It is an odd business, reaching a stage in life when people you know are having books written about them. One moment they are there, a part (large or small) of your life, the next they are gone and being being memorialised between the covers of a book.
It first happened to me last year when my old pal Roger Deakin was the subject of a biography by Patrick Barkham. This autumn it is the turn of Ronald Blythe and Neil Innes.
Neither of them were close friends – I was on the outer fringe of each of their wide circle of acquaintances – and yet reading about them now, seeing their lives pinned down on the page, has felt oddly personal and, through no fault of the two biographers, melancholy.
Ronnie and Neil: both East Anglians, they were to outward appearances utterly dissimilar in every other way. One avoided long-term relationships; the other was married for 53 years. One tripped about the world, living a life of music, comedy and fun; the other lived his long life within 50 miles of where he had been born. One was solitary, thoughtful and reserved: the other social and extrovert.
Yet reading the recently-published biographies of Neil Innes and Ronnie Blythe, I couldn’t help hearing echoes of one life in the other. They were both generous-spirited, in person and in their work. They were both, in very different ways, thinkers. Above all, they both led lives which were built around the stories they wrote and sang.
I knew Ronnie Blythe over the last couple of decades of his long life. I chaired events with him and occasionally visited him at Bottengoms, the wonderful and slightly mysterious house in the Stour Valley left to him by the artists John and Christine Nash. He was a quietly-spoken man, a fascinating talker with a wide knowledge of books and nature and East Anglian history. Although he was a man of God, a lay preacher in his local diocese, he had an endearing love of gossip and a skittish sense of humour.
He was much loved in his local community, several of whom – known as ‘the dear ones’, according to the new biography – helped care for him as he grew older. The last time I visited him, I noticed how many people called on him during the day. On a previous visit, I had made the mistake of asking him whether his solitary life ever made him feel lonely. ‘A chance would be a fine thing,’ he said briskly. Now I saw what he meant.
Blythe Spirit, Ian Collins’ deft, sensitive and superbly researched biography, reveals that almost all of what appeared on the surface of Ronnie’s life concealed a more complex truth. He was meticulously well-spoken, with the air of an old-fashioned academic or the distinguished curator of a museum, and yet he was born the son of a farm worker and, later, gravedigger. According to Ian Collins, the young Ronnie had started to lose his broad Suffolk accent when he first heard the clipped tones of the BBC Home Service.
Whether subliminally or deliberately, the teenage Ronnie set about changing his voice… Above anything and anyone, he desired the classless anonymity of the observer, recorder and artist. Paradoxically, to be taken seriously, he needed to emulate the sounds of the educated elite.
There were other paradoxes. To someone who first met him, he would seem a mild and gentle soul, but he was temperamentally and in his clear-eyed literary ambition, as hard as nails. Everything in his life was secondary to being a writer. He was quietly at ease with his sexuality as a gay man – indeed, he was pretty adventurous in that area during his life – but he always remained alone.
There was a price to pay, the biography suggests. Collins tells the haunting story of how his friend, the writer Julia Blackburn, went to see him after her ‘almost daughter’Tanya had died, hoping for some words of wise and gentle comfort. According to Julia, he told her ‘with a sort of determined finality that he had never loved anyone enough to feel the pain of loss and therefore there was not much he could say.’
As its title indicated, there is not a hint of that writerly detachment in Dip My Brain in Joy, the biography of Neil Innes. Written by Yvonne Innes, who married Neil in 1966, it is both the account of an extraordinary career in music and comedy and the story of an intense and almost entirely happy marriage. Neil lived a life built around writing songs and performing them from when he was at art college, becoming a key part of the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, providing the music – and appearing in – Monty Python’s Flying Circus, creating TV series like The Innes Book of Records and Rutland Weekend Television, out of which emerged the Rutles, a group set up with Eric Idle which spoofed the Beatles and in the process created songs that transcended parody.
What made his songs so memorable and different was the odd mixture of wisdom with a child-like joy and irreverence. He once said,
We are like Russian dolls. Inside each of us there is a baby, a toddler, a child, a teenager, a binge drinker and in my case a sex god and a pompous old git.
He loved jokes, the cornier and sillier the better. On one occasion after I had played a song at one of his parties, he looked at my bald head and touched his own. ‘Maybe we should put our heads together and make an arse of ourselves,’ he said.
As with Ronnie Blythe, his purity of purpose was not without cost. Yvonne’s account of their lives of together is punctuated by tales of financial misfortune and disaster. Time and again, when their joyous, swashbuckling lack of interest in business matters collided with the ruthless greed of record companies, or the incompetence of TV networks, or the over-optimism of investors, or the inexplicably unpleasant behaviour of Eric Idle, there could be only one outcome.
Through it all, Neil and Yvonne sailed blithely on, creating music, spreading laughter and enjoying their lives like the hippyish innocents they were. It’s fair to say that Neil’s Russian doll did not include a businessman.
Reading Blythe Spirit and Dip My Brain in Joy has made me glad that I knew these two very different East Anglians. Both decided at a young age that their lives would be dedicated to telling their tales in the way that suited them best and did precisely that, without compromise or apology, until they day they died.
They were two glorious, heroic lives.
