As the 19th edition of Bristol’s very own silent, visual and classic comedy festival, Slapstick, returns this month, Melissa Blease sits down with Mike “McGear” McCartney of satirical performance group The Scaffold to discuss how their unique blend of comedy, music and poetry has bought them back together 60 years later…
Ah, Bristol; I’ve gigged there before. We did TV show called Now, years ago, hosting with a bloke called Michael Palin who we hadn’t heard of at the time. The Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Carly Simon – we were all on the same bill. We finished the show, hit the pub, and hit the scrumpy; Michael said, go easy, order it in halves! But we went to the bar and ordered a few pints. And that was it! We got a taste for scrumpy. All I remember about that night is, much later on that evening, somebody saying, “I’m a policeman – what have we been up to?”. I played the place that used to be called Colston Hall too, in a one-man show called Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll. Story of my life? Exactly! I ended up lying in a taxi looking up at the ceiling after that one. Fond memories indeed!”
Heck, I could be talking to Jimmy Page, or even Keith Richards. But this is the ostensibly mild-mannered, subtly witty Mike McCartney (aka Mike McGear) talking: the Liverpool-loyal former apprentice hairdresser, hugely successful photographer, long-term member of comedy, poetry and music trio The Scaffold… and younger brother of Paul (“Our Kid”) McCartney who, despite growing up with the force of nature that his next-one-down was destined to become, managed to forge a reasonably successful music biz career of his own.
You probably need to be of a certain vintage to recall The Scaffold in their glory days circa 1968-1974, during which time the band notched up three Top 10 singles and recorded four enduringly popular albums. But if your rib-tickle tastes take you in the direction of the Pythons, The Mighty Boosh or, perhaps, even The Young Ones, The Scaffold’s very own brand of peculiar performance art that takes us on a trip into slightly surreal, psychedelic, vintage counter-culture territories are set to take you on a voyage of mind-bending discovery.
The meaning of the lyrics to Thank U Very Much, for example (the band’s first hit single, back in 1967) originally caused much speculation, not least of all due to Mike saying, at the time of the single’s release, that the song was all about “drugs, women, sex and depravity”. Their number one hit Lily the Pink, meanwhile – which, in 1968, sold over one million copies, earning The Scaffold a gold disc – was a ‘sanitised’ version of a bawdy, late Victorian-era drinking song celebrating the life of Lydia Pinkham, the inventor of Pinkham’s (mysterious) Medicinal Compound, which claimed to cure all manner of, erm, feminine disorders.
“Ah, Lily – we’ll always love Lily”, says Mike. “But I suppose Thank U Very Much will always be my favourite Scaffold song, because I wrote it! It was actually just all about me thanking Our Kid for a posh Nikon camera that he bought me way back in the day, which really got my career in photography going. But it somehow became – can you believe this! – proof that The Scaffold were satirists who took the p*ss out of the establishment, and the government, and the royal family, and people who were born privileged. It was fascinating for me, having written a song that simply said thank you to my brother, watching it turn something else for other people. Yeah, I said that thing about drugs, and women, and all that – but I was having a laugh! Come to the Slapstick Festival and you might hear the full story…”
Indeed, Mike and his Scaffold-ing mates (that’ll be poet Roger McGough – yes, the Roger McGough) and John (latterly, Tiswas superstar) Gorman – will no doubt be sharing all manner of fascinating stories, secrets and, perhaps, scandals in Bristol when guest presenter Harry Hill hosts a celebration of the band’s work at St George’s Bristol on Saturday 18 February (part of this year’s fabulous Slapstick Festival line-up). Mike promises sketches, songs, poems and rare footage too, alongside a screening of their then-controversial short film Plod (1972). The Scaffold, reunited after all these years! But Mike: has the band ever not been united?
“Oh God yes, of course!” he laughs. “Even the best good friends fall out sometimes. Gorman originally suggested getting back together, and I said, I’m up for that! Let’s just take it nice and easy, read scripts together like in the old days, see how we go. Roger wasn’t sure at first, but he asked me what I thought. I said firstly, the three remaining original members of the Scaffold are still alive – that’s quite a feat. Secondly, those three original members are finally talking to each other again! You know, with so many groups from that time, half of them are dead and half of them can’t stand each other. But we formed 60 years ago this year, and we’re all still here, and that’s quite the benchmark. That premise alone is a good start for a celebration! So we both said yes.”
So how does it feel, being a Scaffolder again? “It’s been fascinating for us because we haven’t done it in so many years, and the whole concept of getting together again has been a very interesting process. We did a show at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool (which is where we began) last year, and it went really well. But, you know, expect anything and everything from this one!”
Mike’s also looking forward to the special event screening of the original footage of The Scaffold at the Talk of the Town that acts as a curtain-raiser to their St George’s reunion gig at the former Bristol Imax Cinema (Bristol Aquarium) on Friday 17 February. “There we are in this huge, iconic venue wearing our smart white suits, me singing a song on my own, and John doing sketches, and Roger doing a very serious poem – us, doing our thing,” he says. And – ever the busy man – he’s staying in Bristol for Sunday 19 February too, when he’ll be in conversation with fellow Liverpudlian Paul McGann prior to a screening of The Beatles/Richard Lester’s 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night at the Bristol Old Vic. At this point, I can’t resist asking the obvious question: Mike, will Your Kid be in the audience for any – or all! – of the Bristol gigs? “My big brother?” Mike laughs. “God knows; he’s a big brother, he does what he wants. Is he even in this country? Not only do I never know where he is – he doesn’t know where he is either!”.
But right here, right now, we’re on Scaffold territory. “The whole thing about The Scaffold, then and now, is that The Scaffold don’t know what they’re going to do, when they do it – and that’s the joy of us, really,” says Mike. “The three members are three unique human beings, and together we’re one unique thing.” And as long as they all step away from Bristol’s infamous scrumpy this time around, we’ll be thanking them very much for doing that unique thing right on our doorstep.
The Scaffold Live at Talk of the Town (1969) is taking place on 17 February at the former Bristol Imax Cinema, Bristol Aquarium and The Scaffold: A Celebration with special guest host, Harry Hill, will follow on 18 February at St George’s Bristol. Book your tickets at: slapstick.org.uk
