Bonzo Dog Band
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The Bonzo Dog Band (also known as The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Bonzo Dog Dada Band and, colloquially, as "The Bonzos") was a band created by a group of British art-school denizens of the 1960s. Combining elements of music hall, trad jazz, psychedelic rock, and avant-garde art, the Bonzos came to the attention of a broader British public through a children's television programme, Do Not Adjust Your Set.
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[edit] The band's foundation
Unusually for a band, the actual date of conception for the Bonzos is known to us: 25 September 1962. It was on that day that Vivian Stanshall (tuba, but later lead vocals along with other wind instruments) and fellow art student Rodney Slater (saxophone) bonded over a transatlantic broadcast of a boxing match between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston.
Rodney Slater had previously been playing in a trad jazz band at college with Chris Jennings (trombone) and Tom Parkinson (sousaphone). Eventually they recruited Roger Wilkes (trumpet) and Trevor Brown (banjo) from the Royal College of Art as they slowly turned their style from more orthodox music towards the sound of The Alberts and The Temperance Seven. Vivian was their next recruit and on that day in 1962, he and Rodney christened the band, The Bonzo Dog Dada Band. Bonzo the dog was a popular British cartoon character created by artist George Studdy in the 1920s and Dada after the early 20th century art movement.
Not long after Vivian, Rodney and Tom were evicted from their shared flat, the band added two more faces to the line-up: Goldsmiths College lecturer Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell and his lodger, songwriter/pianist, Neil Innes. According to Neil Innes' web site, the Bohay-Nowell was added to Vernon Dudley's name by Vivian Stanshall.
The band had been working with drummer Tom Hedges before Rodney found Martin Ash, who later took the stage name of Sam Spoons and shortly afterwards got them their first pub gig, where they were noticed by Roger Ruskin Spear.
Ruskin Spear, the son of the British artist Ruskin Spear, claimed, "I couldn't believe anyone was that bad." He eventually changed his mind and, with his interest in the manufacture of early electronic gadgets/objets d'art and sound-making systems soon became an integral part of the band.
The line-up changed again with the departure of Roger Wilkes, whose girlfriend demanded his resignation, and John Parry, the trombonist. The two were replaced by, respectively, Bob Kerr and "Big" Sid Nichols. The final 'classic' band member, "Legs" Larry Smith joined in 1963, as a tuba player and tap-dancer (but later as a drummer), on Vivian's invitation.
The band's fortunes began to increase when their manager, Reg Tracey secured them a deal with Parlophone Records in April 1966. Their first single, a cover of the 1920s classic, "My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies" was backed with "I'm Going To Bring A Watermelon To My Girl Tonight" which was rather too risque for radio.
A second single, "Alley Oop", backed with "Button Up Your Overcoat" followed in October of that year.
[edit] A move from jazz to rock
Although the Bonzos had started out playing jazz, they decided to embrace rock in order to counter claims that they were beginning to sound like The Temperance Seven and The New Vaudeville Band. (In fact Geoff Stephens asked the Bonzos to perform as the New Vaudeville Band. They declined. Former Bonzo Bob Kerr joined The New Vaudeville Band and went on to create his own band, Bob Kerr's Whoopee Band, which combined the lunacy of the early Bonzo sound with music having a great deal in common with the Temperance Seven). For those interested in the Bonzo Dog bands earlier jazz leanings a recently released CD Songs The Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us - A Pre-History Of The Bonzos (Lightning Tree Records) collects together all of the novelty Jazz recordings from the 1920s and 1930s that the Bonzo Dog Band recorded or performed live. This CD also demonstrates the Bonzo Dog Band's musical relationship with early British Jazz which itself evolved out of the British dance band circuit of the 1920s and 1930s.
As the Bonzo Dog band's fame increased, they appeared as the resident band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a children's show notable for having several future members of Monty Python's Flying Circus (Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin) and David Jason in the cast.
Moving over to Liberty Records, the Bonzos released their first album, Gorilla, which included "Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold" which savagely parodied their early "trad" jazz roots and featured some of the most deliberately inept jazz playing ever recorded. "The Intro and the Outro" in which every member of the band introduced and played a solo, started with genuine band members:
- Hi there, nice to be with you, happy you could stick around.
- Like to introduce "Legs" Larry Smith, drums
- And Sam Spoons, rhythm pole
- And Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, bass guitar
- And Neil Innes, piano.
- Come in Rodney Slater alto saxophone
- With Roger Ruskin Spear on tenor sax.
- I, Vivian Stanshall, trumpet. [Stanshall is the narrator on this track]
before including such improbable members as:
- Big hello to big John Wayne, xylophone
- And Robert Morley, guitar.
- Billy Butlin, spoons.
- Princess Anne on sousaphone. Mmm.
- Looking very relaxed Adolf Hitler on vibes
- Eric Clapton on ukulele [it was actually Clapton playing a ukulele],
- And specially flown in for us, the session's gorilla on vox humana. [loud angry growl]
- Nice to see Incredible Shrinking Man on euphonium.
- Drop out with Peter Scott on duck call. [sound of duck call]
- Hearing from you later, Casanova on horn.
- Yeah! Digging General de Gaulle on accordion. [brief accordion solo] Really wild, General! Thank you, sir.
- Roy Rogers on Trigger [sound of flowing liquid].
- We welcome Val Doonican as himself. [Irish voice repeats "Hello there"].
The track finally ends with a mention of "J. Arthur Rank on gong."
The full "cast" of the track can be read on the BBC's H2G2 website [1].
Much later, Stanshall was to provide an introduction on Mike Oldfield's first instrumental album, Tubular Bells, which echoed the style of The Intro and the Outro, but without the blatant absurdities.
[edit] Urban Spaceman and beyond
They had a hit single in 1968 with "I'm the Urban Spaceman" produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym "Apollo C. Vermouth". The Beatles were great fans of the group and featured them performing the song "Death Cab for Cutie" in their film Magical Mystery Tour. The anarchic twelve bar blues "Trouser Press" — featuring a solo by Roger Ruskin Spear on a genuine trouser press he had fitted with a pickup — gave its name to an American anglophiliac rock magazine Trouser Press. "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?" lampooned the British blues boom, and tap dancer/drummer "Legs" Larry Smith was an onstage hit with his lubricious dancing. Many of their songs parodied parochial suburban British attitudes, notably "My Pink Half of the Drainpipe" on the album The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse (a euphemism for an outside toilet, still common in Britain at the time).
In 1969 they released the album Keynsham (1969) and also appeared at the Isle of Wight Festival. Keynsham is a small town near Bristol in south-west England. The name of the album was almost certainly derived from an advertisement on Radio Luxemburg for a dubious method of forecasting results for football matches (and using these results in football pools). In the advertisement, which was of great length preventing the youthful listeners to the only legal English language station transmitting pop music, the improbably named Horace Batchelor, inventor of 'the amazing Infra Draw method' would drone interminably, repeatedly spelling the name of the town where he lived, and to which the gullible presumably sent money.
The Bonzos toured the United States with The Who and also appeared at the Fillmore East with The Kinks. Intro'd as a "warm-up act" for the real show, the Bonzos rushed out and did a series of frenetic calisthenics. True to the dada spirit, Stanshall performed a mock striptease and Roger Ruskin Spear, with a platoon of robots (including one that sang "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" while actually blowing bubbles), did whatever he did without regard for what the rest of the band was doing. As for "The Canyons of Your Mind", it featured such an incredibly bad guitar solo it drove audiences to open-mouthed delight.
Whilst the group formally disbanded in 1970, their record company compelled them to reunite to record a final album titled Let's Make Up And Be Friendly recorded in 1971 and released in 1972.
One of the Bonzos' song titles, "Cool Britannia", was revived as a media label for late 1990s Britain under Tony Blair (oblivious to the patently satirical intent of the original song).
[edit] Band members
The core members of the group for most of the band's career were:
- Vivian Stanshall (1943 - 1995): trumpet, lead vocals
- Neil Innes (b. 1944): piano, guitar, lead vocals
- Rodney "Rhino" Desborough Slater (b. 1944): saxophone
- Roger Ruskin Spear: tenor sax and various contraptions
- "Legs" Larry Smith: drums
However, the band's onstage line-up varied, sometimes on a weekly basis, and they also invited a number of guest musicians into the recording studio. Additional members of various duration include: Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, Martin "Sam Spoons" Ash, "Happy" Wally Wilks, Tom Parkinson, Chris Jennings, Claude Abbo, Trevor Brown, Tom Hedge, Eric Idle, Eric Clapton, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Leon Williams, John Parry, Raymond Lewitt, Sydney "Big Sid" Nicholls, James "Jim Strobes" Chambers, Bob Kerr, Dave Clague, Joel Druckman, "Borneo" Fred Munt, Chalky Chalkey, Dennis Cowan, Aynsley Dunbar, Jim Capaldi, Anthony 'Bubs' White, Andy Roberts, Dave Richards, Dick Parry, Hughie Flint and Glen Colson. ".
Stanshall and Innes were the band's principal songwriters.
"Legs" Larry Smith toured with Clapton and Elton John and can be heard tap dancing on John's "I Think I'm Going to Kill Myself".
[edit] January 2006 reunion: Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band Revisited
On 28 January 2006 many surviving members of the band played a concert at the Astoria, London. Neil Innes, "Legs" Larry Smith, Roger Ruskin Spear, Rodney Slater, Bob Kerr, Sam Spoons and Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell appeared. There was also a number of special guests attempting with various degrees of success to be Vivian Stanshall, the only member of the band not still living, including Stephen Fry, Ade Edmondson, Phill Jupitus and Paul Merton. Their stage antics were very much in evidence including performances on the Theremin Leg and Trouser Press. The show was filmed and was broadcast on BBC4 and also released on DVD in May 2006.
A countrywide tour, with Ade Edmondson and Phill Jupitus, followed during November 2006, starting in Ipswich and ending with two nights at the Shepherds Bush Empire, where Paul Merton and Bill Bailey joined in for a handful of songs. David Catlin-Birch (lead guitar and vocals) from alternative pop group World Party joined the band for the tour.
[edit] Discography
[edit] Studio albums
- 1967 Gorilla
- 1968 The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse (chart #40)
- 1969 Tadpoles (chart #36)
- 1969 Keynsham
- 1972 Let's Make Up And Be Friendly
- Note: The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse was released as Urban Spaceman in the US.
[edit] Singles
- 1966 "My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies"
- 1966 "Alley Oop"
- 1967 "Equestrian Statue"
- 1968 "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (UK Singles Chart - #5)
- 1969 "Mr Apollo"
- 1969 "I Want To Be With You"
- 1972 "King of Scurf" (U.S.) / "Slush" (UK)
- 1992 "No Matter Who You Vote For the Government Always Gets In (Heigh Ho)"
[edit] Compilations and miscellaneous
- 1970 The Best of the Bonzos
- 1971 Beast of the Bonzos
- 1974 The History of the Bonzos
- 1983 Some of the Best of The Bonzo Dog Band
- 1984 The Very Best of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
- 1990 The Bestiality of the Bonzos
- 1990 The Best of the Bonzo Dog Band
- 1992 Cornology
- 1995 Unpeeled
- 1999 Anthropology: The Beast Within
- 2002 The Peel Sessions
- 2006 Wrestle Poodles... And Win!
- 2007 Songs The Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us - A Pre-History Of The Bonzos
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Official Bonzo Dog Band 40th Anniversary Tour web site
- The Viv Stanshall Appreciation Society & Archive
- An Excellent site - with interviews, articles and a cornucopia of rare recordings.
- The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band by Ian Kitching
- Extremely detailed fan site, with additions being made over a period of eleven years.
- The Bonzo Dog Band at The Trouser Press
- A superior discography and critique of all the studio albums plus notable compilations from a music publication named after a Bonzo's song.
- The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band Revisited
- A fan's review of the January 2006 reunion concert.
- The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band Revisited
- Review, The Times, 31 January 2006.
- Words Of Innespiration - The Lyrics & Unplanned Career of Neil Innes
- Neil Innes endorsed site with lyrics, downloadable audio and other stuff
