“Actually bigger”: the true origin of the ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ Stonehenge scene
It’s hard to think that the world of stadium hard-rock had such little self-awareness playing underneath inflatable demons and shoddy pyrotechnics back in the day, but then a world before Spinal Tap feels like ancient history. The comic imaginings of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, the hilarious exploits of their fictitious hard rock trio saw them puncture the innate silliness of heavy metal at its MTV height—1984’s This Is Spinal Tap mockumentary, directed by Rob Reiner, uproariously borrowing a little from all of rock’s big names of the day’s on-stage accidents or green room disasters.
They could also play, touring the world in character and notably performing at 2009’s Glastonbury Festival and Wembley’s Live Earth concert. The concept was conceived during McKean and Guest’s college days in 1968 but officially debuted ten years later as a pilot of the TV sketch comedy show The TV Show. Metal had become ever-ripe for satirising across the 1970s, swelling to a bursting point of absurdity by the time production was underway early in the following decade.
One such band that had veered into arena pomp excess was the Brummie outfit that started it all. Dropping a string of essential bluesy warlock metal across the 1970s, Black Sabbath‘s original frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, just about had an eighth LP, 1978’s Never Say Die!, in him before embarking on a road to solo stardom. Recruiting Rainbow’s Ronnie James Dio for two records, by 1983, Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan had stepped behind the mic to front the critically maligned but fan-affectionate Born Again.
Pushed by infamous band manager and father to Sharon Osbourne, Don Arden, the Born Again Tour was filled with disaster-filled stunts such as dry ice obscuring Gillan’s floor-level lyric sheet, plus campy theatrics involving a little person dressed as the satanic baby from Born Again’s atrocious cover to druids wandering the stage. Sounding familiar? Serving as the centrepiece of their nightly plastic black magic was one little Salisbury landmark that graced the stage like a mystical hazard.
“I mean, it is a huge show, really, but the actual show, production-wise, is ginormous,” guitarist Tony Iommi told Steve Newton in 1984. “And we have actually cut some of it down. We did take out with us, first, to America, we took out a full rig of the Stonehenge, but the columns that we were using were too big. They were gigantic things. I mean, they are actually bigger than the Stonehenge itself. And so we had to cut them down ’cause the people behind the stage couldn’t see. So we had to, we’ve removed the big columns and used the small setup, but even the small setup’s quite big, really.”
He wasn’t joking. While rehearsing in Birmingham NEC, the crew wheeled in gargantuan Stonehenge props, 13ft high and made of fibreglass and wood, leaving the band gobsmacked. There’s little doubt that the towering triptychs triggered Spinal Taps’ inverse disaster of a tiny Stonehenge pitifully descending on the stage during their prog epic. Bassist Geezer Butler has gone on record saying he spoke to one of the movie’s associate scriptwriters about their brush with megalith mishaps.
Always enjoying a tongue in its cheek, This Is Spinal Tap never quite destroyed heavy metal’s cartoon theatre but found itself at home with a gang of spray-haired and spandex-ed hard rockers who welcomed the lampooning. While ‘Black Sabbath Mk III’ couldn’t have anticipated it, the Born Again Tour would prove the stuff of rock—and comedy—legend.
