Читать книгу Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall - Chris Welch - Страница 7

In 1961 Vivian Stanshall went to sea. The plan was to earn enough money to fund study at Central School of Art. He was admitted without having any formal qualifications from his school days. Oddly enough, for someone whose success was to come largely from a dazzling use of vocabulary, his educational skills were relatively secondary compared with the tactile instincts of the artist.

‘I remember smells, tastes and colours which I can recall at any time, but I couldn’t quote you anything. I do engulf quite a lot of books, but it’s not ordered – there’s no structure,’ he said. ‘I freely admit to being in awe and jealous of people who have a classical education. The best education is the yooniversity o’ life, innit?’¹ There were two problems with financing college and both of them were to do with his father: Vic earned too much money to qualify for a large enough grant for his son and ‘equated artists with gypsies and ne’er-do-wells’. He would not give Vivian enough to get him through art school. His son entered the Merchant Navy.

Tourist Waiter Stanshall was engaged aboard the liner Orsova at Tilbury in Essex, on 12 May 1961. He was blossoming into quite an imposing young man in every way: as well as hair worn long for much of his life (even when it began to fall out), he had very delicate hands, like those of a classical pianist. They seemed incongruous against his large frame, and he always took great care of them, particularly his right hand: he was ambidextrous, but this was what he called his ‘magic hand’.

The Orsova set sail for Hong Kong, Singapore, Borneo and Sydney, Australia from Southampton. On board he refined his ability to drink, belch, fart, smoke and fight, which would be vitally important in his career with the Bonzos. He also developed a lifelong interest in knives, inscribing one with ‘AS’ for ‘Anthony Stanshall’. There was plenty of time to indulge a voracious appetite, which played havoc with his waistline. He would amaze his seafaring chums at lunch by devouring four pork chops, held between the greasy fingers of one hand.

Tourist Waiter Stanshall was demoted mid-cruise for spilling hot soup down a passenger’s neck and banished below decks to join the ‘U Gang’ (‘U’ for ‘Utility’). ‘Down there were all the most useless, terrible, vulgar sort of people,’ says fellow-Bonzo Rodney Slater. ‘They were all the “geezers” who weren’t allowed on deck to be seen by the public. They were confined to the bowels of the ship and were only let out after dark! He loved those guys, the stokers, the guys who cleaned out the latrines, the hard cases below decks.’ At least below decks you didn’t have to worry about how you looked. Vivian recalled, ‘You didn’t have to mix with the passengers and could grow a beard.’² Because of his height, he was encouraged by his shipmates to try deck boxing. Vivian got his face punched in every time.

‘He had to do it, yet he hated it,’ explains his son Rupert. ‘He was a dreadful coward really. He went through with the ordeal but he’d go down with the first punch. The guys would be telling him, “Go on, you can do it. You’re a big lad!” And then they’d put money on the other guy. Dad suggested that I went into the Merchant Navy myself at one stage but I didn’t fancy that.’ When the liner docked, there was an opportunity to get away from the ship’s discipline. In far-off Port Moresby in Papua, New Guinea, Vivian said he went through a blood-brother initiation ceremony with a tribal people.

‘The bushes parted and a savage face peered out and somehow intimated that he would like me to follow him,’ Vivian later told a journalist friend. ‘Being a young man, I went.’³ How many of the magnificent tales of nautical adventures and outrageous exploits were strictly true was a matter for conjecture among his friends back in England. He told the stories well, kept his audiences captivated and so the accuracy really did not matter to them.

‘I got the feeling the story changed as time progressed,’ says Monica. ‘Eventually the story encompassed the entire world, but I’m not sure that the trip did. He certainly liked the idea of initiation ceremonies.’ He also liked to bewitch friends with the account of his visit to a restaurant in Hong Kong where he had monkey-brain soup. He described sitting there surrounded by monkeys in cages mounted on the restaurant walls. ‘You ordered soup and these monkeys knew what was coming,’ he related with ghoulish delight. ‘The chef pointed at one and the monkey screamed its head off.’

Seaman Stanshall was discharged from the Orsova on 16 October 1961 at Tilbury. Armed with the savings from his life at sea, he became a fully-fledged art student and began to lead the kind of life his father had warned him about. After a stint at West Essex School of Art, Vivian, aged nineteen, enrolled at London’s Central School of Art, off Kingsway, in the autumn of 1962. He was overjoyed at his new-found freedom as a student living in town and his parents were there to help him choose digs. He did not like the first flat at all. ‘Vic and Anthony went in,’ says Eileen. ‘Well, it was about four minutes later that Anthony came out, put his hankie to his nose and said: “I couldn’t live in there. Terrible smell, Mum.”’ They had better luck with the next flat and Vivian had better luck with the landlady.

‘After a while he came home one weekend, and I said, “How are you getting on with that woman?” He said, “She’s wearing me out. I’ll have to dump her. I can’t stand it.” So what he got up to with that woman I don’t know. I didn’t like to go into it any further. But he never had any bother getting girlfriends. They all seemed to like him and it seemed as if he knew a lot of people.’ Vivian settled in well and proceeded to eat his way through his grant very quickly, forcing him to rely on friends to supply fish and chips. He spent much of the rest of his money on unusual brass and stringed instruments. Vivian had more than thirty instruments, including ukuleles, mandolins, recorders, ocarinas, and – most cherished – a tuba and a euphonium.

Vivian commuted to college on the underground. He regularly created public situations filled with tension to see what people’s reactions would be, a fascination with pushing the boundaries which stayed with him for most of his life: ‘I started testing people when I was travelling by tube to Central School of Art,’ he said. ‘I bought some stuff called Wasp-Eez, which I bought for the name. I would scratch or roll up my trousers and apply Wasp-Eez and then I would find that the carriage would empty or they’d move away, and it’s like the old one, if you start scratching, everyone starts scratching.

‘I became very fast with the Evening News and the Evening Standard crosswords, which are cryptic. Since I’m left-handed, I write on the side. So everyone sits on the train doing the same crossword and I would fill in completely the wrong answer, but near enough to look convincing, which would bugger up the guy next to me. What becomes difficult is fitting in other words or getting a word to fit. But if you do this with confidence then he is truly thrown.’⁴ On other occasions, Vivian would slowly and deliberately black in the whole of the crossword, square-by-square: ‘and that was disturbing’.

He later teamed up with college chum and future Bonzo drummer Larry Smith to play more involved pranks. ‘I have a rubber hand. This is an idea I got from a Victorian pickpocket, who would go to church and have false hands in prayer in the front while she was dipping her fellow-worshippers,’ explained Vivian. ‘I would have these obvious false hands and have Larry next to me and pick his bag, steal things very obviously to see if anyone would stop me. And people wouldn’t do a thing! They would continue to read and if I looked at them, fixed them, to see if I was caught, they would return to their newspapers. They didn’t in any way want to be involved.’⁵ This was what struck Vivian. An individual could be in any kind of trouble or distress and everyone would pretend that there was nothing happening.

‘I mean, we staged hangings,’ he said. ‘I came in with a hangman’s noose and put this on top of one of the strap things and put it around my neck and stood on the seat ready to hang myself and jump off and it would be too long, you see, so that would be a nuisance. I’d keep shortening the rope and people would just watch this, they wouldn’t try to intervene – it was absurd.’⁶

There were plenty of other like-minded new friends at the college. Roger Wilkes was a fellow-musician who taught Vivian to play trumpet properly. Rodney Slater got to know him through the tight-knit art students’ social circuit. Pop Art was becoming fashionable, which meant that a poor student keen on collecting could pick up the relics of the jazz age for next to nothing: ‘Nobody wanted all the memorabilia like the old sheet music and gramophone records,’ says Rodney. ‘The grown-up world was the world of your parents, which you didn’t want.’ The students saw nothing of much interest in the blossoming teenage movements.

‘Kids were already being exploited in terms of clothes and music. One sniffed a rat even back then. If you were a certain kind of person you just didn’t belong in either world. You had to make your own world of craziness. Which was…the band. As members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band we lived our lives in the same way all the time, on stage and off. We remained individuals within the group but at the time we did it without thinking. It was just the thing to do.’ Rodney Slater, a powerful master blower of the bass and baritone saxophone, was born in Croland, Lincolnshire in 1941. He played in a trad-jazz band with two friends from college, Chris Jennings and Tom Parkinson. They met trumpeter Roger Wilkes, drummer Sam Spoons and Trevor Brown, who played college dances, at the Royal College of Art. Together with Rodney and his friends, they formed a new outfit, influenced by bands like the Alberts, the Firehouse Five and the Temperance Seven. They met Vivian the day before he was due to start at college.

‘He had nowhere to live,’ says Rodney. ‘Tom met him at the Pillars of Hercules boozer and brought him home. We were living in West Dulwich then. I had actually seen Viv at a party a few months previous. We were playing at some old church in Westbourne Grove and Viv arrived wearing a frock coat and a huge red beard. He was prancing around and kind of performing in the pulpit and I thought, “That’s an interesting guy!” Then it all went crazy and the police came and before I could talk to him we all had to leave.’ When Vivian arrived at Rod and Tom’s flat in West Dulwich, he made himself at home and was invited to join in their music-making. Vivian recalled: ‘There were instruments all over the place at Rod’s house and he said, “Do you think you could play tuba?” and so I started with that. They didn’t have a vocalist.’ Rodney and Tom brought Vivian along to the Royal College of Art for an evening session. Vivian listened for a while and then asked Roger if he could get up and sing something. ‘He did either “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” or “The Sheik of Araby”,’ says Roger Wilkes. He delivered the song with a comic edge and was asked to join.

‘I started posturing at the front,’ Vivian said, ‘got the smell of it and started dominating a bit, singing lyrics out of newspapers – all very Dada.’ The actual date of the formation of the Bonzos was the night of 25 September 1962, when Rodney and Vivian decided to stay up late and listen to a transatlantic broadcast of a crucial boxing match between heavyweight fighters Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston in Cominsky Park, Chicago. The young musicians decided on the name of the band while they waited for the broadcast to begin. The fight lasted for two minutes and six seconds. The Bonzos clocked in at eight years. ‘Tom had come home to listen to the fight on the radio and brought Viv with him,’ explains Rodney. ‘We started talking about the things we liked and we all decided we’d like to have Viv as a member of our band. He couldn’t really play anything. He was just a character. He did have a guitar with him and plonked away but he was going to be the singer.’ Vivian readily admitted that he had not had any formal coaching in music: ‘No. I wish to God I had. I think if I had done, I wouldn’t have had the gall to make a row, I’m sure I wouldn’t,’ he later said. ‘As people dropped out in the old band, so I took over whatever was needed.’⁷

Their name was the Bonzo Dog Dada Band, in honour of both the artist George Studdy’s popular cartoon dog Bonzo and the Dada art movement. The Dadaists sought to overturn preconceived ideas about what art should be. With his 1917 piece, ‘Fountain’, one of the leading lights of Dada, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), took an ordinary urinal, signed it ‘R. Mutt’ and submitted it to a New York exhibition, causing outrage and consternation when it was predictably rejected. By decreeing that it was art, he said, surely the artist has then made it art? It was this sense of fun and anarchic rule-breaking that was alive in the Bonzos. What they wanted to say or play was always going to be more important than appearing to be the best in the neighbourhood, or the highest paid. Like the Dadaists, the Bonzos had a love of their medium and similarly refused to stick with one style, moving from jazz to rock as the mood took them, continually experimenting and provoking their audience. Both Duchamp and Stanshall produced relatively little work, much of which was deceptively simple. They were fond of using puns, private in-jokes and references, wilfully obscure symbols and lots of innuendo.

The ‘art-school Dadaism thing’, as Bonzo Roger Spear puts it, was also the inspiration for some of the weird and wonderful effects. ‘We used to use everyday things to confuse people. Instead of “Mr Jones” on a name plate outside a house, you’d put “Shopping Bag”. Shirts and trousers – they’re just good names. In fact I once bought a house, went up into the attic and there was a trouser press.’ Roger immediately used it in the band. The Dadaists also created machines, as Roger would later do in the band. In 1959, Duchamp put together ‘Rotoreliefs’, machines powering discs with patterns on them. As they rotated, they would give the impression of three-dimensional images.

The musicians quickly tired of explaining what Dada was about and the band became the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band and then just the plain old Bonzo Dog Band by 1968. Stanshall commented: ‘I’m tired of people joking with the name. I remember a chap at school called Smellit who kept mice. His life was made hell. Yet the bullies were called Sagger and Belcher.’

As for the Doo Dah, Rodney Slater says: ‘I never came across anyone who used those words “Doo Dah”’ except my mother, who used them all the time: “Oh, fetch me the doodah.” When Rod met Vivian, he was surprised to hear him using the same quaint expressions. ‘We both loved these strange expressions people used in different parts of the country.’ At Maida Vale tube station one day, they heard that the train was cancelled. ‘Bugger my rags,’ exclaimed Rodney. Vivian had never heard that expression and he ‘literally lay on the floor and was uncontrollable. Anything like that really made him laugh.’ Vivian introduced him to Southend expressions. Vivian was fascinated by language and was always developing his vocabulary. During the first three years of the band’s existence he went to night school to catch up with everything he’d missed out on at school. He studied English literature and German at night school and was very serious about it, going to the evening class before he’d go to the pub.

‘He adored Hitler’s speeches,’ says Rodney. ‘Not because of what was said in them, but the way he delivered them. It was the hysteria that he created which Viv loved. He’d sit there listening to these speeches and began acting them out himself. We even painted a huge swastika on the ceiling of the flat we shared. You could see it from the street, if you knew where to look up at the first floor. There was this red ceiling with a big black swastika on a white background.’ They shared the same sense of humour, danger and the ridiculous: on one occasion they returned to their flat from the pub by lying down in the middle of the road and rolling through Dulwich Village all the way home.

Until the end of 1962, the band line-up featured Vivian (mega-phone), Rodney Slater (clarinet), Roger Wilkes (tenor horn), Tom Parkinson (sousaphone), Trevor Brown (banjo), Chris Jennings (trombone) and a drummer from St Martin’s called Tom Hedges, plus any number of friends stopping in on a temporary basis. The students played at the Prince of Wales, a pub in Notting Hill Gate, and during intervals at St Martin’s School of Art, at Central School of Art, the Royal College of Art and Camberwell College of Art. Most of the students from these colleges scattered across London would descend on the Royal College on Friday nights intent on tanking up. The main hall had a big stage and an upstairs bar which could cater for three hundred people. Rehearsals for the band were either on the main stage or in a room above the hall and people would drop in to hear them playing.

They were treated to a highly erratic form of 1920s jazz, far removed from the straight style of the big trad act of the time, the Temperance Seven, fronted by Paul McDowell. Vivian had a feel for comedy and within a couple of months he started to dress up. For ‘Sheik of Araby’ he’d wear a large Arab head-dress. He was a natural comic, making wonderful stage entrances and provoking laughter in the audience before reaching the microphone. It was fun, but it was strictly a hobby, an excuse for anyone to join and ‘make a row’, as the band called it. Something to get away from studying. Art schools played a vitally important role in the development of the British pop and rock scene. The Who, the Kinks, even blues bands like the Pretty Things, Yardbirds and Cream, had art-school origins. The colleges provided a kind of support structure for a breed of highly motivated, energized youngsters desperately seeking opportunities for self-expression. If the hard graft of painting, drawing and design became too demanding, playing music provided a more instantly satisfying lifestyle. Art colleges underpinned the British music industry, providing grants, entertainment budgets, rehearsal facilities, venues and a ready audience.

Music-making could also be a distraction from art. Vivian wanted to be a great artist, his music always a secondary concern, no matter how well he did. ‘Painting was so important to him that if he couldn’t do it – it would have killed him,’ says Ki Longfellow, Vivian’s second wife. ‘So it didn’t matter if he fucked up the music side and wasn’t taken seriously because that’s not who he was. He could play at being a pop star or play at being a lyricist. If he failed as a painter, then he would have been a real failure as an artist. But he didn’t fail as a painter – because he didn’t paint! What he did do was spend the rest of his life being diverted from what he really was. That’s what he regretted.’

Vivian’s personality was beginning to blossom now he was free of his suburban roots. His role as the singer with a bunch of musical iconoclasts gave him the opportunity to be as expressive, funny and outrageous as he liked. Instead of being shouted at, criticized or punished, he was applauded. When he took to the stage and began singing and ad libbing his well-rounded vowels and distinct enunciation were assets rather than liabilities. The band stood out so much off stage, they barely needed to dress up for performances. Vivian favoured large, flat, cloth working men’s caps or period smoking jackets, while smart double-breasted suits worn with white shoes and his hair parted in the middle gave him the appearance of a raffish gangster. He habitually wore large and ostentatious spectacles and even donned false ears and eyes from his favourite joke shop. It was an altogether more interesting outfit than the duffle coat-topped ensemble donned by the average 1960s beatnik. The major influences on early Bonzo performances cited by Vivian were pioneering comedy band the Alberts, whose ‘Sleepy Valley’ he bought as a youngster, and commedia dell’ arte, a theatrical movement that flourished in the Italian renaissance. The Alberts, together with ‘Professor’ Bruce Lacey, had been giving concerts that mined a surreal comedy seam some years before the Bonzos. In 1962 they had recorded for EMI such pleasantly daft items as ‘Morse Code Melody’ and they too had a striking stage act.

Like the Bonzos, Bruce Lacey collected traditional-jazz instruments. He too had an art-school background, coming out of the Royal College of Art with a degree in painting in 1954. He started doing cabaret, using props such as exploding pianos, and the Alberts provided music for his humour while he created the visual imagery for their act. They played 1920s jazz and music-hall songs, dressing up in Victorian costumes. The Alberts worked with Bruce for some years, staging ‘An Evening of British Rubbish’ at the Comedy Theatre in 1962. This gig was particularly influential for the Bonzos. Their tuba player, Tom Parkinson, who also did pyrotechnics for the Alberts, took along Roger Wilkes and Vivian to see the band play. Seated right in the front row, Vivian loved every minute.

‘He started to dress in Victorian or Edwardian costume too, except the hats got bigger and his beard got longer!’ says Roger. Sometimes the Alberts would augment their ranks with other musician chums, playing as the Massed Alberts for charity shows. The Temperance Seven and later the Bonzos were among their guests. Bruce Lacey himself thinks that he and the Alberts showed the Bonzos ‘a genre in which they could work’ and was at times ‘rather pissed off’ because he saw more than a few of his ideas being used by the Bonzos. Bruce made props for the Goons and television shows by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine in the late 1950s. He made a robot called Rosa Bosom, who appeared as the Queen of France when the Alberts did a version of The Three Musketeers at the Royal Court theatre in London. Two other robots he called ‘Electric Actors’, one of which used to sing ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’ while puffing out bubbles from its chest. Roger Spear made a very similar machine for the Bonzos’ stage show, to Lacey’s annoyance. In turn, the Bonzos were piqued when another trad act, the New Vaudeville Band, came on the scene and stole their thunder with ‘Winchester Cathedral’. The truth was that the influences stretched back many years: bands such as Spike Jones and his City Slickers had been doing energetic parody numbers decades before the Alberts themselves.

Under the influence of watching the Alberts in action, Wilkes added tunes like ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’ to the Bonzo repertoire and Tom began using a sousaphone on stage. Thursday at the Royal College of Art was reserved for practice night and the band was beginning to build up a set. They started to use explosions between numbers, like the Alberts. The first incarnation of the Bonzos had little time to perfect a set before band activity came to an abrupt halt around Christmas of 1962. The crisis was provoked by the sudden eviction of Vivian, Rodney and Tom. Their landlord took exception to the students’ lifestyle, particularly their experiments in making scrumpy cider. Vivian suggested they use the fruit of a pear tree in the garden to brew some booze. They stripped the tree of pears, which they put in the bath.

‘We added a few bags of sugar and waited for something to happen,’ laughs Rodney. ‘All that happened was nobody had a bath for two months because of this mess.’ This was not the only aggravation caused by the troublesome tenants. One night Rodney caused a deafening explosion in the communal toilet bowl. ‘I used an electric match packed with flash powder,’ he reports. ‘The instructions were: “Never let one off in an enclosed space.” So I did it just to see what would happen. It cracked the bog. So that was another black mark.’ The landlord finally asked the band to get out.

The band members recovered their poise to recruit more musicians. Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell (born 1932) was working as a lecturer and rented a flat opposite Goldsmiths College in New Cross, south London. He was older than the rest of the band, which meant he was the butt of many ageist jokes, but he was a good musician whose Home Counties accent was a match for Vivian’s. Unique among Bonzos, Vernon owned a car, which proved very useful to Vivian, who never learned to drive. Vernon brought another asset to the band. He was letting a room to a friendly young student called Neil Innes (born 1944), who happened to play the piano.

Neil was a gifted musician, who studied piano from the age of seven until he was fourteen, when he decided to switch to guitar. He bought himself a particularly cheap example. ‘It was such a bad instrument I thought it was really difficult playing guitar. It was more like playing an egg slicer. I put music to one side because I got more interested in painting.’ At the age of eighteen, Neil went to Goldsmiths, where he met Vernon. Neil recalls being ‘a bit smothered’ when he too was invited to join the band. ‘I just pounded away with the chords on the piano while others went mad on saxes and tubas.’ He could also sightread music – the ‘dots’ were largely a mystery to Vivian. First introduced to the Bonzo singer at the New Cross Arms, Neil was intrigued. ‘Viv was in his large phase. He had trousers like Billy Bunter and wore a Victorian frock coat and horrible purple pince nez glasses and carried a euphonium under his arm. He also had large false rubber ears on. The music was awful. Dreadful row. We used to rehearse up there in the canteen with a lot of people who came and went. It was very confusing.’ The Bonzos started as they meant to go on: noisy and loose. Their skill lay in developing a polished act which allowed for improvisation. The cheerful incompetence was in part exaggerated for comic effect, though which parts were exaggerated was not always clear either to band or audience. In these early days, they were far more ramshackle than they later pretended to be.

By this time, Vivian was squatting in a large Victorian house in Chalk Farm, near the legendary Roundhouse venue. Roger also took a room there and when Rodney popped over, the three would have a jam session. The next house Vivian moved to had no windows and was freezing cold, but ‘he put up with it’, says Roger, ‘and I think he could easily have ended up living on the streets and enjoying it’. The line-up was similarly changing. Rodney was back, Vernon was a permanent member, mainly on banjo, and Roger had found a new percussion man, Martin Ash. His skill with playing cutlery, as much visual as musical, led to him adopting the stage name Sam Spoons. He improvised instruments with a cast-iron banister ‘borrowed’ from one of the stairwells in the Royal College, with weightlifter’s bars fitted to the bottom. Brackets were salvaged from old pianos and from them hung cymbals. Says Roger: ‘Sam was hilarious and fitted the band perfectly.’ Sam was also a more successful art student than Vivian, who found that very hard to cope with.

‘The ultimate was to apply for the Royal College of Art,’ says Vernon. ‘If you could get in there you could lead a wonderful life for another three years. Sam got in. Viv didn’t. He hated the idea of Sam being his superior.’ Mostly, though, the band were just having fun. Their first pub gig was at the Warwick Arms in the Portobello Road, west London, which Sam had procured as he lived just around the corner. Vernon and Neil found a regular gig at the Bird in Hand in Forest Hill. When they began playing a regular Kensington Arms gig they were spotted by Roger Ruskin Spear (born 1943). The son of a Royal Academician artist, Roger played the saxophone in 1920s-style jazz bands. He came to see the Bonzos with his trumpeter friend Lenny Williams in tow.

‘I couldn’t believe anyone was that bad,’ recalls Roger with awe. In the context of a stuffy trad-jazz scene, where most bands were note-perfect but played with no passion, the Bonzos represented freedom and fun. Another friend who sometimes played in the band, Sid Nichols, introduced Roger. That night he and Lenny sat in for a session and the arrangement became permanent. Roger thought the props the band were using were fantastic, particularly Vivian’s take on the Temperance Seven’s life-sized dancing doll. Only the Temps’ doll was an exquisitely made Victorian beauty, while Vivian’s, christened Alma, was a rough papier mâché bird, a ‘grotesque woman covered in warts’ according to Roger. Vivian danced romantically with the doll attached to his feet.

With a background of study both in the sciences and art, Roger was uniquely placed to take the Bonzos beyond Albert-copying in terms of robotic props and with ever more dangerous explosions. The band became more popular as they gained experience. They were asked to play a lavish twenty-first-birthday party, held in a large private house in Kensington, at which Vivian turned up roaring drunk and promptly collapsed on the carpet. The band had to play without him.

By early 1963, Roger Wilkes graduated from the Royal College and left the band to concentrate on his career as a furniture designer, under pressure from his girlfriend, Rosalyn. She came along to a gig immaculately clad, with a mink stole. The band generally behaved so badly they all found it difficult to keep girlfriends and on this occasion they were so coarse they were thrown out of the venue. Rosalyn made it abundantly clear to Roger that she did not care much for their lifestyle, and so he bowed out, to be replaced by Bob Kerr, on cornet and trumpet.

Rodney Slater was coming to the end of his course and Vivian had one more year to go at Central. Now established enough in the band to make his opinions known, he took the opportunity to create further line-up changes by picking on their trombone player, John Parry. Vivian was ‘a terrible snob’, says Vernon, ‘and so anybody like John, who didn’t have a degree, was in “a different class’”. Vivian criticized Parry’s playing, his punctuality and his ‘cheap trombone’. When Parry crashed his scooter on the way to a gig, Vivian sent a letter to sack him while he was in hospital.

The band got a new regular gig at the Tiger’s Head in Catford. It was bigger than the Bird in Hand and the band now included Syd Nichols, the replacement for John Parry. Syd and Vernon would alternate on tunes like ‘Tiger Rag’, played at tremendous speed. The band rocketed through old novelty numbers such as ‘Ali Baba’s Camel’, ‘Little Sir Echo’ or ‘When Yuba Played the Rumba on the Tuba Down in Cuba’. They were developing an original cabaret act of manic invention. A typical evening began with an extremely slow and sombre version of ‘Rule Britannia’, accompanied by the Queen Machine. This contraption gave a series of Royal Waves, until the climax of the anthem, when a shattering explosion ‘invariably got the audience’s attention’, recalls Neil Innes. It also set the tone for the evening, which passed in a bewildering stream of explosions and maniacal playing, supported by props, visual gags, shouting, abuse and yet more explosions, so many that some in the band later developed severe tinnitus, Vivian among them.

They discovered that if they taped their explosives more loosely they got a red flash and lots of smoke. Roger had a wind-up gramophone case on stage and he would wire up the fuse, put it in the case and let it go off. The case gradually filled with flash powder, which was very sticky. One night at the Tiger’s Head somebody dropped a lighted cigarette end into the case and it all lit up and burned ferociously. ‘I’ve never seen a pub empty so quickly,’ says Vernon. ‘They all went outside with their pints and had to wait for half an hour before the smoke cleared!’ All these explosions and fires did at least mean they could frighten an unruly or unappreciative audience into submission. The rush of bangs, the cartoon speech bubbles held up, the props – it all came at a dizzying pace. Between and indeed during the numbers there was all manner of comedy business as the band dressed up as camel drivers, policemen, ice-cream salesmen, sword swallowers and tap dancers. Sam used three wooden blocks for an old music-hall routine, appearing to be juggling the blocks, while one was attached to his belt.

For the audience, the show was exhilarating, shocking and hilarious. An early set list gives an idea of a typical gig. It starts off with a number which has, inevitably, ‘explosion’ written against it. Their choice of tunes that night included ‘Ain’t She Sweet’, ‘Bubbles’, ‘Abie’, ‘Alexander’s Rag-time Band’, ‘Whispering’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Ukulele Lady’, ‘Sheik of Araby’, ‘Bill Bailey’ and ‘Tiger Rag’. The Bonzos alternated between ‘fast’, ‘slow’, ‘novelty’ and ‘waltz’. Halfway down the list was marked ‘Military medley’ and, in brackets underlined twice, an ominous ‘pyrotechnics etc.’. They ended with ‘There’ll Always be an England’.

Whenever the band needed a new number, they would go out and scour the second-hand shops for a song with a silly name. Spotting ‘I’m Going to Bring a Watermelon to My Girl Tonight’, they’d hand over a few pence for the sheet music and it would become another Bonzo favourite. Few people in the average pub crowd had been exposed to much in the way of ‘live’ theatre or come across such apparently exotic characters outside of a music hall. Stanshall’s stage persona in particular seemed to change before their eyes. He was sophisticated, knowing, worldly and effete; then crude, coarse and streetwise. The effect was mesmerizing. Audiences sat entranced by the spectacle. The songs, gags and routines took hours to work out and the band put in many anxious hours to improve the performance. Their reward was gales of laughter. Even Vivian’s father might have been mesmerized and cracked a smile, had he turned up. Vivian’s brother Mark, then running antique shops in London, came down to the Tiger’s Head to see the band, who also played three gigs a week at the Deuragon Arms in Hackney. It meant cranking out a lunchtime gig, rehearsing all afternoon and then rushing over to the Tiger’s Head for an evening show. Landlords were happy to have them, as people bought much more booze during the show, and the band were actually making something of a living: a whole £25 a night in some venues. They were the envy of any impoverished student, still at college, but earning the equivalent of the national wage.

‘Until the year I was taking my finals we were working six nights a week,’ said Vivian. ‘At an earlier stage, from the Royal College days, the band consisted of maybe forty people with the same attitude and it didn’t really matter if they could play or not. I can remember turning up at some boozer which was so tiny and the stage was so packed that we performed along the top of the bar. Sometimes there’d be one pianist and nine banjo players. You never knew who was turning up. Eventually people would say, “I’m an artist” and drop out. As far as I was concerned what we were doing was merely an extension of what we were doing as artists and a damn sight more fun. So it just narrowed down to those of us who weren’t serious about “art” in the context of art school.’

It became increasingly obvious that Vivian Stanshall had a real talent for mime, mimicry and visual comedy. Long before the age of professional Elvis lookalikes, he loved to offer skilful imitations of Presley, even at the risk of causing offence to teddy boys, who loudly protested at his mockery of the King. Most audiences howled at Viv’s increasingly clever and theatrical performances. This was not just the result of art-student foolery. He took his craft more seriously than anyone knew, spending the summer of 1965 at the Edinburgh Festival studying with the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, whom he had met at the Central School of Art. It was the same Kemp who later took David Bowie under his wing.

Kemp’s show, ‘Bubbles’, was at the Traverse Theatre Club over the summer. Andy Roberts, guitarist with the group Liverpool Scene at the time, remembers Vivian as ‘a pasty-faced chap’ on stage. There was lots of Marcel Marceau-style material, involving pretending to be trapped in a box and similar routines. ‘The show was sly, camp, gentle and revealing,’ says Andy. ‘Viv looked stunning in white face and he did these epigrammatic interludes where he came on playing the euphonium and stopped to say something like “Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down”. Then he’d play the euphonium and walk off.’ By the time Vivian returned to London, Neil and Vernon had found new gigs, at which an emboldened Vivian showed off the vastly improved theatrical and mime techniques he had learned with Kemp. He started faking a strip routine to ‘Falling in Love Again’. He mimed taking off everything, including breasts, which were tossed camply over his shoulder. At this point Sam generally came in with a cymbal crash. The other band members added their own unique parts to the atmosphere: when Vivian went into a dance routine, Roger Spear enhanced the act with a home-made strobe light, a clever creation from a simple baked-bean can with holes in, through which a light was directed. It gave the effect of Vivian dancing in a silentmovie scene. Audiences were stunned. Nobody had used such effects in a live pop music performance before.

‘The first time we used it the band couldn’t play because it was so bloody funny,’ says Rodney. ‘It looked so real. Viv would do a lot of things like that.’ Often it was ad libbed. Sometimes he did a routine about famous artists, becoming Manet the Jewish boy or Pissarro the Irish impresario. They were all names he would change around to much hilarity from the band, who were often as impressed as the audience. He also improvised a complex routine around a spoof of Raymond Chandler private investigators, which became a Bonzo album track, ‘Big Shot’, a number he sprung on the band during a gig. The Bonzo Dog Band were really coming together and would be complete with the addition of one more, flamboyant, member.