Galaxie 500: Cheese and Onions (1991)

When Frank Zappa asked "does humour belong in music?" you knew he was being rhetorical. He certainly poked fun, ridiculed and parodied -- all long before Spinal Tap and the Rutles.

The Rutles -- the brainchild of Monty Python's Eric Idle and with music by Neil Innes -- were a brilliant Beatles parody: the casting was excellent and the songs sailed just close enough to Beatles various styles that after a while it was hard to remember if I'm In Love and the exceptional Cheese and Onions were Rutles or Beatles songs.

And so inevitably there was a tribute album to the Rutles, a band that never existed.

In the early Nineties  whole bunch of Shimmy Disc artists and fellow travellers --  Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, Daniel Johnston, Bongwater, Shonen Knife, Galaxie 500 and others -- delivered Rutles Highway Revisited, in a cover which actually parodied the Rolling Stones' Their Satantic Majesties Request (left).

Go figure!

Neil Innes didn't much rate it (he liked tunes, these people had stripped them out) and it isn't the best in many places, especially when Peter Stampfel and The Bottlecaps try to improve on the original of Ouch! by adding new lyrics.

Still, here's Galaxie 500 paying tribute to a band that never was but delivered this classic slice of Lennon-styled psychedelic rock.

For more one-off or unusual songs with an interesting backstory see From the Vaults.