The Stutter Rap How  Grand Master Jelly Tot made it to No.4 in the UK charts  without even trying Amongst the many and varied things that in did in my  workaholic zenith year of 1987 was my flirtation with  alternative comedy. Sure, I worked as a session player  playing on many albums including Sam Brown's 'Stop.' I was  producing Tom Robinson and an ex Housemartin. I also spent  time in L. A and made an album in New York as member of a  band called The Lodge. While these were all interesting,  learning experiences and things that would help my  reputation as a serious musician, I couldn't resist the urge  to justify the cost of my annual fee to Equity (the Actors  Union). Simon Brint, whose name you might recognise as  composer of countless T.V themes and series, also plays the  ageing, deaf keyboard player in the deliberately appalling  Raw Sex. Stalwarts of the alternative scene and regular  contributors to French and Saunders. Well, if you've ever  seen them with a third disgusting Italian character called  Eduardo, who Duanne (played by Rowland Rivron) claims to  have met on an 18-30 holiday, then you will now know who my  secret alter ego is. In '87 we did a Theatre show at the  Kings Head in Islington and subsequently a three-week stint  at The Edinburgh Festival. It was there, as a fellow comedian, that I got to know a  lot of performers personally who were doing the circuit at  the time. One such man was the very funny Tony Hawks. He had  a three piece group called Morris Minor and The Majors. They  had appeared on Saturday Night Live to great accailm and  their stage act was both very funny and inventive. They had  this dance/rap piss take song called 'The Stutter Rap' in  their set and Virgin thought that this just might be a  novelty hit. As someone they knew who actually produced  records but also dabbled in comedy, they thought I might be  just the man for the job of producing their record. Ok then  the secrets out. It was me; I produced 'The Stutter Rap.' I  knew at the time that this record would either sink without  trace or become an enormous hit. As I said I was trying to  establish my self as a serious contender and didn't want my  name associated with such a potentially In a cheesy novelty.  So I did it under a pseudonym. In honour of Jellybean  Benitez I became Grand Master Jellytot. Morris Minor & The Majors At the first meeting with the record company I suggested  that rather than emulate the early '80's feel of the demo  that we make it a pastiche of the 'Beasty Boys'. It was a  novelty record after all and the 'Beasty Boys' were  everywhere at the time. They were as irritatingly ubiquitous  as the sodding 'Spice Girls' are now. We were given a fairly  small budget and proceeded to record the single at a small,  cheap studio in London's Wardour Street. In the early hours  of the morning, as we mixed the final thing down, I became  aware that the 1/2 inch machine that we were mixing down to  wasn't lined up properly. You could hear the distortion when  we played the final mix back. It was late, we were tired and  I thought that we would just mix the thing else where at a  later date. Back at the record company for a meeting about how to  proceed from here. They suggested, or demanded really, that  the next step would be to get some hip D.J to do a cutting  edge 12" remix for the clubs. I protested this was a stupid  novelty record. If anyone one was going to buy this it would  largely be 11 year olds. Surely no self-respecting club goer  would want to buy a kids comedy record regardless of who  remixed it. Shep Pettibone's reworking of Benny Hill's  'Ernie' for instance. I don't think so. I was told that I  knew nothing about marketing and that this was how they  worked records nowadays. So a week later some 19 year old  with a base ball cap on the wrong way round goes off with  the multi track to add some street cred to a song with the  alternative title of 'No Sleep Till Bed Time'. Grand Master Jelly Tot Morris Minor & The Majors Back to the record company again to hear the end result.  Our re-mixing genius had added string pads and some  percussion. There was also a fat synth bass line. What this  means is, of course, that it no longer sounded like the  Beasty Boys at all. What it sounded like now was a bland  disco record. He also missed the point of all the audio  jokes. For example the line where they sing 'We open our  mouth and nothing comes out' was originally followed by a  silent gap. Our hero inserted a percussion break. At the  beginning of verse 2 I put some scratching. It had become  hip at the time to scratch a record then let it go to show  which record you were actually scratching. Inevitably it was  a James Brown track. So we scratched the theme tune to  'Neighbours' (We were later sued by Tony Hatch for doing so,  but that's another story) The hip D.J missed the point of this joke so replaced  'Neighbours' with, you guessed it, James Brown. In the  middle section there is an appalling, tasteless guitar solo  in the wrong key. After a while one of the band is heard to  shoot the guitar player and you hear him crash to the floor.  Once again the re-mix specialist missed the point. The  guitar solo remained but the sound effects of the gunshot  and crash were gone. As if all this were not enough the  vocals were mixed so quietly you just couldn't make them out  which, quite frankly, made the entire thing completely  pointless. Much to my surprise even the record company had  to agree that this had been a waste of time. No one  mentioned that the re-mix had cost twice as much as I had  spent on recording the damn thing in the first place. I was  asked if I could re do the 7" version due to the distortion  on the original. So, some days later, I found myself in another studio  preparing to mix the song again. Standard procedure when  mixing someone else's track is to make a copy of the multi  track and work on the copy. Much to my horror, however, the  hip young thing that the record company had employed hadn't  bothered with such detail. Instead he had wiped of seven  tracks off the original. This is one of the most  unprofessional things I had ever heard of and it meant that  I would have to re record most of the song from scratch. I  called the record company and told them that I had, had  enough of this and withdrew my services. I went to America for a couple of months and on my return I  called Tony to see what had happened and to apologise for my  behaviour. Tony told me that they had been left with no  alternative but to release the distorted rough mix that we  had done all those months ago in London. 'So what happened  to it?' I asked. 'It's at number 12' he said. In the next  two weeks it went as high as number 4, made number 1 in  Australia and sold over 200,000 copies in England alone.  Grand master Jelly Tot now has a silver disc on his wall. Grand Master Jelly Tot