Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Innes

A shrug disguised as a credit line, Neil Innes's "But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs" is the kind of sentence that quietly detonates in a culture addicted to mythmaking. The "but mostly" does two jobs at once: it downshifts expectation (no grand narrative, no tortured genius origin story) and it sets a boundary against the retrospective urge to turn collaborations into feuds, hierarchies, or branding exercises.

Innes, whose career thrived on playful intelligence and genre pastiche (Bonzo Dog, Python orbit, the Rutles), understood that audiences want a single auteur to pin the magic on. This line refuses that hunger. It's not coy; it's corrective. The repetition of "wrote songs" is almost comically flat, like a deadpan punchline delivered with accountant calm. That's the point: it strips away the romance of artistic labor and replaces it with the unglamorous truth that work is work, and credit is often simpler than gossip wants it to be.

The mention of "Viv" (Vivian Stanshall, his fellow Bonzo) carries a quiet act of respect. Two names, same verb. No ranking, no ownership. The subtext reads like a preemptive defense against the posthumous rewrite machine: before anyone turns a band into a story of rivalry, remember the boring, beautiful core - people making things side by side. Innes's modesty lands less as self-effacement than as an ethics of collaboration, delivered with the dryness of someone who knows how quickly legends become lies.