Spinal Tap Bring Stonehenge to Glastonbury
(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 London’s Wembley Arena on Tuesday. The band’s magnum opus remains Stonehenge, their mystical hard rock mini-opera tribute to Salisbury’s 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 Geographic’s TV special Stonehenge: Decoded in 2008. He looks like he’s 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.
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Ha ha! Stonehenge was an amplifier - brilliant. What are the acoustics like inside the circle? Can anyone who was at the summer solstice party confirm this theory?
Sadly enough, the large amount of people crammed together lowered the accoustic qualities of Stonehenge. But I think I saw a jack to plug-in the guitars! ;)
Ah, that was possibly it's downfall - the acoustic set-up looked good on paper and probably sounded fine in the soundcheck, but it all fell apart when the first Glastonbury Festival crowd turned up. 'What a waste of time and protein', they probably thought, 'we'd be better off in a field'.
Actually, that must be quite interesting, how 'accoustics' was worked into buildings in the past. I'm sure the Roman Emperors weren't to first to realise their speeches had more effect when the rethoric sounded nice. Greece must have figured that out also, and probably the egyptians... . Maybe the pyramids were giant amps too? ;)
Seeing that Stonehenge and classic rock were forever linked via Spinal Tap, a bunch of (no doubt) shaggy-haired old Atlantans have decided to name their alternative rock radio station 'Stonehenge'. Though, as you'll see from their homepage, the music they play is admirable, there's a decided lack of lip service paid to Avebury, or even Nigel Tufnel. Poor form.
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