The second Spinal Tap rockumentary is a waste of your money if you buy a ticket, and a waste of your time if you see it for free. This dispiriting and dismal comedy of tribute will extract pained smiles from the Gen X cohort that memorized it on VHS as teenagers. Younger viewers who, absent anything fresher, have fallen back on their parents’ parodies will be reminded to try harder. Otherwise, this tapped-out tedium is not benign. It is symptomatic not just of the long twilight of the Boomers, but the way in which that dimming of their light leaves us on a darkling plain. If this is the best we’ve got, then it’s lights out.
By 1984, when This is Spinal Tap came out, rock music had already decayed from dreaming of new frontiers to shoring up against dissolution. The Beatles and the British Invasion had broken new ground in the West. Its heirs had stomped around their stadial turf for nearly two decades when This is Spinal Tap appeared. Their paths were hewn in rock. By the mid-1980s, their spandex was sagging, their perms were wilting, and their routines were tired.
Everyone was ready for the joke. Especially as the joke had already been made. The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, the first rock satire, came out in 1978. That it was made with George Harrison’s money suggested just who the joke was on. The music business is a calculated outrage. Of course the fans get insulted too.
The first Spinal Tap movie was late to the party. The second is late for its own funeral. Its director, the smug and smirking Rob Reiner, hasn’t made a passable film since the mid-1990s. If he were a driver, he’d be subjected to mandatory eye-testing.
David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel were childhood friends in Squatney, East London. They began in a Beat group, The Thamesmen, who sounded not unlike the early Rolling Stones or Yardbirds. In 1967, they formed Spinal Tap after meeting hirsute bassist Derek Smalls, then broke in America with the Scott Mackenzie-like “(Listen to the) Flower People.” Dedicated followers of musical fashion, Tap then followed their slightly more talented peers into psychedelic concept albums and the kind of soft-brained hard rock that clogged the airwaves through the 1970s and still, incredible as it now seems, had purchase on the cloth ears of American youth when Nirvana finally brought Punk home in 1991.
Never mind. Tap filled a much-needed gap in the musical world until 2009, when they broke up over non-musical differences. Spinal Tap II follows their reunion for a final show in New Orleans, which is where the music was born and where it now goes to die.
The same old faces are here. Their characters are older but the same. As in a sitcom, any real character development would disprove the concept that this is a closed circuit. The most that the format allows is the least of variations. Like Blur’s Alex James, Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) has retired to the country and sells artisanal cheese. Tufnel also sells vintage guitars and barters them for cheese by weight. He has a custom Union Jack-painted guitar like Noel Gallagher had in the 1990s. The custom bit is that the guitar’s body contains a secret panel for secreting cheese and a miniature grater. We are enjoined to laugh at these thin parings of wit.
David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) has washed up by the sea in California. He scratches a living by dubbing spooky noises onto true-crime podcasts and playing in a mariachi band. Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer), who always did hold things together, now runs the Museum of Glue in London, following the failure of his orchestral-metal project Hell Toupée. Rob Reiner returns as the simpleminded director-fan Marty DiBergi.
Ian Faith, the band’s cricket-bat wielding manager, is dead. He is succeeded by his daughter, as Sharon Osbourne succeeded the villainous Don Arden. Self-consciously overplayed by Kerry Godliman, she is called Hope Faith. Like Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell on The X Factor, Hope Faith is abetted by a mercenary publicist. He suffers from a condition called St. Cecilia’s Curse, which means he cannot hear music. This dim flicker from the lighthouse of humor would be funnier, were it that Osbourne and Cowell are more like the wreckers who used to set up false beacons in order to lure ships onto the rocks.
It’s not so much a joke as a plea for our indulgence. This is nothing if not apt, for the Tap trio are wizened like debauched monks. Of the core Tappists, Guest and Shearer are game, though Guest’s limp wisps of white hair and Shearer’s preposterous handlebar mustache do most of their mugging. But McKean doesn’t so much phone it in as occasionally text his displeasure. A flashback of McKean and Guest singing their early skiffle composition “All The Way Home” exposes how the rapid patter and understated physical sparks between McKean and Guest have declined into semaphores and shuffles. St. Hubbins resents Tufnel but gets over it. McKean just acts like he has an unwanted Guest.
The band’s 12th drummer is Didi Crockett. She looks like Miley Cyrus, who looks like a Disney publicist’s idea of a rock chick, who looks like Billy Idol, who always looked like a tabloid editor’s idea of Punk. The diminishing returns of the music business’s decline from deep immorality to shallow tedium are so coarse and corrupt that, despite Paul McCartney’s promise to the contrary, they’re no longer guaranteed to raise a smile.
McCartney drives this home in a cameo in which he joins Tap in the rehearsal studio. It is mildly diverting to watch Sir Paul letting us know that he too is in on the joke as he condescends to follow his master’s voices by busking the chords and harmonies of Tap’s Summer-of-Love rip-off “Cups and Cakes.” When McCartney sings along to a piccolo outro pinched from “Penny Lane,” it’s like watching a fox chewing off its own foot to escape the trap.
Macca never did know when to stop. Sticking his nose into songwriting, he tries to correct David St. Hubbins’s insertion of a jazzy 6/8 instrumental passage into the 4/4 rocker they are working on. It’s the kind of trick that Lennon and McCartney slipped into Beatles songs. Britain’s second-best band first slipped the bonds of 4/4 by inserting 2/4 bars in “All My Loving,” but no one seemed to mind, because the backbeat was still there. Later, Lennon was especially prone to 7/4 bars (see “All You Need Is Love” and “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”). Probably because he had lost count of how much acid he had taken.
John Coltrane’s 6/8 vamps inspired some of the tasteless virtuosity of Jeff Beck, the model for Nigel Tufnel. More importantly, they supplied the vibe of Derek Smalls’s Santana-style foray “Jazz Odyssey.” The more trivial your interest in rock, and the greater your recall of This Is Spinal Tap, the greater you will appreciate the cultish arcana of Spinal Tap II, and the more your genuine affection will be exploited by what hardened Tapheads will recognize as a puppet show.
“Is this a joke?” Nigel Tufnel asked all those years ago when David St. Hubbins’s hippie girlfriend Jeanine suggests that the band rebrand by dressing as their astrological symbols. It is a joke, but only if you got the joke the first time round. If you didn’t you will merely be baffled. If you did you will find it hollow and a bit sad. Worst of all, you may, as I did, find it boring. I wanted to enjoy it. I almost laughed aloud several times. The most I could manage was a snort of recognition when Elton John jammed on “Flower People.”
All the conventions of the reunion show are followed in a search for satire, and all the cherished gags of This is Spinal Tap are violated in a search for laughs. There are no new songs here. That is just lazy. The songs that stay the same are worse. The ending isn’t so much underpowered as immobile. Elton John emerges from the stage floor for “Stonehenge,” and it all goes wrong. The original “Stonehenge” is one of the funniest sequences in musical comedy, a perfect inflation and puncturing of rock’s worst pretensions. The redo here is the feeblest of homages. Even Nigel Tufnel’s introductory recitation (“In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived an ancient race of people: the Druids”) has lost its rhythm.
The original Tap was ironic. Its sequel is ironic about the original. The Greeks didn’t have a term for the vitiating and indigestible effects of double irony—they could have called it deuterironeia—but the Swedes do. It’s kaka på kaka: piling “cake upon cake.” Tap’s second drummer, Eric “Stumpy Joe” Childs, knew how that feels. It’s like choking on someone else’s vomit.
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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