of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band – From “Fab: intimate life of Paul McCartney” by Howard Sounes, 2010
When Neil wrote it, I didn’t particularly see much in it. We got the demos down when we were staying in a cottage in Devon – this sounds nice and Trafficy. […] We played it a hell of a lot and I got to quite like it. It’s a nice happy song, I can see that it looks frightfully contrived and commercial. Does it? I know it’s not satirical or highly pointed.
Vivian Stanshall – Leader of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – From New Musical Express, December 7, 1968
Viv [Stanshall] was down the Speakeasy with Paul. I think they used to drop into the personas of country gents, sort of thing, “Another one, dear boy?” “I don’t mind if I do”. Viv was saying, “We’ve got to do this bloody single, but the producer won’t give us time to do anything.” So Paul said, “Well, I’ll come and produce it.”
Neil Innes – Member of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band – From “Fab: intimate life of Paul McCartney” by Howard Sounes, 2010
So Viv was down the Speakeasy Club, I think, with Paul, talking generally, he used to hang out quite a bit. And Viv was complaining about the fact that Gerry [Bron – the producer of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band] was sort of, “Right, three hours of that, move on.” And he said, now we gotta go in and record this bloody single. So Paul said, “I’ll come and produce it if you like.” And that was perfect, because that was the only way we were going to get him off the control desk, to have somebody like Paul, who wasn’t known as a record producer, but he was known. So he came and produced that, and took eight hours.
Neil Innes – From Bonzo Dog Band- Neil Innes interview by Richie Unterberger, January 2001
Larry was sort of doing on the drums a-boom-chick, boom-chick, boomchick, and Paul said, ‘Yeah, that’s all right, we’ll do it like that, but give it a boom-dat-boom boom bap with the boom-chick, boom-chick,’ which gave it a feel. Then he snatches up Viv’s ukulele and starts leaning into the microphone, Nashville-style, to fade it, live fade and fade out, rinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dinky-dink, and the whole thing is taking off. And it’s totally down to Paul.
Neil Innes – Member of The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band – From “Fab: intimate life of Paul McCartney” by Howard Sounes, 2010
I loved the Bonzos: I’d been to see their show and they’d been in Magical Mystery Tour, in the strip scene at Raymond’s Revuebar. Viv Stanshall used to go to the clubs a lot, like I did, and we’d often meet all the guys late-night, chatting over a drink. He said that they really needed a single to establish them and I said, “Well what have you got? I’ve seen your act and you haven’t really got singles there.” Viv then asked if I’d produce them and I said “Yes, if you get something together.” So they sent a demo and I showed up at Chappell Studios one afternoon, talked to the engineer and got them a good sound, a bit of compression, a bit of this and that, and produced it. Within two or three hours they’d cut the track, ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’, which turned out to be their only hit. I said “Just put me down as anything” and Viv made up the name Apollo C Vermouth. A lot of people still don’t know that I produced that track – they say “What – you produced the Bonzos? Never!” And it was fun session. I still like Viv a lot, and I loved the radio show he did.
Paul McCartney – Interview with Club Sandwich, Spring 1992
I originally met Viv in the London club days, out and about on the town. We used to have drinks and a laugh together and he was a lovely, funny man. He was in The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, which I saw live on stage at the Saville Theatre a couple of times when Brian Epstein promoted shows there. They were very eccentric — sort of modern yet very old-fashioned — following on from bands like the Temperance Seven. Then I phoned Viv and asked if the Bonzos would be in Magical Mystery Tour with us. They did the scene with the stripper that we filmed in Paul Raymond’s Revuebar and I think they had a pretty good time, playing while the woman took off her clothes. So Viv became a very good friend and I used to visit him at his house — I remember that he had an aquarium with turtles, at which we used to sit and wonder! Then he asked me to produce their next single ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’, which I did at Chappell Studios. I went down there, met the guys, and Viv had a length of brightly-coloured plastic piping which made a noise when he swirled it around his head. That was to be his contribution. We chatted a while and then I produced the record. He suggested that I be credited as “Apollo C Vermouth”, which indeed I am, still, to this day. It turned out to be the Bonzos only hit, although hit singles is not what they were about anyway. I’ll always remember Viv and Keith Moon being a sort of double act, the two of them playing very, very posh English gentleman. They did have their crazy side, of course, but whenever I saw them together they were perfect gentlemen. They did a joint Radio 1 show, which I heard while driving up to Scotland and was the inspiration for Oobu Joobu. Over the following years Viv and I would see each other, on and off, at functions, but I gradually lost touch with him, so it was with particular sadness that I heard he had died. He was a wonderful man and he’ll be much missed.
Paul McCartney, 1995
From Writing on Music, March 13, 2016:
[…] As it happened, when the band went into the studio in autumn ’68 [sic – June/July instead?], Innes brought along a catchy ditty he had titled ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’. Innes’ inspiration for the song came from two sources. One was the “urban spaces” of post-war rebuilding in Manchester: “They call them ‘brownfield sites’ nowadays. I just thought ‘well, if there’s urban space, why isn’t there an urban spaceman?’” The other was the vacuous consumerism of ‘60s advertising: “shiny, smiley-faced people eating happy meals and things like this. And so the ‘Urban Spaceman’ was a composite of the sort of an ideal figure in an advert. He doesn’t exist in real life.” With a simple melody inspired by the wailing “na-na-na-na” siren of a passing ambulance, ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ was very different from the Bonzos’ usual wild pastiche of musical styles and ideas.
If the Bonzos had to have a single, ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ seemed a likely candidate. But the Bonzos’ attempts to record the song were hampered by Bron, whose idea of effective record producing was to keep a strict schedule. If the band tried to work on anything for more than three hours, Bron’s verdict was, “Right, that’s it, we’ve got to move on to the next track.” One night when Stanshall was out on the town with his friend Paul McCartney, he complained bitterly to McCartney about Bron’s draconian production methods – and McCartney responded by offering to produce ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’. The Bonzos accepted McCartney’s offer because, in Innes’ words, “that was the only way we were going to get Gerry off the control desk, to have somebody like Paul, who wasn’t known as a record producer, but he was known.”
When McCartney arrived at Chappell Studios, where the Bonzos were recording, he immediately sat down at the piano and played ‘Hey Jude’, which he’d just finished writing. This delighted the band, not only because they were likely the first audience ever to hear the song, but because they knew that such antics would greatly annoy the clock-watching Bron. McCartney then got the band to play through ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ several times, and went around and showed each musician a different way of playing their part that Innes says “made the whole thing take off”. The Bonzos played their own instruments on the record, but McCartney allowed them to keep his ukulele track on the final version of the song. While McCartney was practicing his strumming, Bron’s wife Lillian wandered by and asked, “What’s that you’ve got there, a poor man’s violin?” McCartney retorted, “No, it’s a rich man’s ukulele.”
After an eight-hour recording session, both McCartney and the Bonzos were satisfied with how ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ sounded. But the song still had to be mixed, and at that point the band’s recording budget was nearly exhausted. So engineer Gus Dudgeon sneaked into Decca Studios, where he used to work, and surreptitiously mixed ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’ during a break in a Moody Blues recording session. Drummer ‘Legs’ Larry Smith explained, “He was kind enough to note all the fader positions and reset them afterwards so the Moodies weren’t put out, or any the wiser.”
Innes told McCartney biographer Howard Sounes, “I’d like to go on record as saying that the record would have been nothing like [as successful] without Paul’s touch”. And with McCartney’s consent, the Bonzos took one final jibe at Bron’s push for commercial success. They demanded that the production of the single be credited to one Apollo C. Vermouth. […]
Fiona McQuarrie – From Natural Exuberance: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s “I’m the Urban Spaceman” | Writing on Music, March 13, 2016
The association with McCartney continued when he produced the Bonzos’ Top Five hit I’m the Urban Spaceman in 1968. Rodney [Slater, member of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band] reminisces about the experience of working with McCartney on that track. He was basically “in the control room suggesting things” and he just “got things done,” as The Beatles did when they had thought of something (though Rodney points out that they did have George Martin to help them). McCartney was “giving ideas” over one to two days, which was all the time he needed to produce the track, though he himself usually went into the studio for a week to two weeks at a time even then. When Viv suggested playing the garden hose on the record, McCartney said (Rodney does his best laidback Scouse) “Yeah, that’d be great, go for it.” The sound engineer found a way to make it work by putting a microphone in every corner of the room, and then Viv stood in the middle to whirl the hose round his head, and everybody ducked. Rodney explains that it was the same principle as the Wurlitzer effect in a Hammond organ: you couldn’t get the sound if you didn’t whirl the hose. Neil is quoted as feeling that the song only became a hit when it got out that the producer Apollo C. Vermouth was in fact a Beatle, and that it was too glossy and not chaotic enough for the Bonzos, so I take the opportunity to get Rodney’s reaction. He disagrees with both of Neil’s comments. The hit had got going long before McCartney’s identity was revealed, and it wasn’t too glossy —the band were deliberately aiming for something different, a better, harder product. The hit got the band “an awful lot of work” and contributed to the overload “that in the end just ground us down, and we couldn’t carry on.”
From Albion Magazine Online: Exploring Englishness – Interview with Rodney Slater of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
From Bonzo Dog Band- Neil Innes interview by Richie Unterberger, January 2001 – Interview with Neil Innes:
Was it difficult translating the Bonzos’ act and material into the studio when you began recording albums?
The problem was, in fact, Gerry Bron, who was our producer. After three hours, he said, “That’s it. We’ve got to move on to the next track.” It was because Gerry was like this, in fact, that’s how Paul McCartney ended up producing “Urban Spaceman.” Because the record company was saying, “well, what about a single? What about a single?” And we couldn’t care less. We were just still being silly art students. We didn’t feel that we were in the same business as everybody else. We didn’t have teenage fans or anything like that, we were just out for a good time.
So Viv was down the Speakeasy Club, I think, with Paul, talking generally, he used to hang out quite a bit. And Viv was complaining about the fact that Gerry was sort of, “Right, three hours of that, move on.” And he said, now we gotta go in and record this bloody single. So Paul said, “I’ll come and produce it if you like.” And that was perfect, because that was the only way we were going to get him off the control desk, to have somebody like Paul, who wasn’t known as a record producer, but he was known. So he came and produced that, and took eight hours.
Q: This is just for “Urban Spacemen”?
Neil Innes: One track, yeah. He produced it in the record session. But in fact Gus Dudgeon, who went on to produce Elton John, actually did the final mix.
But why it took eight hours, was because, you know, Paul’s used to sort of spending hours in the studio and hanging out. I remember it was quite funny, because he sat down on the piano and played “Hey Jude” all the way through. No one had heard it then. He’d only just written it. He said, I’ve just written this, and he played, sang “Hey Jude.” And of course, the people watching the clock were going absolutely apeshit. We did things like double-track the drums, and Viv wanted to blow his trumpet mouthpiece into a garden hose, with a plastic funnel on the end, whirling around his head. The engineer said, “I can’t record that.” Paul said, “Yeah, you can. Just put a microphone in each corner.” So that took 20 minutes. Anyway, it was a really good time. He played Viv’s ukelele, and Gerry’s wife Lillian came up to him at one point and said, “What’s that you’ve got there? A poor man’s violin?” And he said, “No, it’s a rich man’s ukelele.” It was just lots of cheek and banter going on.
Q: Was there any thought of using Paul as a producer again? Why didn’t he do anything else with you; was he too busy?
Neil Innes: He probably wasn’t [busy], actually. He probably would have loved to. But it didn’t cross our minds. All that crossed our minds was so we could annoy Gerry even more by sort of refusing to allow Paul’s name to go on the record. So we came up with the name Apollo C. Vermouth, and we kept it like that for a good four or five weeks. In fact, the single actually got up to about #17 without anybody knowing he’d had anything to do with it. But by then, the management snapped and leaked the story. Then it shot up to #5. But by then, it had sold over a quarter of a million records in the UK alone. You could sell records in those days. I mean in recent years, I think you’ve only got to sell thirty or forty thousand to get a #1. But I remember we sold nearly 18,000 records in one day. It’s extraordinary. Those were the days. It’s probably [why] so many gangsters got into record companies.
Interview with Neil Innes – From Bonzo Dog Band- Neil Innes interview by Richie Unterberger, January 2001
Written by Neil Innes
Recording
AlbumOfficially released on I'm The Urban Spaceman / Canyons Of Your Mind
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