(Mostly) fictional English rock band Spinal Tap made a much-anticipated come back at the Glastonbury music festival last weekend, followed swiftly by their 25th anniversary One Night Only World Tour show at Londons Wembley Arena on Tuesday. The bands magnum opus remains Stonehenge, their mystical hard rock mini-opera tribute to Salisburys millennia-old Neolithic masterpiece, “Where a man’s a man, and the children dance to the pipes of pan.”
A performance of the song made for a memorable scene in the movie This Is Spinal Tap, featuring midgets dancing around – and threatening to crush – an 18 inch high megalith, after the notoriously soft-brained band confused inches with feet in their dimensions for the stage prop. “This tended to understate the hugeness of the object,” as singer David St. Hubbins rightly points out in the ensuing argument with their manager.
Guitarist Nigel this amp goes up to 11 Tufnel remains fascinated by the monument, and has a few, ahem, interesting theories to add to the debate about its origins, such as how many men it really took to build it (just one, “Duncan”) and what materials they used (wood and dinosaur saliva). Just don’t mention aliens…
You can hear them in the below interview Tufnel gave for National Geographics TV special Stonehenge: Decoded in 2008. He looks like hes suffered pretty badly from the ravages of the ages himself, but then rock stars will.
Stonehenge was an amplifier originally. Of course it was an amplifier.
Image by wonker.