Adelaide Guitar Festival: What do you get when you mix Spinal Tap with You Am I?
Question: What do you get when you mix Spinal Tap with You Am I? Answer: Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven. Or at the very least some magnificent chaos.
SA Weekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Weekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Few artists are lucky enough to be involved in a project that embeds itself into popular culture and carries its clout across generations. Harry Shearer has done it twice.
He’s the bedrock of the longest-running prime time show in television history in The Simpsons, voicing several of its most loved characters including Mr Burns, Ned Flanders, Principal Skinner and Otto.
And he’s Derek Albion Smalls, bass player for spoof British heavy metal outfit Spinal Tap, a band which continues to act as a cautionary tale for young aspiring musicians around the globe.
Alongside bandmates Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and David St Hubbins (Michael McKean), Smalls both paid homage to, and mercilessly mocked, ’80s stadium rock in the groundbreaking 1984 “mockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap.
Now, on the eve of his performance at the Adelaide Guitar Festival alongside Aussie rockers You Am I in a Spinal Tap tribute called This Time It’s Personal, Shearer reveals what many rock fans have suspected all along: This Is Spinal Tap is bordering on a true story. “The thing about that movie is that we didn’t have to make up a lot of stuff at all,” Shearer says from his LA home, where the weather phenomenon known as June Gloom has sucked the warmth out of summer.
“We’d all been around the rock ’n’ roll scene in one way or another, and we had friends that were in it even deeper. We just took stories that we knew and played with them a little bit, but everything in there is based on something that happened to us or someone that we know.”
And it’s not that hard to believe if you look at the over-the-top behaviour of the new wave of British heavy metal bands that Shearer and his pals were parodying.
In fact, Shearer says, many musos have since commented that they have found themselves in very similar circumstances to those portrayed in Spinal Tap.
“One time we had an inkling of what other bands thought was when Michael and I, in the late ’80s, we’re invited to represent Tap at a metal charity recording,” Shearer recalls.
“I think it was the lead singer of Iron Maiden (Bruce Dickinson) who came up and said (here Shearer adopts on OTT English accent) ‘we were in San Diego last night and we couldn’t find our way to the bloody stage either!’. I hope I haven’t broken any rules by quoting him. But yes, we do get feedback from time to time.”
Famously, This Is Spinal Tap had no written dialogue, with each actor reacting in character to the scene being shot. It’s a method that produced lines that live on to this day, including, “You can’t really dust for vomit” when the band is talking about the death of one of their drummers and “These go to 11” when Nigel is showing off his amps.
Shearer is quick to correct my assertion that the film was ad libbed. “No, not ad libbed but improvised,” he says.
“Ad libbing is about talking, and improvising is about listening. So you’re in a scene and you’re listening to what everybody is doing and reacting as your character would react. But it’s not talking first, it’s listening first.
“All of the movie was improvised except for two lines – that was the toast that Sir Denis Eton-Hogg makes to us at the beginning of our American tour. Sir Denis didn’t improvise.”
Shearer says it’s a satisfying feeling to still have 18-year-old band members telling him they use This Is Spinal Tap as a kind of reverse instruction manual.
“They come up to me and say, ‘Hey, my band learned what not to do by watching your movie’,” he laughs.
“But yeah, of course it’s satisfying. You do so much work that disappears without a trace, or is forgotten five years later.”
Which brings us to the other big chunk of this former child actor’s repertoire, the bit he refers to as his “day job”. The bit, if entertainment media reports can be believed, nets him a cool $US300,000 an episode. The Simpsons.
Shearer has been there since the start, and along with the aforementioned characters he also voices Waylon Smithers, Reverend Lovejoy, Lenny Leonard and Scratchy.
He no longer voices Dr Julius Hibbert after the show’s producers decided to no longer have white actors providing voices for black characters.
“Generally we record a show a week,” Shearer says. “It’s a couple of hours of recording, which I do by myself now. I no longer do it with the other actors as it just doesn’t fit into my schedule.”
And the favourite after all these years? Well, Mr Burns obviously.
“I think most people in comedy would say give me a villain to do because that’s the most fun, so I think I like Mr Burns the best,” Shearer says. “He’s pure evil.”
The 78-year-old actor and his Welsh singer-songwriter wife Judith Owen split their time between Santa Monica, London and New Orleans, a city Shearer has been outspoken in defending since Hurricane Katrina devastated the region in 2005.
He produced a film – The Big Uneasy – which looked at the mismanagement of the city’s flood levee systems and the attempts to cover up this mismanagement in the aftermath of the storm which saw more than 1800 Americans lose their lives.
“The real story of what happened in 2005 – the flood – was not told by the media here in the United States and isn’t widely known outside of the city,” Shearer says.
“There were two investigations and the conclusion was that it was the greatest man-made engineering catastrophe since Chernobyl.”
It was in New Orleans where Shearer and Owen decided to “hunker down” during Covid, watching the famously vibrant city adapt to the constantly changing restrictions.
“There’s a thing going around at the moment that Covid is over, but it’s wishful thinking,” he laughs. “But yes, we were in New Orleans for most of it. It was great because a lot of restaurants just moved outdoors and a lot of music happened at porch concerts. Judith played a show with a trombone player we know who has a nice front yard with a park across the street. The best bit was that the people who wanted to listen sat down the front and the people who wanted to talk sat down the back. I just wish venues could be more like that.”
Shearer’s hoping to see a little more of our own fine city on this trip, after admitting that he mainly saw “the block between our hotel and the theatre” during his first trip here with Judith for Cabaret Fest in 2016.
As well as performing with You Am I, he’s also presenting a miniature film festival of some of his favourite movies – Spinal Tap, of course, along with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, space spoof Galaxy Quest and coming of age flick Licorice Pizza.
“Dr Strangelove is one of my favourite films of all times, a very funny film about nuclear war,” Shearer laughs.
“Licorice Pizza is a movie I saw last year that I really liked – it’s a weird love song to LA in the same way that Randy Newman’s I Love LA is a love song to LA, and Galaxy Quest is probably the funniest movie to come out of Hollywood in recent decades. It hit my funny bone hard.”
Shearer says he’s yet to rehearse This Time It’s Personal with You Am I, a situation he plans to rectify as soon as he lands in Sydney on his way to Adelaide.
There will certainly be elements of The Majesty of Tap, the Spinal Tap tribute show You Am I has played on and off for several years now, and Shearer hints that there will also be some footage of the original Tap live and even the debut of a new song.
You get the impression, though, that there might just be a fair bit of winging it too, going wherever the music takes them (although if nobody gets stuck inside a giant chrysalis and there’s not at least one comically small model of Stonehenge then there could be walk outs).
That’s the majesty of rock, the fantasy of roll, and at the end of the day, though, as long as all the amps go all the way to 11 then everyone will go home happy.
■ This Time It’s Personal, with Harry Shearer and You Am I, Saturday, July 23, Her Majesty’s Theatre, adelaideguitarfestival.com.au
Which team won Super Bowl LIX?
What is Australia’s tallest bird? In which country is the kimono regarded as national clothing? Take our weekly Brainwaves quiz — 50 mind-bending general knowledge questions.
‘So stressed I want to die’: One in three parents at breaking point
News Corp Great Australian Parent Survey 2025 results are in – and the country’s parents share the crushing reality of modern childrearing.