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“I promise you, after I burn,” Derek Smalls growls on Spinal Tap’s new song, “that I’m gonna be rockin’/ In the urn.” Harry Shearer, who plays Smalls and wrote the song, says the idea was simple: “I just thought it was the silliest way to say, ‘We’re never gonna die. We’ll live forever.’ And to make it as stupidly literal as possible.”
That song aside, the long-delayed sequel to This is Spinal Tap, titled Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, in theaters today, leans hard into the band’s mortality. ”I think it was obvious to us that we’re not gonna pretend we’re in our forties,” says Shearer, 81. “We have to portray these guys as they would be now, and what naturally flows from that?”
Shearer looked back at the origins of Spinal Tap, discussed his future as a voice actor on The Simpsons, and more in our new interview.
How did you regain the rights to Spinal Tap, which led to this movie?
My wife and I have this dear friend, one of the most wonderful musicians and people that either of us know — Danny Thompson. Great upright bass player, played with Pentangle, the only upright bass player to play with the Who, just an amazing guy. One day he was talking to me about the first movie. He asked me about how the money thing was going and I was describing it as pretty dire. He said, “YYoushould talk to my friend Amanda [Harcourt].” He named a couple of major rockers that she had found missing funds for.
So I called her and engaged her to take on the case of the Spinal Tap monies. She did some investigating and said there’s something there. That began about a four-year process in the fascinating world of lawyers. It resulted in my getting all rights to Spinal Tap and Spinal Tap-associated stuff. I turned it over to a partnership of the four of us. A couple years later, Rob [Reiner] arranged to get a movie made and that’s where we are.
The assumption is that your work on The Simpsons provided you with the resources to pursue what must have been a costly venture to get these rights back.
I couldn’t have done it if I were poor. Nobody can undertake a legal action if they don’t have some way of financing it. Lawyers don’t come free, and good lawyers don’t come extra free.
Were you eager to do this sequel or did you have any trepidation about it?
The only trepidation I had was that I was having some health problems. I had long Covid. Underline the word “long.” I was concerned. It turned out I was OK enough to do the film. Then the only other trepidation is we’re stepping in the shadow or the footsteps of something that hit a remarkably lucky chord with a lot of people. It’s a beloved film, and I just worried about sequel fever — I’d always thought it would be a one-off.
I didn’t want people coming up to me for the rest of my life going, “Oh, did you guys have to do that? Did you really need the money that bad?” It took a lot of time with the four of us together just batting around ideas for it to become apparent that we could make something that could be in the same bin. Not at the same level. I don’t know, what level is that? But I think it’s good. We wouldn’t be embarrassed by it, nor would the audience.
What were the key moments in this story-cracking process that made you feel like, “Oh, this could work?”
It was just a day-to-day thing. We were gathering at my house here in Santa Monica for a long time, every day. Rob was putting stuff up on a board, putting notes on a big board. When we got enough of them, when we started filling that board, it became apparent: “Oh yeah, there’s something here.” Nothing more dramatic than that.
It’s a longer creative collaboration than almost anyone gets to have, when you look at the span of it.
What’s most amazing to me is that we are four very different people. We got together in the first place, really, by coincidence. Born out of the fact that Rob and I were doing this pilot for ABC, The T.V. Show, and it was a takeoff on everything that was on television at the time. One of the things we made fun of was a show that was on NBC Friday nights called Midnight Special, where Wolfman Jack, the DJ, introduced a band.
So we made up this band and Rob was Wolfman Jack. Michael [McKean] was invited in to that. Chris [Guest] was already a writer on the show at my suggestion. We were very different people with very different sensibilities and we clicked. The fact that it continues is amazing, but the fact that it started at all is to me much more amazing.
And Spinal Tap really began with that performance on that show.
The really vivid memory is we’re doing this song called “Rock and Roll Nightmare” on Midnight Special. Somewhere in there was woven in some pre-taped sequence that looked like what became music videos. We got on the ground lying horizontally, camera up on the ceiling, waiting for a smoke effect. Instead of smoke, drops of hot oil were coming down on us because the smoke machine wasn’t working right. So rather than kill the prop man, which I think is illegal in California, we just started talking about what else we could do with these characters. If the smoke machine had worked right, none of this would’ve happened.
How did the whole movie come to be improvised?
We sat down to write the first draft of the script, and we were in a hotel room in Beverly Hills and writing for about four or five days, and then looked at each other and went, “Nobody’s gonna be able to read this and make any sense of it. We should really make a 20-minute demo of the movie.” Because the idea of a mockumentary at that time had not been popularized. We thought that the only way a studio was gonna get this is if we show it to them in some miniature form. Boy were we wrong. They were so baffled. I’ve never seen blanker expressions on the faces of any human than on the faces of studio executives after the lights came up after the 20-minute demo.
I’ve watched that demo. It’s got the full essence of the thing.
All the stuff is in there. I don’t remember which studio this was, but the guy who was sitting there went, “What was that?” I said, “It would be a feature film.” He said, “Oh, music movies never make money.” And that was the end of that.
The other two guys obviously had a longer musical and personal relationship. How did that affect things for you as the third guy in the equation?
It lent itself to the story of these guys in the movie. I was the latecomer to the band. I’d been in an all-white ska band. I joined Tap when their original bass player left — Ronnie Pudding.
Some of the most fertile comedic moments were when Rob was interviewing the whole group. The drummer deaths, and Shit Sandwich — what do you remember about those? Because that’s the real heart of the thing, the four of you bouncing stuff back and forth.
I just remember the shoots going incredibly fast, and trying to keep up, because I was not a trained improviser. I had never been in an improv group. The comedy group that I was in, we wrote all our sketches. So that was really, in a way, my improv school, those scenes.
That’s a hell of a school.
Yeah, no kidding. So if there was any stress it was that. I knew the theory from being friends with people who had been in improv groups. The theory is it’s about listening, not about talking. I was focusing on listening and getting my cues if I was ever to speak from what had just been said as opposed to trying to dream up ideas.
Rob realized the emotional core was key to the project, and he suggested that not everyone was initially on board with that, because the comedy was the priority. How did you feel?
I was on the other end of the spectrum from that. The first cut of the film that was shown in a couple of screenings, the cards from the audience were pretty stunning. “How come the movie stopped being funny halfway through?” So we went back and an adjustment was made that I think really helped.
There are probably hours and hours of outtakes that are amazing.
Oh yeah. Some of them came out as DVD extras. And some of them should never be seen again. I think the ones that are really up to the level of the movie have been on DVD extras. Bruno Kirby and the car went on for 20 minutes. Fred Willard at the Air Force base could have lasted another hour. But I think all of us share this sense that there’s a comedy clock, and nobody wants to see a two-and-a-half-hour comedy. Nobody wants to make one and nobody wants to see one. You do 89 minutes and get outta there.
The movie was a critical success, but not necessarily a commercial one right away.
It actually sat forgotten for a little bit. That’s an artifact of the movie business, and the studio that released the film in the first place, because they couldn’t keep us in theaters. They didn’t have the muscle. The movie didn’t really click. It did OK business in theaters, but it didn’t really click until I think we became the first non-porn home video to make money. That encouraged us. We got together by accident at the Universal Amphitheater. We were all at the same gig, not by a plan, and started talking about, maybe we should do a tour. That’s really what was the first impetus for getting this to be a continuing project. That turned out to be a 26-city American shed tour [in 1992], outdoor venues, culminating with two nights at Royal Albert Hall in London.
You had to play bass in front of Paul McCartney in the new movie. Did that mess with your head?
Yeah. I really tried very hard to put that out of my mind. When he was acting, I was watching him, but when we were playing I just put him out of my mind. You have to. I’ve played bass in front of a lot of other bass players. When we were at Live Earth, there were 19 bass players on the stage. Robert Trujillo, my God, stole the show. But yeah, this was a different experience.
Without spoiling the actual ending, you guys do not die. So was there any thought of having any of the main characters die in the movie?
Not that I know of. If they were trying to kill me, I’m not aware of it.
None of you guys were really metal fans or even particularly cared much about metal per se.
To us it just seemed the farthest out in terms of how funny rock & roll could get. We all went to see a Judas Priest concert at Long Beach Arena. I think that was our first venture out to do some investigating, and we all came away just overpowered by the thing that hit our chest, the audio level. I think that was the cue for us to be England’s loudest band. Becausemetal was like a whole different volume level.
You had to go to a fetish store called the Pleasure Chest to find the harness you wore. Did you ever have a moment of self-consciousness wearing that stuff?
Yeah, the character erased that. The best part of that story is the wardrobe lady sent me to the Pleasure Chest by myself. So I walk into the Pleasure Chest and I say, “Excuse me, where would I find the harnesses?” And the guy’s answer literally is, “It’s right between the ball stretchers and the butt plugs.” And there’s a little postscript. The butt plugs package I saw had a caricature of a guy with a doctor’s reflector on his forehead —Doc Johnson’s butt plugs. Years later, my wife and I went to an auto show. There’s a mint old Corvette. The provenance indicator for the very fancy Corvette was from the Doc Johnson collection. It’s the Corvette that butt plugs paid for.
You almost parted ways with The Simpsons a few years ago. In fact, it confused the internet so much that a lot of people still think you left. Are you doing that for the foreseeable future? Or is there gonna become another crisis point?
First of all, I didn’t leave, nor did I threaten to leave. They threatened to carry on without me. It was a phone call from a lawyer saying, “If you don’t sign this contract by five o’clock Friday, you’re off the show.” All I did was republish that letter. So that’s where that came from. I’m signed up for another four years.
Do you still enjoy it?
It’s OK.
Other cast members have said they’re a little bit concerned about AI and what the show could do or threaten to do. How much is that on your mind?
I don’t worry too much about that. I was thinking about it the other day, and the thought occurred to me — OK, you can have a voice and you can have maybe a hundred different adjectives to describe the tone of voice or the expression of the emotion. Happy, sad, but that doesn’t begin to simulate the numbers of those possibilities that a live actor can have. So you can get a kind of halfway satisfactory performance with that technology. I don’t think you can get a really original and overpowering performance. Or overpoweringly funny performance, in the case of comedy.
You’ve said that you’re not necessarily a fan of a lot of the things that people say are influenced by Spinal Tap.
The best shining example of something that was influenced by us is the British version ofThe Office. There have been a lot of attempts to do other [fake] musical documentaries and I’m not sure that they’ve been all that good, and then it gets cheapened. And so you have TV shows now where they’re using that style of camera work, but there’s no sense of a documentary maker. Marty DiBergi is a character in the movie, and you know why he is filming. You know why it’s being shot this way. Now It’s just a technique, it’s, “Oh, let’s shoot that way.” But there’s no sense of story, of a documentary being made or why anybody would make it about these people or any of that. So it’s just now become a sort of a cliché.
It occurs to me that what Sacha Baron Cohen does would not exist without This is Spinal Tap.
I’m sorry to hear that.
