Trivia & Extras / The Wilbury Twist Dance

The Wilbury Twist: The Band's Last Word, and Its Silliest

If a band gets to choose how it goes out, the Traveling Wilburys chose about as unserious an ending as five legendary musicians have ever picked. "Wilbury Twist," the closing track on 1990's Vol. 3, is a deliberately ridiculous fake dance-craze song in the grand tradition of "The Twist," "The Madison," and every other rock and roll novelty number designed to get people moving without asking too much of them intellectually. It would turn out to be the last piece of new music the Traveling Wilburys ever released.

A Dance That Was Never Meant to Exist

The song walks listeners through an increasingly absurd set of invented dance instructions: putting a hand somewhere it doesn't usually go, a foot somewhere it definitely doesn't, and escalating from there into moves no sober person could follow along to, all delivered with the band's usual straight-faced commitment to a bit that was never meant to be taken seriously. It's the same energy that produced the entire Wilbury half-brothers conceit in the first place: five men who'd each spent decades being treated as Very Serious Artists, gleefully undercutting that reputation on their way out the door.

The band's own official website later extended the joke retroactively, inventing a fictional dance lineage for the "Twist" to belong to: a "Wilbury Quadrille" supposedly popular in Bath in 1790, and a "Wilbury Waltz" that swept Vienna a century later. None of it is remotely true, in keeping with the band's entire invented family mythology.

The Video: Eric Idle and John Candy Try Their Best

The "Wilbury Twist" music video, filmed in Los Angeles on February 28, 1991, brought in reinforcements for the silliness: Monty Python's Eric Idle and comedic actor John Candy both appear attempting to demonstrate the song's nonexistent dance steps, with the enthusiastic incompetence the material demands. It's a fitting bookend to a band whose very first single, "Handle With Care," had been elevated from throwaway B-side to career-redefining hit. "Wilbury Twist," released as the band wound down for good, feels like the opposite move entirely: something the Wilburys could easily have left as an album-only curiosity, but chose to spotlight with an actual video anyway.

The Band's Actual Last Word

"Wilbury Twist" wasn't planned as a farewell (nobody involved seems to have treated 1990 as the end of anything at the time), but that's what it became. No further Wilburys material was ever recorded after this song's video shoot. Roy Orbison had already been gone for over two years by this point, and within another year George Harrison would retreat almost entirely from public performance. Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Tom Petty never reconvened as the Traveling Wilburys again.

Four men who'd spent decades being taken enormously seriously spent their last afternoon as a band getting Eric Idle and John Candy to fall over doing a dance that doesn't exist. Nobody involved seems to have minded.

Hear the full album this song comes from on our Vol. 3 page, or see the rest of the band's music videos on our singles and videos page.