Recorded March 1968 | Length 2:23 | |
B-side "The Canyons of Your Mind" (Stanshall) Released 11 October 1968 (UK)
18 December 1968 (US) Genre Comedy rock, psychedelic pop Label Liberty Records (UK)
Imperial Records (US) | ||
"I'm the Urban Spaceman" was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's most successful single, released in 1968. It reached #5 in the UK charts. The song was written by Neil Innes and produced by Paul McCartney and Gus Dudgeon under the pseudonym "Apollo C. Vermouth". The B-side was written by Vivian Stanshall. Innes won an Ivor Novello Award in 1968 for writing "I'm the Urban Spaceman".
A well-known staging of the song involves Innes performing solo while a female tap dancer performs an enthusiastic but apparently under-rehearsed routine around him. This skit originally appeared in a 1975 edition of Rutland Weekend Television, with Lyn Ashley as the dancer, and was more famously revived in the 1982 film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl with Carol Cleveland taking over the role.
At his live concert at the Fraser Theatre, Knaresborough, Yorkshire, Neil Innes stated that while growing up in 1960's Manchester England, his bedroom overlooked a building site which had been a previous bomb-site. The name given to such spaces at that time was "urban spaces". He imagined the kind of people who would live in these places and coined the phrase "urban spaceman", who, as such, did not exist. The song had nothing to do with drugs.
Leeds indie rock band Cud performed an extremely fast version (1:07 long) for a 1989 Peel Session. The recording appears on their albums Elvis Belt and BB Cudn't C.