Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Innes

A casual line like this is doing careful image management. Neil Innes - the dry-witted artisan of British musical comedy, forever adjacent to bigger spotlights (The Bonzo Dog Band, Rutles, Python) - frames his contribution in the gentlest possible key: "used to", "help", "sometimes". Every word downshifts the claim. He’s not announcing authorship; he’s describing a minor, almost domestic act of craft, the kind that happens in rehearsal rooms and kitchens, where songs are built from half-finished ideas and borrowed guitars.

The name-drop "Viv" (presumably Vivian Stanshall, the Bonzos' mercurial frontman) carries its own subtext. Innes is positioning himself as the steady musical hand behind a famously chaotic charisma. Chords and melodies are the bones of a song, the parts you can’t fake; by limiting his role to those fundamentals while refusing to inflate it, he performs a particular British virtue: self-deprecation as credibility. It’s modesty, but it’s also a quiet assertion of competence.

The intent feels twofold: to correct the record without starting a fight, and to honor a collaboration that wasn’t a neat ledger of credits. Innes suggests a world where "helping" is both generosity and survival strategy - a way to keep a brilliant, unruly project moving. The line invites you to hear the band as an ecosystem: one person ignites, another structures, and the work exists in the overlap.