Peter
Cook and Dudley Moore’s relentlessly filthy 70s albums anticipated
punk, and influenced both alternative comedy and a generation of smutty
teenagers. But is this re-release just too offensive for modern ears?
Dudley Moore, left, and Peter Cook promote the first Derek and Clive album in 1976.
Photograph: Estate of Keith Morris/Redferns
What’s
the worst job you ever had? Ask the right (wrong) person and their eyes
will light up with mischief and horrible recognition. They have found a
kindred spirit. “I had the terrible job,” they will tell you, suddenly
slipping into one of those whining, droning, ultra-boring, ultra-cockney
accents that you no longer hear in real life, “of retrieving lobsters
from up Jayne Mansfield’s arsehole.”
They may go on to inform you of Lady Vera, who can tell your future
from your farts, or their schooldays when Sir would get “jolly batey”
with them, or the time they earned a crust collecting Winston
Churchill’s bogeys, one of which was so huge it stood in for the Titanic
(“There was no such THING as the Ti-fucking-tanic!”). They’ll probably
be in their 40s and they won’t be able to control themselves laughing.
These are the men – and yes, it’s usually men – who were exposed to the
comedy albums of Derek and Clive at an impressionable age. And they’re
about to go overboard again, for all of this unfathomably filthy
material by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is re-released this week in a box set, A Right Pair of C****: The Complete F****** Derek and Clive.
It is a (vile) body of work that stands alone in the annals of
comedy. Derek and Clive are juvenile, relentless, cheerfully disgusting
and achingly funny, but their unmatched nihilism stares so deeply into
the abyss that they’re almost unbearable to listen to for long
stretches. In the witterings of two toilet attendants, you can hear the
old head-to-head Pete and Dud sketches – the ones that won Cook and
Moore fame and affection on their 1960s BBC2 series Not Only ... But
Also – curdling into a thing of genuine darkness.
Even their fans will admit that the Derek and Clive stuff – three
largely improvised spoken-word albums recorded between 1973 and 1978 –
was truly obscene, a litany of turd jokes, masturbation gags,
splattering fart sound effects and liberal use of the C-word for which
the term “toilet humour” seems pitifully inadequate. At their worst, as
on the ugly second album, Derek and Clive Come Again, the act was a
formless, cruel mess and a reflection of the duo’s increasingly toxic
relationship. Both were drinking heavily. Cook, deep into alcoholism and
fearing to gaze upon his own decline, increasingly took out his
frustrations on Moore. At their best, though, they’re a deep dive into
British scatology and – paradoxically – a breath of fresh air. They’re
the guiltiest guilty pleasure available.
In New Zealand in 1971. Photograph: The Sydney Morning Herald/Fairfax Media via Getty Images
Which raises the question of how they’ll be received in today’s climate. Bluntly, there isn’t enough #problematic
in the world to cover Derek and Clive. On Come Again, Moore sings about
his mother sucking his penis. On the Sir sketch from the bleak third
album, Ad Nauseam (it came with a free sick bag), he plays an excitable
and uncomprehending schoolboy relating the time one of the masters
sexually abused him.
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Not
horrified enough? Try Cook laconically saying: “I’ve raped people ...
but always in good faith.” Or how about the infamous Soul Time sketch,
in which Moore plays exuberant R&B piano while singing: “I’m a
nigger and I fucked a white chick”? It won’t get you very far to point
out that the victims of paedophilia, rape or racism aren’t the butts of
these jokes. The targets, insofar as there are any in Derek and Clive’s
world, are your uptight bourgeois sensibilities.
“I consider myself incredibly prudish and very right on,” says
comedian Iszi Lawrence, a Derek and Clive fan since her teens, who
recalls getting into trouble for singing their Dutch Bitch song at the
school piano. “I’m very nearly a social justice warrior myself,” she
admits. “But the things that make me really cackle are the most wrong
and fucked up. Derek and Clive is supposed to be offensive – if
it doesn’t sicken you, it’s failed. Listening to it is not going to
turn you into a horrible sexist misogynist rapist. It’s comedy, and I
refuse to take comedy that seriously.”
The roots of Derek and Clive lay in Cook and Moore’s complex and
increasingly strained relationship during the early 70s. Cook’s problem
drinking and collapsing home life fed a resentment towards Moore, the
untroubled partner without whom he couldn’t work. This would worsen as
Moore struck out on his own and, later, began to make headway in
Hollywood.
The outwardly cold and aloof Peter Cook
was in fact a sensitive man, easily hurt. His heavy drinking, initially
a way to cope with his separation from his children but soon a pursuit
in itself, meant that he was often hopelessly drunk onstage during Pete
and Dud’s tours. As the late BBC comedy producer Harry Thompson relates
in his masterful Peter Cook: A Biography, the old warm double act
degenerated into a cruel new dynamic whereby Cook would torment Moore
for his own amusement.
Pete and Dud, the ‘old warm double act’. Photograph: Alan Messer/REX Shutterstock
Bored during a New York residency in 1973, Cook suggested they try
improvising some sketches in a recording studio, purely for their own
entertainment. Perhaps they could take the dirtier, unrecorded end of
their ad libbed conversations even further. Cook began the recording, in
Bell Sound Studios, with words from an old sketch he’d done around the
Private Eye office: “I’ll tell you the worst job I ever had ...” Enter
Jayne Mansfield and the lobsters, and new personas far removed from
TV-friendly Pete and Dud. They were now the seedy toilet attendants
Derek (Moore) and Clive (Cook).
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In
following sessions more bravura filth flowed, including This Bloke Came
Up to Me – Derek and Clive repeating one particular insult in a variety
of inflections – and the absolutely horrible Winkie Wanky Woo, in which
Moore plays a hideous, laryngectomal pervert luring the well-heeled
Cook into acts of gross indecency. It was utterly unbroadcastable, but
never intended for release anyway.
“This is what people need to understand about Derek and Clive,” says
comedian Mitch Benn, of Radio 4’s Now Show. “Originally, none of it was
intended to be heard by anyone. They were just doing it for their own
nihilistic, cathartic reasons. To me, the original Pete and Dud stuff
from TV is funnier but there’s something undeniable about Derek and
Clive. This is comedy that’s absolutely liberated from any constraints –
even from the constraint of an audience. You can’t call it offensive
because they never actually intended anyone to listen to it.”
Cook, however, soon lost interest in this new avenue, too. As the New
York show became an American tour, he fell deeper into drink and pills.
By the time this increasingly fraught and miserable experience ended,
Moore was adamant that the partnership was over, a decision Cook would
long harbour as a betrayal.
But studio engineers had kept the Derek and Clive tape. It found its
way into New York’s music underground, as part of a bootleg that also
featured the infamous Troggs Tapes – the hirsute Andover band arguing in
the studio (“Just fucking play it ... you big pranny!”) – and oddments
such as Orson Welles auditioning for the role of a frozen pea. Soon
bands including the Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin had
acquired copies and word began to reach Cook and Moore of their new
currency with the rock elite, who were always in need of lowbrow
entertainment to enliven the tedium of touring. By 1976, cassette copies
were, ironically enough, on sale in Private Eye’s classified section.
Cook, who had been becalmed and increasingly depressed since he split
with Moore, saw an opportunity. Island Records agreed to release the
tapes, plus some extras, as Derek and Clive (Live), this a last-minute
change from the planned title: Derek and Clive (Dead).
To their amazement the album became a worldwide hit, outselling any
previous Pete and Dud LP and shifting more than 100,000 copies in the
UK. Its forbidden qualities doubtless helped sales – radio stations
everywhere had no choice but to ban it – and the warning on the cover
that it should not be played to children was cordially ignored. No fewer
than four police forces reported it to the DPP for obscenity. The two
comics were once again the focus of attention. Although Moore had vowed
never to work with “that man” again, reluctantly he rejoined Cook to
promote the album and they begin writing together again.
There was something prophetic in Derek and Clive (Live), too. Though
the duo had recorded their skits in 1973, the album chimed with the
dirty minded, Uncle Disgusting aspect of punk rock. Derek and Clive’s
cottaging sketches, Jamie Reid’s homoerotic Cowboys T-shirt, Malcolm
McLaren’s rubber fixation, the strange similarity of Cook and John
Lydon’s affectless, nasal voices ... they all signalled a move to the
seedy in pop’s shared unconsciousness. Derek and Clive were not just
perverted, they were prescient.
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“Derek
and Clive anticipated the punk sensibility and the later alternative
comedy thing, too,” says Benn. “There’s a purity to that sort of
extremism that you can see in the Sex Pistols but also in acts like Rik
Mayall and Ade Edmondson as the Dangerous Brothers – of relentlessly
saying and doing everything you’re not supposed to.”
There would be two sequel albums but Derek and Clive proved to be the
end of Cook and Moore’s partnership. Cook had become too erratic and
Moore’s Hollywood career was on the verge of taking off with 10 and
Arthur. “This was the final insult for Peter Cook,” says Benn. “He
thought he might be able to make it as a leading man and who gets there
instead? His short-arsed mate.”
The disintegration of the relationship can be seen up close in the
1978 film Derek and Clive Get the Horn, which shows the fractious
recording of their final album Ad Nauseam. Though Moore is clearly
trying to leave, Cook can’t resist tormenting him. “It’s really
uncomfortable but still really funny,” says Lawrence. “It’s like
watching psychological S&M porn with two out-of-shape white blokes.”
Now the psychodrama is available again, from beginning to end. Will
Derek and Clive still resonate in the 21st century? Or are some things
just too inappropriately, offensively problematic? It remains to be
seen.
“I’m starting to have a real problem with the word ‘problematic’,”
fumes Benn. “It’s starting to sound like ‘un-American’. Complaining that
Derek and Clive is offensive is like complaining that porn is dirty.
“And anyway, even if people hate it, what are they going to do?” he wonders. “Dig them up?”
• A Right Pair of C****: The Complete F****** Derek and Clive is out now on UMC/Spectrum.
