Sometimes the comic song transcends mere mirth and strikes out at the sublime. I Can't Go Back to Savoury Now is such a number. It is the acme of John Shuttleworth's art, that of locating poetry in the unglamorous trivia of life (at the back of the fridge; in the carvery at the conference centre) then adding tinny grooves on a Yamaha organ. Listening to the song, I feel sad at its vista of low-horizoned lives, touched by Shuttleworth's innocence of anyone's standards but his own, and happy to inhabit a world where fretting over a treacle sponge is considered (albeit by a fictional character) worth singing about.
This classic ditty climaxes the latest gig on Shuttleworth's Minor Tour - cue jokes about griffins, gorgons and Cerberus. ("Three heads? That's far too many for a dog, Ken.") But the heroic realm is not Shuttleworth's territory, and he is soon back in Sheffield, hymning the advent of the fleece ("Goodbye fair cagoule/ You've been made to look a fool"), or setting regional road trips to bossanova beats: "My progress was hampered/ By roadworks at Stamford." It is easy comedy, perhaps, all this provincial and domestic bathos. But as delivered by Shuttleworth (aka Graham Fellows) it is all affection and no sneer, and goes down as warmly as a Horlicks and a fig roll.
There are lulls, including a weak video featuring a later Fellows creation, the concreter Dave Tordoff, hunting for the Beast of Goole Moor. A third character, Newcastle-under-Lyme's foremost musicologist Brian Appleton, is more successful; his Morrissey spoof My Turn to be Poorly is terrific. Alter egos in tow, Shuttleworth dons a bovine mask and offers up an evening of mild, but not minor, pleasures. On the contrary: I would say this minotaur has every right to feel bullish.
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