The Rutles

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The Rutles
The Rutles in All You Need Is Cash. From left: Eric Idle, Ricky Fataar, John Halsey, Neil Innes.
Background information
Origin	Rutland, England
Genres	Rock, parody, comedy rock, rock and roll
Years active	1975–1978, 1996–1997, 2002–2019
Labels	Warner Bros., Rhino, Virgin
Past members	John Halsey Ken Thornton Phil Jackson David Catlin-Birch Neil Innes Eric Idle Ricky Fataar Ollie Halsall David Battley Malcolm Foster Doug Boyle Mickey Simmonds Mark Griffiths Billy Bremner Andy Brown Roger Rettig Brian Hodgson J. J. Jones Jay Goodrich
Website	www.rutles.org

The Rutles (/ˈrʌtəlz/) were a rock band that performed visual and aural pastiches and parodies of the Beatles. This originally fictional band, created by Eric Idle and Neil Innes for a sketch in Idle's mid-1970s BBC television comedy series Rutland Weekend Television, later toured and recorded, releasing two studio albums and garnering two UK chart hits. The band toured again from 2002 until Innes's death in 2019.

Encouraged by the positive public reaction to the sketch, Idle wrote the mockumentary television film All You Need Is Cash (1978, a.k.a. The Rutles). Idle co-directed the film with Gary Weis; it features 20 Beatles' music pastiches written by Innes, which he performed with three musicians as the Rutles. A soundtrack album in 1978 was followed in 1996 by Archaeology, which spoofed the then-recent Beatles Anthology series. A second film, The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (modelled on the 2000 TV special The Beatles Revolution), was made in 2002 and released in the US on DVD in 2003.