I'm the Urban Spaceman

According to Neil Innes who wrote the song, "urban spaceman" refers to the "urban spaces" (brownfield sites for development) in postwar Manchester. The song is intended as a satire on the vacuous consumerism of 1960s advertising, and 'Urban Spaceman' the ideal figure in advertising who "doesn't exist in real life".^[4] Innes said:

I know this sounds all very pretentious, but the point was that I was, in my pompous little way, trying to sort of say, "Well, here's urban space. What about an urban spaceman? What would he be? He'd be the product of the advertising world, a glossy magazine or an advert on the tube. And an ambulance went by and went "nananananana" and so I thought, "Well, there's a tune."^[5]

The song was recorded at Chappell Recording Studios in Mayfair, London, and produced by Paul McCartney. Vivian Stanshall, who was out one night with Paul McCartney, complained about the strictness of their producer/manager Gerry Bron, and McCartney responded with an offer to produce "Urban Spaceman" for them.^[4] McCartney played the ukelele on the song, and the recording session lasted 8 hours. To end the song, Stanshall attached a trumpet mouthpiece and a funnel to a garden hose which he blew and whirled above his head to create the tune. McCartney, however did not mix the song; the band had spent most of the budget recording the song, the engineer Gus Dudgeon then took the multitrack to Decca Studios and secretly mix the song while the Moody Blues were having a break during their recording session.^[6]

A well-known staging of the song involves Innes performing solo while a female tap dancer performs an enthusiastic but apparently under-rehearsed routine around him. This skit originally appeared in a 1975 edition of Rutland Weekend Television, with Lyn Ashley as the dancer, and was revived in the 1982 film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl with Carol Cleveland taking over the role. Their association with members of Monty Python started on Do Not Adjust Your Set written by future members of the Python, and they performed on the show.^[7]