Rock’s Biggest Supergroup Hid a Monty Python Easter Egg in One of Their Songs

As fans are well aware, a number of famous rock stars contributed to Monty Python projects — Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Pink Floyd all helped to finance Monty Python and the Holy Grail, George Harrison mortgaged his home to pay for Life of Brian and, more recently, Mick Jagger introduced the troupe’s reunion show press conference while implicitly poking fun at his own career.

Despite this cozy relationship, few musicians took any direct artistic inspiration from the sketch comedians — although Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson did name-check Monty Python while attempting to explain the album Thick as a Brick.

But in 1988, one of the biggest rock supergroups in music history, The Traveling Wilburys, included more than one shout-out to the Pythons in their debut album.

The group’s stacked lineup included George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lynne and the legendary Roy Orbison. According to Orbison’s son, Roy Orbison Jr., as his dad was recording the first Traveling Wilburys album, John Cleese was filming A Fish Called Wanda and was renting a house just two doors down from the Orbison family. As a result, he got really into Monty Python and shared their work with his famous father, who quickly became a fan. 

According to The Traveling Wilburys: The Biography by Nick Thomas, it was a shared love of Python that bonded Orbison and Harrison; the two of them would “recite and perform complete skits from Monty Python’s Flying Circus” for the rest of the band. Lynne recalled how he, Dylan, Harrison and Petty were “giggling like a bunch of schoolgirls” at Orbison’s Python performances. 

Roy Orbison Jr. also noted that the Monty Python love seeped into the album as well. After driving with his dad to the Wilburys recording session, they listened to a Python album featuring a song in which they “beeped over the bad words, using a chicken cluck or by honking a horn.” Seemingly, he was referring to “I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song on the Radio,” which was sung by Eric Idle on Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album.

At the end of session, Orbison played his son some of their recordings from that day, and the finale of the Dylan-led tune “Dirty World” included a moment in which the lyrics “it’s a fucking dirty world” were conspicuously censored. 

“So that’s an idea I put in my dad’s brain,” Roy Orbison Jr. told REBEAT Magazine. “I claim a little bit of credit for that because it was my cassette and what I wanted to listen to, driving Roy on the way. Roy must have started doing that and they ended up throwing it in, from a Monty Python sketch, over to ‘Dirty World.’”

The Python-Wilbury connections didn’t end there either. The group also hired Michael Palin to pen the first album’s liner notes. Palin, under the pen name “Hugh Jampton,” wrote about how “the original Wilburys were a stationary people who, realising that their civilization could not stand still for ever, began to go for short walks — not the ‘traveling’ as we now know it, but certainly as far as the corner and back.”

The second album, confusingly titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, didn’t include Orbison, who passed away less than two months after Vol. 1 was released. But it still retained some Python homages, including an Idle cameo in the music video for “Wilbury Twist.”

Idle also wrote the liner notes for the second album — although he later admitted that he “just copied what Michael Palin had done for the first.”