It trades on former glories and gags far too much but it's good to see the band back together for this hit and miss and melancholic sequel
With the formerly warring Oasis doing the resurrection shuffle, the time is right to revisit mock rock act Spinal Tap. They ascended to immortality over forty years ago with a movie that still stands, strong as Stonehenge, as a monument to mockumentary (or rockumentary, if you will) triple platinum comedy gold.
The fictional pomp rockers, made up of actors and seriously polished musicians Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean, pretty much wrote the book on rock band satire. The first movie, 1984’s This is Spinal Tap, gave us such delights as guitar amps that went up to 11, a cricket bat wielding band manager, and the band’s alarming habit of losing drummers in bizarre and fatal accidents.
In this very patchy sequel, we follow the Tap as they reunite and prepare for a one-off comeback show in New Orleans. The gang is all here, including the redoubtable Marty DiBergi (Rob Reiner) who returns as our interviewer and guide, along with brief appearances by Fran Drescher as Bobbi Flekman, the band’s one-time artist relations manager for Polymer Records, and Paul Shaffer as former hype man Artie Fufkin.
DiBergi’s first task is to track down the veteran rockers, who haven’t played together in fifteen years. That wizard of cosmic gormlessness Derek Smalls (Shearer) now runs a glue museum in Tooting Beck and his former bandmates, Nigel Tufnel (Guest) and David St. Hubbins (McKean) are engaged in similarly eccentric employment.
Older but still none the wiser, the Tap return to a very different world to reclaim their place in the pantheon of rock but strangely this new movie makes few concessions to the realities of the modern music industry or how these now wizened dinosaurs slot into the rock heritage circuit.
The band’s bumptious manager Ian Faith has now gone to the great gig in the sky and his daughter Faith (Kerry Godliman) is now hustling for the band against competition from a spineless music impresario called Simon Howler (see what they did there?) who initially encourages the band to die on stage for the publicity.
The rampant tongue in cheek sexism of the first movie is dialled down considerably but there are some pretty decent sight gags and gnomic dialogue from the old rockers that keep the very short running time ticking over nicely.
Given the band’s legendary status among real rock stars who have long nodded in acknowledgement at the Tap’s egos and excesses, there are also some very big name cameos.
Paul McCartney drops by a rehearsal session to jam - just in time to witness David and Nigel bickering (maybe a lot like Macca and George Harrison in Let it Be and, decades later, in the Beatles Anthology) and Questlove, Chad Smith of The Red Chili Peppers and Lars Ulrich also appear (via Zoom albeit) as part of the band’s endless search for a new drummer. I wonder if Larry Mullen Jr was asked to make his own cameo.
However, those star turns are nothing compared to the arrival of one Elton John, a man more than acquainted with ego and rock `n’ roll excess, as an old Tap fan who enthusiastically joins the band on stage for a truly memorable performance of their enduring classic Stonehenge.
You can pretty much tell what’s coming next but it is a joy to have them back - Derek Smalls still owns the most vacant expression in rock, mock or otherwise; St Hubbins remains as convinced as ever of his own genius despite mounting evidence of the opposite; and Tufnell mystic idiot savant act is still priceless.
It trades far too much on former glories and gags that have long since passed into mock rock mythology but don’t forget - it’s such a fine line between stupid, and uh…clever.
