(Credits: Far Out / EMI Films / The Traveling Wilburys)
Sat 27 September 2025 17:30, UK
While there are more successful examples of the supergroup, the Traveling Wilburys boasts the most star-studded ensemble.
Formed in 1988, the Traveling Wilburys was largely an excuse to hang out in the studio together and have a laugh over making music. Dreamed up by George Harrison and ELO’s Jeff Lynne during the previous year’s Cloud Nine sessions, the pair managed to corral Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and even Roy Orbison for the semi-conceptual group, offering a tongue-in-cheek story in their promotional campaign as a travelling musical troupe of half-brothers.
Following their Grammy-nominated debut, Orbison had died, reducing the Traveling Wilburys to a quartet. For 1990’s jokingly titled Traveling Wilburys Vol 3 sophomore album, new pseudonyms were adopted. Harrison became Spike, Lynne adopted the moniker Clayton, Petty plumped for Muddy, and Boo was claimed by Dylan. Released as the third single, ‘Wilbury Twist’ featured a roll call of celebrity cameos from Woody Harrelson, Cheech Marin, and Eric Idle.
The connection between Monty Python and Traveling Wilburys went back further than the band itself. Harrison’s HandMade Films production project had arranged the funding for 1979’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian, forming the company after the original backers walked away last minute, days before the shoot, resulting in a little cameo from Harrison as the minor Mr Papadopoulos character. HandMade would continue realising orbiting projects from the Pythons, including Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and the Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl concert film.
Orbison was a huge fan too. A keen player of 1980’s Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album comedy record, the ‘I Bet They Won’t Play This On The Radio’ number’s comic censorship of swears with chicken clucks or squeezehorns found its way on a Wilburys track, honouring such artful edits with a suggestive litany of items from “porky curtains” to “parts and services” that follow ‘Dirty World’s repeated “he loves your” refrain.
So wedded to the Pythons’ comedy legacy, Traveling Wilburys managed to rope in Pole to Pole traveller Michael Palin to pen the debut’s liner notes, indulging further in the fictional story under the alias Hugh Jampton: “The original Wilburys were a stationary people who, realising that their civilisation could not stand still forever, began to go for short walks… Not the ‘travelling’ as we now know it, but certainly as far as the corner and back”. Writing as Tiny Hampton, Idle too offered some material for the Traveling Wilburys Vol 3 follow-up, giving an insight into the background of the supposed family name.
One can’t help but consider the film potential of it all. Originally toying with the idea of a tie-in spoof feature with HandMade, such a project could have been in the vein of Idles Fab Four spoof The Rutles and the TV movie All You Need Is Cash, or it could have been a thin on the laughs test like The Return of Bruno. Never managing another album, the group remained on hiatus for years, scuppering any chance for a reunion following Harrison and Petty’s respective deaths in 2001 and 2017.
It’s likely that such a supergroup would have coalesced regardless, but the comedic flair and keen embrace of the Traveling Wilburys’ humorous guises and backstories have Monty Python’s fingerprints all over it.
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