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This is the new video from The Mint Chicks for their song I Can’t Stop Being Foolish – discovered via a tweet from Paul Capewell earlier today.

The song is so-so, but the video’s great (if necessary, watch it with the sound turned off). Robots, mousephones and rainbow-powered jet-owls. What’s not to like?

It occured to me rather simultaneously that this sort of surreal humour is often greatly appreciated by musicians.  One thinks immediately of Frank Zappa (most of his oeuvre could be classed as an extended audio-cartoon – check the film Baby Snakes his 20 minute mini-operas Greggery Peccary and Billy the Mountain), or even Spike Jones.

However, it was The Goons who took musical surreality to its illogical height.  The Ying Tong Song reached #3 in the UK pop charts in 1956 – quite an achievement for a sound experiment involving differential tape speed and extensive use of foley:

Music was always an integral part of The Goon Show, with regular interludes by Max Geldray and his Orchestra and the Ray Ellington Quartet. However many of the best pieces of humour in the stories themselves were also musical (or sonic, at least).

When needing to cover the sounds of a ransacking while searching for the dreaded Tuscan Salami, Hercules Grytpype-Thynne (played by Peter Sellers) famously pulled out his leather euphonium:

“GRYTPYPE-THYNNE: He’s gone, He’s gone. Quick. Rifle his desk, photograph the plans of the male salami, telephone the Kremlin and mind that bust of Queen Victoria.

MORIARTY:Right.

GRYTPYPE-THYNNE: Meanwhile I’ll play two quick choruses of “When I’m Cleaning Windows” on my leather euphonium just to cover any noise, now get going.

MORIARTY: Right.

[FX: Hammer blows, sawing, breaking glass etc over Moriarty's grunts and Grytpype-Thynne impersonating a leather euphonium].”

In a different episode, the Goons ran off to Daytona Beach to attempt a new land speed record in a fifty-tonne brass-bound Wurlitzer, with all the appropriate musical sound-effects, (and a few subtle “organ” jokes).

It’s possible that in this video-centric society that we live in today, the art of surreal musical comedy has been blunted or supplanted by other forms. But you can still download the Goons on mp3, and appreciate any number of intricate Looney Tunes soundtracks via YouTube…