The Rutles – LP

beatlesblogger.com
The Rutles – LP
by beatlesblogger
The Rutles – LP
Posted on March 29, 2015

As their website says:

The Rutles are a legend. A living legend. A legend that will live long after other living legends have died. This is the semi-legendary story of the Prefab Four who made the sixties what they are today!

For such a huge cultural phenomenon the Beatles have attracted surprisingly few parodies and send-ups over the years. That is until The Rutles came along…..

We’ve just scored a nice vinyl copy of their 1978 LP The Rutles:







Created by Eric Idle and Neil Innes for British television, The Rutles first appeared in 1975 as a sketch on the BBC TV comedy series called Rutland Weekend Television. The sketch presented a mini-documentary about the 1960s band “The Rutles”, and featured Innes singing “I Must Be In Love”, a pastiche of a 1964 Lennon-McCartney tune.

The Rutles gained more fame after their 1978 mockumentary television film, All You Need Is Cash (in which George Harrison actually appears). The Rutles LP is the soundtrack album from that film and it contains 14 of the film’s 20 songs.

The Rutles comes with a gatefold cover and pasted inside is a lavish 16-page, full colour book containing text and images detailing the history and (imaginary) releases of the band. Here’s a selection:









And there’s an inner sleeve containing more band parodies, too:



What we have here is the US pressing. Released on the Warner Brothers label in 1978.

If you’d like a taste of what The Rutles are about:





The cover to the American CD reissue of The Rutles. From left to right: Dirk McQuickly, Barry Wom, Stig O'Hara, and Ron Nasty.