Search - Peter Cook :: Over at Rainbow's

The Moustache & The Beard

hulucass | Bedfordshire, England | 01/17/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"What happened to the fascinating Peter Cook after Derek & Clives I, II, III & the video? While Dudley was swanning around Hollywood with women twice his size, Peter held the fort in Hampstead, England. He strolled, stumbled or gallivanted around to his neighbour George's house, where the eccentric guru George taped him in a variety of moods... laughing, slurred, razor-sharp, witty as sin, ludicrous, bored and plain glorious. It is said that the two CDs (an hour each) in this package are taken from countless years of conversation. Until we can hear the rest of it, 'Over At Rainbow's' will do very very nicely indeed. Because this really does feel like we are meeting the real Cook. It is a revelation. Who would have thought that the father of modern satire would have been sitting around claiming to be jewish, or phoning radio shows as a German and a Norwegian, or discussing exercise with a tramp (standing on his last legs), or rehearsing visits to a psychiatrist, or discussing Mickey Rooney's entrapment in a lift, Jane Russell's assault on Elizabeth Taylor's breasts, and whether bringing down the establishment would just mean "some other cu*ts coming round asking me for something for nothing".
These CDs encapsulate the story that followed Derek & Clive, which most know off by heart now. They resonate on many levels - being both funny and funny-peculiar, rather spooky, a massive piss-take of new-age religion and suprisingly touching.
Dudley Moore left Peter Cook when he most needed him. And - as we hear here - Cook struggled through in the most philosophical, mystical, polite and hysterical way.
I will give this four stars rather than five stars only because Peter is sporting a moustache on the cover."

Nothing more revealing

Barry | London | 09/25/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There is nothing in the canon of recorded sound that is remotely like it. Nothing more revealing. Nothing, in some ways, more ridiculous: a kind of contemporary version of Boswell's life of Dr Johnson in hi-fi, with the tape machine acting as the silent and uncritical scribe.
...The indisputable highlight is a long and extraordinary Pinteresque episode, 'The Comic, the Mystic and the Tramp'. it involves George, Peter and a hungry bum called John, a.k.a. Bronco. 'The Comic, the Mystic and the Tramp' is a unique masterpiece of improvised, unintentional theatre: there should be a name for this new art form - TAPE (Theatre Accidentally performed Electronically) posisbly, or Reel Life.
An enterprising director should transcribe it and put it on the stage. it really is that good.
The similarity with Pinter is not, come to think of it, entirely accidental. Cook and Pinter both closely observed and wrote distinctively about isolated people, mainly men, who create their own and often impenetrable worlds. Indeed, the links between Cook and Pinter are numerous and some anorak researcher might find it worth his while. The best tracks on Derek & Clive albums are when these particular kind of men are speaking, men who live beyond feeling. 'Over At Rainbow's' echoes much of this and is a triumph. the fact that George Weiss led the daft and slightly murky Rainbow party is not important. That he had a tape machine on twenty-four hours a day, expecting to pick up messages from higher beings, is. And it did pick up messages from at least one higher being: his friend and neighbour, one P. Cook."

"The fish & you are all I can bear"

Argento Kettle | Bunty, Alabama | 11/03/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I'd say this is the strangest record of the year. Peter Cook, now dead English satirist/world's funniest man/Dudley Moore's- other-three-quarters phones radio phone-in shows as a German budgie-breeder and a Norwegian fish-fiend in this almost mind-bending queer but funny double-CD package.
The english weep over and mourn and applaud Peter Cook. This record is a sideways look at the man; taped by his neighbour in the village of Hampstead in North London - seemingly full of eccentrics, fools, pseuds, nudes and mystical sorts.
If peter Cook was God, then this record is God's sacred trimmings.
A subtle jest a second."