insofox, who is a big Beatles fan and by extension a big Rutles fan, meeting up beforehand for a pizza; it's possible I shouldn't have said "Let's rut!" quite so loudly as we vacated our table, but then it was Soho.I wasn't quite sure what to expect, the Rutles being legendary in the literal sense, but it was a wonderful evening. As well as Innes, and Barry Wom on the drums (cue chants of "Bar-ry! Bar-ry!" whenever he did anything), we had a silverfox trio of guitarist, bassist and keyboardist, the last introduced as 'the Rutland Symphony Orchestra'.
"Let's go back to the Hamburger days and arbeit into some macht freis," said Innes, and the band launched into 'Goose Step Mama' to wild applause. They did...well, they did their entire back catalogue, pretty much, in two sets, concluding with a 'pretend last song' *wink wink* followed by an encore of 'Back in '64', which felt just as poignant as the nostalgic numbers it parodies.
Gosh but Neil Innes is talented, funny and personable, although I might stop short of 'so gorgeous', this being the verdict of the woman behind me in the interval queue for the ladies'. I actually fell slightly in love with the whole band, so adorably were they enjoying themselves, and wanted to take them all home with me, though when I admitted this to my fellow-queuers we concluded they might be a bit of a handful.
Saturday was mostly about getting various shopping and tidying tasks done, although I found time for a very pleasant coffee in Greenwich with
wardy who was treating himself to a night on the town, and Sunday was a rideout with the Modern Vespa gang for a diner brunch. Two of us ended up at Mickey's Diner on the A229 while the rest were waiting at Mickey's Rock Cafe on the A249, an easy mistake to make, but fortunately these were only fifteen minutes apart and we arrived in time to order our main course just as everyone else's pudding was arriving. 