There are two non-Monty Python members credited with writing on the show. One is Douglas Adams. The other is Neil Innes. That is some pretty illustrious company. While Carol Cleveland has long been known as the Sixth Python, Neil Innes was the seventh. He didn’t write most of the songs on the TV show—just a few of the lesser bits on some of the less-famous episodes—but he did write all the songs to Holy Grail. And he performed with them a lot, when they needed an actual musician to give the place tone.

Can you talk about him without talking about Monty Python? I mean, sure, if you don’t mind an enormous hole in the middle of your discussion. He did do Rutland Weekend Television and The Rutles with Eric Idle, and of course there was the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, whose one and only hit was produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth. It’s an impressive career, if an odd one. But from what I can tell, Neil Innes wasn’t interested in the conventional anyway.

Honestly, the thing of his I’m unfamiliar with that I’d like to seek out is Away With Words, a thirteen-episode series for Anglia Television where he went looking for the origins of well-known words and phrases. Because that sounds so exactly my thing, and it’s disappointing to me that I’m just learning about it now. Why was he the one hosting? I have no idea—maybe it was exactly his thing, too. He did write some books, over the years, and of course there are plenty of people who just find etymology fascinating. Because, you know, it is.

But okay, yes, when you picture him, you, too, probably picture the leader of Sir Robin’s minstrels. Or the page who gets crushed by the falling rabbit. Or, hey, the guitar player who plays the theme on the sketch about the most awful family in Britain. He did a lot of bit stuff, and I believe he led the chorus of Mounties in Live at the Hollywood Bowl, if not necessarily on the original episode. When you picture him, it’s hard not to picture him with the others, because he did so much work with various Pythons over the years.

I can’t say for sure that he’s the one who brought the Pythons and the Beatles together, because to be honest I don’t know. I’m not that obsessed with either Python history or Beatles history. But the connection is definitely there, and Innes was definitely part of that. To the extent that one of his non-Python performances of note is performing on the Concert for George, after George Harrison died. Remember that he was in Life of Brian, too, which was produced by George Harrison because he was interested in seeing the finished movie. So George was the eighth Beatle, I guess, after Neil?