ANOTHER MONTY PYTHON RECORD - Monty Python's Flying Circus

YEAR: 1971

LABEL: Charisma

TRACK LISTING: Apologies, Spanish Inquisition, Gumby Theatre, Contradicting People, The Architect Sketch, Spanish Inquisition Part 2, Royal Festival Hall Concert, The Pirahna Brothers, The Death of Mary Queen of Scots, Penguin, Spam, Comfy Chair, Sound Quiz, Be A Great Actor, Theatre Critic, The Judges, Stake Your Claim, Lifeboat (Still No Sign of Land), The Undertaker Sketch

IMPRESSIONS: This is the first "real" Monty Python album (i.e. recorded in a studio) and the first one I ever got my hands on via a high school friend named Chris (no, not Cheeks). Chris and I both were huge fans of MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS when the local PBS station began running the show (and the movies) in the late 1970s. He was the first one who had the actual record and I taped his copy for myself. That was only a stop-gap measure since I very quickly went out and bought all the records at Sound Odyssey in the Cherry Hill Mall (remember Sound Odyssey with the purple shag carpet on the walls?!?!?!) and all the books at The Book End in the Moorestown Mall. The album is jam-packed with more classic Python sketches than you can shake a penguin at; it also makes wonderful use of the stereo medium -- regardless of the Pythons' unhappy recording experiences.

MY FAVOURITE TRACKS: Spanish Inquisition, The Architect Sketch, The Pirahna Brothers, The Death of Mary Queen of Scots, Penguin, Spam, Lifeboat, The Undertaker Sketch

FACT SHEET: ANOTHER MONTY PYTHON RECORD is the second album by Monty Python's Flying Circus (if one counts the BBC Radio LP of sketches from the TV programme performed in front of a live audience). The album cover is a defaced cover of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 in D Major performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dietriech Walther. Many of the sketches are studio recreations of television sketches but there are some which are original to the album. The actual recording of the album was not a very rewarding one, at least according to Terry Jones, who sites the fact that they had a hippy engineer who was so out of it most of the time that they couldn't locate anything on the tapes. The recording studio also was apparently the size of a garden shed.