In memory of Bill Oddie, whose death was announced today, this is a note ALWYN TURNER wrote after interviewing him in 1996, following by Oddie’s own account of recording ‘The Funky Gibbon’.

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A little guy with a funny beard who’s irredeemably funky, a multi-instrumentalist who wrote, played and sang a string of hit singles, an international sex symbol. It could be Prince, but actually it’s Bill Oddie. (Apart from the sex symbol bit.)

In a parallel universe at this very moment VH-1 is dedicating a whole month of broadcasting to Bill Oddie, one of the great survivors of 1960s rock and the man who brought the jazz-funk fusions of Miles Davis and Parliament to a mass audience. Meanwhile, in the real world, videos of the best episodes of The Goodies are available from all good retailers.

On the TV series, the Goodies were a three-piece, but when it came to the records Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden took a back seat and let Bill indulge his love and mastery of pop music. The result was a series of hits in 1974/75 that started with ‘The Inbetweenies’, a piss-take of glam, and included ‘Nappy Love’, a piss-take of teen-pop. Most successful of all was ‘The Funky Gibbon’, a record that hinges on a fantastic clavichord part by Dave Macrae (ex-Matching Mole) and that would – if it had been an instrumental – now be remembered as a classic bit of Britfunk.

These weren’t Bill’s first recordings. In the 60s he’d made some demos produced by George Martin and featuring the cream of the era’s session-players, musicians like Mitch Mitchell and John Paul Jones. He claims to be relieved that none of this was successful and that he found a more promising career in comedy. Certainly it was more fruitful – he wrote all the songs for the very wonderful radio series I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, including a re-work of ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’ in the style of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, and ‘On Ilkley Moor Ba’tat’ in the style of Joe Cocker’s ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. The latter was subsequently recorded by Bill and most of The Grease Band (including Sunny) and released on John Peel’s Dandelion label.

Oddie reckons he wrote more than a hundred songs for ISIRTA, but he had to wait for The Goodies’ more mainstream appeal before he made the charts. ‘People used to say: frustrated pop star,’ he remembers, as he sits in a music room lined with his own silver discs and with posters of his musical hero, Prince. ‘I’d say, “What’s frustrated about it? I’ve had more bloody hits than you have.” I certainly wasn’t frustrated at all.’

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You won’t believe the musical pretensions that went on in my head. I listened to a lot of jazz and a lot of funk, and that period of the ’70s for me was fantastic – it was really the era when fusion started.

The people I liked were Sly Stone and early Parliament, and I listened to what was happening in jazz at the time, when Miles Davis was coming up with some very interesting hybrid music. With ‘Funky Gibbon’, I started off – it’s almost unbelievable considering how stupid the song is – trying to get the feel of a Miles Davis track, I can’t remember which, probably just after Bitches Brew and that sort of era: some really choppy Miles Davis-type rhythm, again with a Sly Stone influence.

We had marvellous musicians on those sessions, but they couldn’t get it. They knew what I was sort of trying to do, but I probably listened to that sort of thing more than they did, and it was driving us nuts, so we sent the drummer and the bass-player and the guitarist home. And I had a keyboard player called Dave Macrae, who’d played with Matching Mole and Robert Wyatt and people like that – governor player – and he started playing some clavinet, very Stevie Wonder-type feel to it, and I said, ‘That’s fine; could you do a synth-bass on it?’

And then I literally started whacking the top of the grand piano. So the actual rhythm-track of ‘The Funky Gibbon’ has only got me and Dave on it – he plays clavinet and synth-bass and we miked up the top of the piano. Then we got the horn section of Gonzales playing a Memphis Horns-type thing. It was lovely for me to be able to use musicians I liked and try to reproduce sounds which I also listened to. And then put the stupid song over the top of it. The idea that all that effort went into ‘The Funky Gibbon’!

It always amused me that no one could play ‘The Funky Gibbon’ except Dave Macrae. It’s actually really hard, a really busy clavinet part. When you did Top of the Pops in those days, you were supposed to use the orchestra, and I thought: they’ll never play it. So I said to Dave the first time we did it: ‘Would you mind coming to the studio because we’re gonna have trouble with this?’ And we dropped the music down in front of the Top of the Pops guy and he went: ‘H-h-hah, I can’t do this.’ And I said: ‘That’s alright, I know a man who can.’

It sounds like Parliament on a bad day, or something like that [laughs], that kind of thing. I think subconsciously people feel it – this was always my theory about it, I thought: I want the music to sound good or authentic, whatever style it happens to be in.