Australian singles chart:
I’m the Urban Spaceman entered the Kent charts on 18 January 1969 and peaked at no 12. It was the #85 song on the Top 100 of 1969.
Songwriter:
Neil Innes
Producer:
Apollo C. Vermouth (alias of Paul McCartney)
Record label of Australian release:
Liberty
Wikipedia:
The Bonzos’ began to be featured more regularly on UK television and radio during 1968. The group achieved a Top 5 hit single with Neil Innes’ I’m the Urban Spaceman, produced by Paul McCartney and Gus Dudgeon under the collective pseudonym “Apollo C. Vermouth”.
Read more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzo_Dog_Doo-Dah_Band and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I’m_the_Urban_Spaceman
Writing on Music:
Neil Innes’ inspiration for the song came from two sources. One was the “urban spaces” of post-war rebuilding in Manchester: “They call them ‘brownfield sites’ nowadays. I just thought ‘well, if there’s urban space, why isn’t there an urban spaceman?’” The other was the vacuous consumerism of ‘60s advertising: “shiny, smiley-faced people eating happy meals and things like this. And so the ‘Urban Spaceman’ was a composite of the sort of an ideal figure in an advert. He doesn’t exist in real life.”
Read more: writingonmusic.com/2016/03/13/natural-exuberance-im-the-urban-spaceman/
This song is also on our Spotify playlist Bang a Gong – the 60s
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