Customer Reviews

Over at Rainbow's

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

What happened to the fascinating Peter Cook after Derek & Clives I, II, III & the video? While Dudley was swanning around Hollywood with women twice his size, Peter held the fort in Hampstead, England. He strolled, stumbled or gallivanted around to his neighbour George's house, where the eccentric guru George taped him in a variety of moods... laughing, slurred, razor-sharp, witty as sin, ludicrous, bored and plain glorious. It is said that the two CDs (an hour each) in this package are taken from countless years of conversation. Until we can hear the rest of it, 'Over At Rainbow's' will do very very nicely indeed. Because this really does feel like we are meeting the real Cook. It is a revelation. Who would have thought that the father of modern satire would have been sitting around claiming to be jewish, or phoning radio shows as a German and a Norwegian, or discussing exercise with a tramp (standing on his last legs), or rehearsing visits to a psychiatrist, or discussing Mickey Rooney's entrapment in a lift, Jane Russell's assault on Elizabeth Taylor's breasts, and whether bringing down the establishment would just mean "some other cu*ts coming round asking me for something for nothing".
These CDs encapsulate the story that followed Derek & Clive, which most know off by heart now. They resonate on many levels - being both funny and funny-peculiar, rather spooky, a massive piss-take of new-age religion and suprisingly touching.
Dudley Moore left Peter Cook when he most needed him. And - as we hear here - Cook struggled through in the most philosophical, mystical, polite and hysterical way.
I will give this four stars rather than five stars only because Peter is sporting a moustache on the cover.

There is nothing in the canon of recorded sound that is remotely like it. Nothing more revealing. Nothing, in some ways, more ridiculous: a kind of contemporary version of Boswell's life of Dr Johnson in hi-fi, with the tape machine acting as the silent and uncritical scribe.
...The indisputable highlight is a long and extraordinary Pinteresque episode, 'The Comic, the Mystic and the Tramp'. it involves George, Peter and a hungry bum called John, a.k.a. Bronco. 'The Comic, the Mystic and the Tramp' is a unique masterpiece of improvised, unintentional theatre: there should be a name for this new art form - TAPE (Theatre Accidentally performed Electronically) posisbly, or Reel Life.
An enterprising director should transcribe it and put it on the stage. it really is that good.
The similarity with Pinter is not, come to think of it, entirely accidental. Cook and Pinter both closely observed and wrote distinctively about isolated people, mainly men, who create their own and often impenetrable worlds. Indeed, the links between Cook and Pinter are numerous and some anorak researcher might find it worth his while. The best tracks on Derek & Clive albums are when these particular kind of men are speaking, men who live beyond feeling. 'Over At Rainbow's' echoes much of this and is a triumph. the fact that George Weiss led the daft and slightly murky Rainbow party is not important. That he had a tape machine on twenty-four hours a day, expecting to pick up messages from higher beings, is. And it did pick up messages from at least one higher being: his friend and neighbour, one P. Cook.

This goes where comedy hasn't gone before - which is the best thing comedy can do. This is the comedy of the comedian in the company of his neighbours, the comedy of boredom, the comedy of zen and nez. I met Cook when I was a teenager and this record confirms and expands my thoughts on him. Sexy, sad, cool, funky.

I'd say this is the strangest record of the year. Peter Cook, now dead English satirist/world's funniest man/Dudley Moore's- other-three-quarters phones radio phone-in shows as a German budgie-breeder and a Norwegian fish-fiend in this almost mind-bending queer but funny double-CD package.
The english weep over and mourn and applaud Peter Cook. This record is a sideways look at the man; taped by his neighbour in the village of Hampstead in North London - seemingly full of eccentrics, fools, pseuds, nudes and mystical sorts.
If peter Cook was God, then this record is God's sacred trimmings.
A subtle jest a second.

These recordings reveal a very different Peter Cook to the one described in Harry Thompson's biography. Sober, coherent, relaxed, polite, caught up in his neighbour Rainbow George Weiss's attempts to launch a political and spiritual revolution, Peter converses with an array of characters frequenting George's home in the mid to late 1980s.
Very interesting; suitable for repeated listening, I loved this.

I worshiped Peter Cook. "Beyond The Fringe" changed my life. I followed those four men through their various and distinctive careers. I think I have all of their recorded works. Peter's last decades were not happy. These CDs are terribly sad. Peter moved next door to a man named George Weiss, who shared Peter's love of drugs and alcohol, but not his wit. But George thought himself the equal of Moore, Bennett, and Miller, and began taping their late-night ramblings. By this time Peter, the razor-thin, razor sharp wit was the size of Jabba the Hutt and about as coherent. One 25-minute cut documents the two of them heating up baked beans. Some crank phone calls to a radio station are the funniest things on this album, but they're not very inventive. When Peter got drunk with Dudley for "Derek & Clive" it was pretty funny. But more of the same, "Derek & Clive: Come Again" was terrible. If you value the wonderful work that Peter Cook left as his legacy, steer clear of this and buy the wonderful book, "Tragically I Was An Only Twin", the scripts of everything he wrote. He died sad and bitter, but you don't have to share that.

What a complete waste of money! I'm a big fan of Peter Cook but this is best avoided. A collection of poor quality recordings of random conversations that are so hard to follow that it is not even of minimal biographical interest, let alone being entertaining in any way - forget it!