Stonehenge is a group of mysterious standing stones on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England. Historians believe Stonehenge was constructed around 1500 B.C. and was used for either religious ceremonies or astronomy.
Stonehenge is also a song by the fictional heavy metal group Spinal Tap. Although, can you call a group that has produced three albums, several live DVDs, and two feature films (the well-known original from 1984, as well as a new one to come in 2024) fictional?
Spinal Tap, thanks to the success of the original comedy film This Is Spinal Tap as well as its soundtrack album (both released on the same day: 2 March 1984) and its cultish endurance, went on to have several stints where the band tangibly existed in the real world.
Spinal Tap was the creation of director Rob Reiner and the actor/comedians Christopher Guest (lead guitar), Michael McKean (vocals/guitar) and Harry Shearer (bass). The actors portray Spinal Tap band members Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls respectively.
The movie is shot in a fly-on-the-wall documentary style, which captures the band as they prepare to launch their new album Smell The Glove and go out on a big US tour. This is not going well, with lots of mishaps and downright bizarre events taking place. The band experience patchy crowds and cancelled gigs, and interest in their album has been decidedly close to non-existent.
At one point, guitarist Nigel Tufnel has an idea to liven up their next set – how about reviving the song Stonehenge, a shelved prog-rock wig-out, which previously gave them “the best production value we’ve ever had on stage”? For those who pay particular attention, there is a nice foreshadowing of this as a fan can be heard to yell “Do Stonehenge!” during the Chapel Hill concert earlier in the film.
There’s just one problem, as the band’s manager Ian Faith (Tony Hendra) points out: the Stonehenge props they once used are long gone. Nigel has a simple solution: he scribbles a quick drawing on a diner napkin, which Ian pockets and duly passes to an artist (a one-scene cameo for Anjelica Huston) in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately, Nigel adds a clueless extra pen-stroke to his drawing, so what should have been 18’ turns out to say 18’’. Spinal Tap is known more for their loud amps that go to 11 than for their intellect. This makes the eventual lowering of the monument onto the stage from the rafters into a far less impressive coup than the band envisaged.
The climax of the Stonehenge story is best savoured with full build-up. Just like much of the rest of the Spinal Tap movie, it might even benefit from a few repeated viewings. On the first viewing, it could be easy to miss the 18” on Nigel’s napkin or not grasp its importance. The next exchange, where a barely-famous-yet Huston as the model maker, presenting her prop to manager Ian Faith, is played dead straight. The prop sits, looking perfect and puny in front of her, as Ian repeatedly asks, to her confusion, whether it will exactly match the full-sized one.
And then the anticipation of its arrival on stage – which depends on Ian being a wholly terrible manager who has kept the band in the dark – only grows and grows. The song begins with a rare lead vocal for Nigel, whose baby it is, intoning the solemnly nonsensical, utterly vague lyrics about Druids, banshees and a “haunted moon”, while taking himself very seriously in a hooded cape.
At the song’s climax, accompanied by yet more vague lyrics about the ancient Druids, the 18’’ Stonehenge prop is lowered from the rafters. The moment is made even more hysterical as the manager chose not to inform the band of the mix-up beforehand, and their speechless faces staring at the miniature Stonehenge prop are priceless.
The finishing touch? To render the mini-Henge less trifling, Ian Faith hired two little people to dress up in fantasy garb to merrily dance around the Stonehenge prop. One of them accidentally trips on the prop, coming dangerously close to crushing it.
In ancient times hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived this strange race of people, the druids
No one knows who they were what they were doing
But the legacy remains here into the living rock of Stonehenge
Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge where a man is a man
And the children dance to the pipes of pan
Stonehenge, ’tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face
Stonehenge where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky
Harry Shearer has described Spinal Tap as a very collaborative project, with the four of them (the band + director Rob Reiner) writing all of the songs for the movie. Song ideas would flow just like gag ideas, inspiring each other back and forth. Having a clear idea for the type of segment they were going to have in the movie, the song almost wrote itself.
In a 2012 interview with Songfacts, Shearer said: “We all collaborated on writing the songs for Spinal Tap, the movie songs, and then the latter two bunches of songs for the last two records, we would individually come in with songs and then the rest of the guys made suggestions and improvements and stuff.”
Shearer especially called out Stonehenge as a fun song to play, “just because it’s musically the silliest song.” The band was clearly having fun building an over-the-top piece of music that suited the po-faced approach the song called for. At the same time, there is an ambition of scope in the song that makes it a worthy musical number in its own right.
In looking at the fictional Spinal Tap lore as presented by the band over the course of the movie and later interviews and “documentaries,” Stonehenge was originally written by Nigel Tufnel for the band’s disastrous 1975 concept album The Sun Never Sweats after a bad dish of Indian food got him a seat “on the porcelain bus” and gave him strange dreams. During a 1992 interview, Nigel described the song as “an anthem to my Druidic ancestors.”
The album’s title is a bastardization of old saying that “the sun never sets on the British empire.” Derek, who wrote the title track, says he misheard it. A “re-recording” of that track is included on their 1992 album Break Like the Wind.
There has been a lot of discussion over the years as to which bands inspired the various gags in the movie. The creators of Spinal Tap have always demurred, claiming they had no specific homage in mind, but that has not stopped people theorising and speculating.
For Stonehenge, the answer could appear to be obvious. Black Sabbath’s 1983 album Born Again contains a brief instrumental intro called Stonehenge, and for the ensuing tour in 1983/84, they had commissioned a life-size model of Stonehenge for the stage. Coming close to reflecting the issues in the Spinal Tap movie, their manager Don Arden (Sharon Osbourne’s father) drew out the dimensions in feet, but the company that built it assumed it was in meters. Instead of 15 feet, it ended up being 15 meters – three times as big as it should have been. As part of the show, a dwarf would crawl across the stones and roadies would appear in hooded cloaks, dressed as druids.
“It was 45 feet high,” remembers Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, “and it wouldn’t fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it in the storage area. It cost a fortune.”
The oversized prop forced the band to cancel several shows in Canada, which resulted in them delaying their North American tour. They eventually had to abandon the Stonehenge prop. It was too large to easily transport or get inside most of the venues on the tour. The last time Geezer Butler remembers seeing it was on a dock in New York City.
While this seems like a ready-made gag for Spinal Tap to use, their own version of the Stonehenge gag actually predated Sabbath’s version of Stonehenge by a couple years. The Spinal Tap concept was born when Rob Reiner put together a TV special in 1979, which is where Spinal Tap first appeared, doing a single skit. After that, he, Michael McKean, Chris Guest, and Harry Shearer started developing the concept that led to the movie. In 1982, they made a 20-minute mintage of sketched-out scenes called Spinal Tap: The Final Tour, which was used to shop around the concept and get a greenlight for the feature version. This includes an early iteration of the Stonehenge gag, predating the Sabbath incident with at least a whole year.
In 2019, the movie’s director Rob Reiner told Billboard: “We had the Stonehenge theme, and Black Sabbath was touring with a Stonehenge theme. Basically, our film came out a week or so after they had gotten off the tour, and they got so mad at us because they thought we stole it from them. That was my favourite thing – that we would shoot a film, edit it, and get it into the theatre in one week!”
When the movie was released, many filmgoers assumed that This is Spinal Tap was a genuine documentary. This included Ozzy Osbourne, who identified with many of the scenes, such as getting lost backstage and having technical difficulties.
At the same time, almost every rock band in the world recognised themselves in parts of it. This was not always very funny. Tom Waits didn’t laugh at it – he cried.
There have been many similar sentiments. Eddie Van Halen said that he was “laughing and crying at the same time” when he watched the film, because it was so close to his own experiences as a rock star. U2’s The Edge has given similar statements, adding that the film “really did sum up what being in a rock band is all about” and that he loved the scene where Spinal Tap’s guitarist Nigel Tufnel shows off his collection of guitars.
When Rob Reiner was auditioning people for The Princess Bride, which he directed in 1986, Sting came in at one point to meet, saying “Every time I watch [the movie] I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“[This] beats all the Oscar nominations we never got,” Shearer has said.
The movie may not have had too much star power at the time, fronted as it was by unknowns and directed by the debuting Reiner. It wasn’t a major theatrical success, grossing $5 million worldwide. But cult status beckoned on home video, where it’s been reissued multiple times.
Years later, the band mulled over performing at Stonehenge itself. While in character as Derek Smalls, Harry Shearer said: “Tap at ‘henge would obviously be a dream gig. But there are security concerns. I don’t know if you know this here in the US, but it’s not a quiet, placid place, especially around the solstice. There have been disruptions, hippies go there to do their ceremonies and all sorts of things; druids, pseudo-druids, and neo-druids frequent the place. It gets a bit snarky there, but it’s always been something we’ve wanted to do.”
Spinal Tap’s special relationship with the stone circle is well known even in circles far outside music and movies. The National Geographic Channel aired a two-hour special in 2008 with details of new findings about the construction and utility of Stonehenge, including a theory archaeologists have uncovered about why it exists. Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel – a renowned Stonehenge expert in his own right (or, in his own mind) – has a more interesting theory on how it was built, and a series of videos where he explained his theories proved to be an excellent way for the National Geographic Channel to promote their new special.
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