Neil Innes performing in Watford in 1972MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES

As a promising child pianist learning Chopin and Liszt, Neil Innes felt the first stirrings of rebellion in his soul. “I began to question who I was working for,” he said of his adolescent self, “The answer was definitely not ‘me’.”

A lifetime of musical whimsy at the gentle expense of others would find its first expression several years later when Innes and a fellow art student Vivian Stanshall started performing in the canteen of the Royal College of Art, London, as the Bonzo Dog Dada Band (Doo Dah later replacing Dada because “no one had a clue what Dada meant”).

Innes once said that he could not decide whether to be a serious musician or a clown. In the burgeoning world of social satire…