Читать книгу Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall - Chris Welch - Страница 8

The Bonzos became more polished and their parodies of characterless pop and jazz more accurate. They turned their attention to the smarmy excesses of perma-tanned showbiz stars who affected mid-Atlantic drawls and exuded insincerity from every heavily made-up pore. In pricking the bubble of the self-important, Vivian had the perfect partner in his friend Larry Smith. The two improvised high camp satires of the starry elite, nowhere better than on ‘Look at Me I’m Wonderful’, from the Keynsham album of 1969. It featured Larry as the archetypal entertainer, beautifying himself for his big show.

Rapping on the dressing-room door, a stagehand alerts Larry Smith, busy applying his makeup. Time for the star to go on stage and face his public. Larry needs no encouragement. If anybody is going to upstage Vivian Stanshall and the band it will be the very gorgeous Mr Smith. ‘Look at Me I’m Wonderful’ reflected the exuberant personalities of its writer and its performer. Larry and Vivian became friends early on in their college days. They shared the same sense of humour and a similar need for attention. Larry brought charm and a touch of class to the band when he joined at Vivian’s request.

Larry Smith (born 1944) was a lively tap dancer – earning himself the nickname ‘Legs’ – a driving drummer and enthusiastic tuba player. He could also sing, but his main role was to smile sweetly at the audience, strike coquettish poses and break the ice at parties. He was a perfect foil for Vivian, both on and off stage. They wound people up with their saucy double act, some thinking they were gay, when both had a roving eye for the ladies. It amused them to let people think otherwise. They visited pubs and picked each other up, arriving separately and standing at either end of the bar, waving coyly. Vivian would beckon over the barman and say, ‘Excuse me, would you ask that nice-looking gentleman if I could buy him a drink?’ They were slung out of more than one pub for their efforts.

Larry was the band’s number-one fan at their Kensington Hotel gigs for months before Vivian invited him to join in 1963. ‘I am writing this on stage, dodging kisses while roses are being sprinkled at my feet,’ he wrote. ‘We are making eight pounds a week each. You can stay with me and you can learn the tuba.’ Instead, Larry went to America in 1964, when he still had a year at college to go. He thought then he would be an advertising executive. He was offered a job at an agency in New York, which he initially intended to take up when he left college. On his return, Larry shared lodgings in Islington with Vivian.

‘We would take about three hours to get ready to go out,’ says Larry. ‘Viv would be poncing himself up as Oscar Wilde and I’d be poncing myself up as Scott Fitzgerald. We both wore spats, collars, waistcoats and studs. Then we’d go out. We ran the gauntlet of abusive lorry drivers and building workers as we walked down the street.’ The two would often mince down to the Turkish Baths, then in Kingsway, and pamper themselves.

‘We developed a great empathy,’ says Larry. ‘Absolutely. There were times when Viv and I were on stage in the band doing these duets which were wonderful. We were very tight and emotionally involved and we knew what each other was thinking, so it was lots of fun.’ Whenever the two did fall out, it was over who was getting more attention.

Tuba player Ray Lewitt joined the long line of ex-Bonzos early in 1966 and Vivian finally got Larry in. He was not much good on the tuba, but was a fantastic tap dancer. When Vernon sang ‘You’re the Cream in My Coffee’, he added the line ‘When I see Larry dancing…’ at which point ‘Legs’ would appear sporting a magnificent pair of fake boobs. He took to wearing American football shoulder pads and carried a Charlie Chaplin cane. His wild routines were a highlight of many Bonzo numbers, notably the splendid ‘Hello Mabel’. Busking with Vivian in Holborn tube station on the Central Line, he developed his act. ‘That was because the echoing sound was fantastic,’ says Larry. ‘The marble floors were fabulous for tapping. I would tap dance for the punters as they came home at night in the rush hour. Viv took the hat round and then we’d go off for a drink.’

The Bonzos did not believe they would make a professional living out of the band. Careers came first. Vivian and Larry were offered jobs heading a design company in Italy. Their new start rather clashed with another keen interest: drinking. Vivian very quickly showed the effects: a relatively small amount was enough to change his patterns of speech and he could put away huge quantities when he wanted. The two friends behaved disgracefully at a party given for new London employees and could hardly stagger back to the Islington flat. Larry just about opened the door as Vivian had by this time passed out. Some of the other party-goers literally dragged him upstairs by his arm and accidentally dislocated it. Vivian later discovered that when he executed some funky move on stage with the microphone, his shoulder on occasion came out of its socket. This unnerving ability to dislocate limbs was one of the few things he shared with the other members of his family. Both his father and brother Mark could do it, although neither of them could dislodge so many bits and so spectacularly as Vivian. Grisly surgery proved to be the only effective treatment eventually, in which the arm was cut off and reattached.

That night in Islington also led directly to the swift retraction of the job offer. Instead of design in Milan, Vivian and Larry looked to the Bonzos for future employment. The band looked more inviting as each member realized he did not wish to continue as an artist. Vivian wanted to stay at college. Roger Spear and Neil lent him some paintings for his postgraduate show, which he passed, receiving a grant for a further year. It was a smart trick: ‘He was a first-division rascal,’ laughs Neil. ‘He could rascal for the nation at Olympic level. Like a lot of people who are basically ruthless, he had a sentimental streak. But once he was up and running nothing could get in his way. He was probably too ambitious.’

To take the band to a professional level, they needed a manager. Reg Tracey was the first of a series who had the thankless task of trying to keep them in order. They met him over Easter 1966 at the Tiger’s Head pub in Catford, signing during their first club tour in the summer. True to form, they were all very drunk when pens were put to paper. Reg made much of the fact that he was the brother-in-law of Kenny Ball, a top British jazz trumpeter and bandleader. Poor old Reg. The Bonzos were tight-knit, as together as any gang Vivian could have wished to be a part of back in Southend. Outsiders had to work hard and Reg’s chances weren’t helped by his voice. A take-off of his unbearably dull tones can be heard on Keynsham’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by “Bachelors’”. ‘So the boys got together and formed a band,’ drones the voice, ‘fate played the straight man and since then they’ve never looked back.’¹ The way Reg spoke was so entertaining for the band that it was a major factor (apart from the booze) in ensuring he became the Bonzo’s manager. He had contacts with the influential Bailey Brothers club circuit and organized a tour for the band after they finished college in the summer. It was a superb training ground. They could play, drink cheap booze and see starring acts such as Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Louis Armstrong. They took just one day out to organize a show that was to form the basis of their regular act for the next five years.

Reg quickly secured the band a deal with Parlophone Records. In April 1966, they recorded their first single, a splendidly raucous performance of the 1920s classic ‘My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies’. The record begins with a tremendous crashing and banging sound. The row was supplied by the Bonzos’ own Rowmonium, a box filled with metal which they took on the road in order to make even more noise whenever possible. The Bonzos’ reading of the song was energetic and high-spirited, capturing their live feel and filled with the special-effect noises of the title. ‘Talkies…’ was backed by ‘I’m Going to Bring a Watermelon to My Girl Tonight’. It was much played on the radio, which made up for its failure to hit the charts. The band made their first TV appearances on ‘Thank Your Lucky Stars’, ‘Blue Peter’ and ‘Late Night Line-up’.

The press began to sit up and take notice of these upstart exstudents. Journalist and author Chris Welch first saw them performing at the Tiger’s Head in April 1966 and wrote an enthusiastic feature on the Bonzos for Melody Maker. A banner headline proclaimed ‘Musical Mayhem’ above a picture of a nine-piece incarnation of the band. Vivian appeared clutching a tiny ukulele, Rodney played what looked like a combination of a sax and clarinet and Neil Innes seemed to be playing the world’s smallest saxophone, no bigger than a kazoo. Comparing the band to established acts, he told the paper: ‘We’re not doing a Temperance Seven – we’re murdering the Temperance Seven!’ The MM had discovered the band entirely by chance, the Tiger’s Head being only a mile away from Chris Welch’s home in Catford. It was a Sunday evening when he took sister Margaret and cousin Terry to the pub at the end of Whitefoot Lane for a quiet family drink. They were sitting in the bar overlooking the main road when they heard the sound of a clarinet being played – or tortured – in the rear lounge. The pub often hosted visiting jazz groups. But this kind of clarinet playing broke all the rules; the squealing, whooping and wailing noises seemed more suited to a circus act.

‘As the band began to play a trickle of customers found a way in,’ Chris wrote later. ‘But we scarcely noticed as the tables filled up. We were transfixed by the performance. The first number may have been “Tiger Rag”. At any rate it was loosely traditional jazz and the band stomped through with incredible energy and amazing cheek. It wasn’t the horrid untogetherness of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, because some of the Bonzos could play very well and the rest tried hard and knew the right noises to make. It was raucous and funny and a just retribution for every trad band that took a break and cried, “Oh, play that thing!”’

The Bonzos looked to the north for their next move and with Tracey’s connections, they embarked on a training that would earn them a little more money and make them a whole lot more accomplished. They were moving up a gear. The band’s first fully professional nightclub engagement was at La Dolce Vita, Newcastle, and it was non-stop from then on. ‘We did two shows a night, driving hundreds of miles from one gig to the next,’ says Neil. ‘Looking back I don’t know how we did it. I’m sure that’s what made us all loonies!’ Life on the northern club circuit was a profound culture shock. These Home Counties lads with their southern ways and posh accents were unprepared for the plain-speaking northern club crews. The Bonzos honed a tight-knit show in their intensive schedule that was far ahead of the average cabaret act. It was here that much of their best material was developed. When London swung in the late 1960s, the Bonzos’ surreal material, their vivid clothes and energy in performing led many to assume they were part of the psychedelic scene, but the band were not inclined to conform to youth movements any more than they were to the Establishment. Dada and the club circuit were the influences, not fashion or recreational drugs, though most of the band were enthusiastic drinkers.

The booming world of the northern clubs, with its mixture of the glamorous and the down-to-earth, became the butt of comedians’ jokes and was celebrated with a TV series, ‘The Wheel Tappers and Shunters Club’, complete with typical master of ceremonies in a flat cap. The atmosphere was also captured on the Bonzo track ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by “Bachelors’”, the title taken from a Marcel Duchamp work of 1923 which depicted the kind of mad machines Roger Spear might later have dreamed of making. Jointly composed by Stanshall and Innes, it was a world-weary re-creation in song of the band’s experiences on arriving at yet another club up north.

‘Bride…’ is based largely on the Greaseborough Social Club where, says Neil, cabaret acts were introduced with a certain lack of ceremony. ‘The chap with the flat cap would sit there, tap and blow into the microphone and say, “Kindly bring your empty glasses back to the bar. Hot dogs on sale in the foyer. And now here’s Yana.” And if the people were still talking he’d say, “Come on, give the poor cow a chance.”’ That typical club proprietor voice is in the song: ‘Eh, lads, welcome t’club…’²

The Bonzos were invariably exhausted when they set up at a new venue: ‘We arrived at the gig looking rough,’ they sing on ‘Bride’, ‘not happy, we’d all had enough: of eight hours on the road.’³ The accommodation itself was not much of a sanctuary on tour. Most guest houses had never seen anything like the Bonzos. While they were at Batley Variety Club, they stayed in the same digs for a whole week. The couple who ran it were particularly friendly and as the band’s engagement drew to a close, the lads asked the husband if the two of them would like to come and see the show.

‘I’d love to come,’ replied the husband, explaining apologetically, ‘but the wife, she doesn’t like animal acts.’ The band fell about – not least because they just could not work out where the wife thought this ‘animal act’ had hidden its Bonzo dogs for the last week. Hotel receptions were ‘empty and cold, with horrid red wallpaper forty years old’, as they sing on ‘Bride…’. These places ‘stank like a rhino house’.⁴ In the morning, the band would be breakfasting with anyone from Tina and Tom the knife-throwing couple to Johnny and Bernice the singing jugglers, who did magic with budgerigars: ‘We enjoyed these dreadful stage acts we saw every night,’ says Larry.

The song also features a chilling reminder of the conditions the band faced in the back of the van travelling between these venues – ‘Mr Slater said, “Poo! I can smell vindaloo”.’⁵ Most of the other Bonzos shared Vivian’s crude fascination with bodily noises. ‘When he had money he’d go out to the best restaurants. He would eat and drink and then after the meal he would give out this incredibly loud belch,’ recalls Roger Wilkes. ‘It was like this belching rasp, and he’d just sit there and wait for the reaction. Farting was his other great hobby.’ Anybody who could let go with a real trouser-trembler was okay in Vivian’s book. This was the reason he respected Sam Spoons.

‘There’s one great thing about Sam. We were on tour one day and we were all in the minibus and Sam farted,’ Vivian told Roger Wilkes. ‘It was the most vile stench and so bad we had to stop the bus and get out. It was the greatest thing he ever did. I admire anyone who can fart like that!’ It was another reason why the band found it difficult to keep girlfriends. Vivian, the most daring curry eater in the band, was also the windiest. ‘On the road these dreadful oriental smells would come from the back of the van,’ says Rodney. There would be a muted chuckle from the back and a cheerful, ‘Sorry, dear boy!’ The boys also started having conversations in belches. Everyone would join in and ended up with their stomachs in knots. Vivian could recite the alphabet in belches and he got the gold medal when he managed to get his intestines around ‘Birmingham’. During later solo gigs, Vivian often sat down at the piano on stage to play a tune, farted, then turned to the audience to explain, ‘That was a bum note.’

‘The Bride Stripped Bare…’ follows the band to the venue, telling how their loyal road crew sets up the band’s equipment at the venue, where a poster bills them as the ‘Dopal Show’ who will appear ‘in person as themselves, woof, woof!’⁶ The full billing for the band at one place had actually been ‘Bonsa Doz Do-Pal Showband’. But when you think that a busy northern club promoter would be trying to take ‘Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’ down over the phone from a southern art student, ‘Bonsa Do-Pal’ was a pretty good guess. As ‘The Bride…’ goes into the coda, it develops into a chorus of threats and warnings, all clearly ingrained on the band’s collective consciousness from their time on the northern circuit: ‘You can have a drink in your dressing room, lads, but you can’t come into the club looking like that!’, ‘Any artiste mentioning football will be paid off immediately’, ‘It’s not me, lads. It’s the management that makes the rules’ and ‘That’s a brand-new scratch on the piano. Cost you £75 to put that right.’⁷ The scratch came from a routine the band developed around ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, and was a gag Vivian would return to many times in his career. There would be a huge explosion during the song, the musicians would all stop playing and start to mime, as if the sound had cut. There was complete silence. Only Vivian appeared to be aware of this, as the band carried on pretending to play. He’d look around for inspiration and then, as if the Bonzos were a stuck record, he’d kick the stage and they’d all start playing again. There was nothing to kick at Greaseborough except the grand piano. The owner was outraged. ‘If there’s a scratch on that grand piano we’re docking your pay.’ They learned more useful lessons from other performers. Initially reluctant to be told what to do, they eventually became enthusiastic about some tricks, such as rehearsing for a special trick ending, or ‘false tab’, as the regulars on the circuit called it.

There was also plenty of time for drinking. ‘We would do these cabaret clubs and have a drink at the bar after the show,’ says Larry. ‘Then at 1 a.m., the bar would close and we’d carry on drinking with the management. So although we wouldn’t get drunk before a show, we had a lot afterwards.’ During the day on tour, there was not an awful lot to do, other than go back to the club where all the gear was still set up and rehearse and work out numbers. The professional status also brought a little bit more money for the band. ‘Now we get £100 a performance,’ Vivian told an interviewer, ‘so we’re all having our clothes made. We’ve added a lot of porridge, a lot of fruit and veg, sequins, rhinestones and things.’ The hundred-mile (or more) journeys between gigs were less fun, stuck in an overcrowded and increasingly smelly vehicle, but there were ways of diverting themselves in the large, left-hand-drive Daimler ambulance that Vernon used to transport the band. When Vivian rode in the right-hand front passenger seat, he fixed a dummy steering wheel in position and pretended to drive, while leaning out of the window and glugging from a bottle of whisky. Vernon secretly steered the ambulance in a suitably erratic fashion, zig-zagging down the road. Passing motorists were horrified to see what looked like a drunken maniac at the wheel.

The ambulance was an ancient beast, with a three-ton concrete floor, so it could not be turned over. In its previous incarnation, the floors were designed so the patients would have a smooth ride. Three lucky band members sat up front while the rest, in the back, perched on ordinary kitchen chairs. None of these chairs was fixed to the floor. Every time the ambulance approached a roundabout, often at about fifty miles an hour, the hapless passengers in the back were alerted by a mocking chorus of oohs and aahs from the front. Chaos reigned as the van tilted sideways and chairs, band members and equipment flew in all directions. On other journeys, when being a Bonzo was all too much, the jolly characters who lit up the stage with their brilliant performances simply became grumpy young men who got on each other’s nerves.

The Bonzos developed their own techniques for coping with being cooped up. For one thing, there was the official ‘Bonzo certificate’: ‘This is to certify that _______ on ______ did behave vulgarly and bestially during a performance of the Bonzo Dog Band and he or she, whichever is applicable, is hereby titled Pig of the Day and is now eligible to compete for the title of Belcher of Britain 196_. “The noises of your bodies are a part of our play.”’ Another approach to relieve the tension was much more straightforward: ‘We used to have fits in the van where we’d all decided to scream,’ says Neil.

‘I thumped “Legs” Larry Smith once,’ says Rodney. ‘Viv hit him as well. It was terribly funny.’ Vivian and Neil, now the creative centre of the band, had a tremendous argument in a dressing room. Neil said, ‘Right, outside,’ and opened the door. Vivian strode out and just shut the door. ‘We all laughed so much it hurt,’ says Rodney. ‘Viv and Larry had a tremendous wrestling match in the back of the car once. It was just nonsense that erupted. Nobody got laid out.’

If the band did not let each other get away with anything, the people they met on their tours also treated them with a commendable lack of ceremony. Backstage at one of the working men’s clubs one night, Larry asked one of the local staff members, ‘I say, old boy, do you know where the loo is?’

‘Aye,’ replied the man and gave him directions. But when Larry got there, all he could see was one of those massive, old-fashioned, china sinks attached to the wall. He called out to the man again: ‘Couldn’t find the loo, old chap,’ he said. ‘All I could find was a bloody great sink.’

‘Aye,’ said the man, again. ‘That’s it.’

‘I couldn’t possibly piss in a sink!’ snapped Larry.

His interlocutor was unmoved. ‘Some of the biggest names in show business have pissed in that sink!’ came the curt reply. ‘We’ve had Shirley Bassey on there, Frank Sintra, Buddy Greeky, they’ve all been on there.’ An impressively inaccurate list of stars and particularly evocative in its inclusion of Ms Bassey. ‘If it’s good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you,’ he snapped, ending the conversation.

There were as many memorable moments for the band on stage. Neil remembers: ‘We had a marvellous week at the Ace of Clubs, Leeds.’ The venue had a rising stage which came up out of the floor to a height of two feet. On the second night someone thought it would be a good idea to switch it on.

‘We started rising at the front but not at the back. So Rodney’s effing and blinding and trying to protect his saxophones. He didn’t know which one to save first. The back was jammed and Roger pretended he was lying on the edge of a precipice. There was an almighty bang in the end when the back of the stage was released. Viv was in hysterics and couldn’t control himself.’ On another occasion, they set up on a rotating stage, which spun them around to reveal an audience who were throwing bottles and generally kicking off. The stage kept rotating and the band made a judicious exit without having played a note.

Vivian was in his element at the heart of the chaos. His commanding stature, his impish humour, his wild array of accents, the vocal and physical contortions and bizarre outfits, not to mention the array of instruments he played, completely won over audiences. Neil sat watching him, from the safety of his piano, with a mixture of nervous anticipation and wonder. If there were any hecklers in the audience, Vivian could dispatch them with ease. Looking down airily, as if they were simply impertinent subjects, he’d say something like, ‘You could give the kiss of life to a hippopotamus’, or ‘I don’t come round and interrupt you when you’re performing’, and invariably got away with it. He was simply being himself. In Manchester, as Vivian and Neil were leaving one of the many Indian restaurants they frequented, they met a little old lady along the street, pulling a wicker shopping basket on wheels. Stanshall dropped on one knee and started singing ‘One Alone’ to her. He went all the way through it: ‘One alone to be my own, I alone to know her caresses…’ and she listened. She might have whacked him or called a policeman. But at the end of the impromptu recital, the lady just said, ‘That was really nice. Thank you very much.’

‘It was really nice,’ affirms Neil. ‘He was being completely guileless. I remember watching him and getting a lump in the throat. Nobody else could have done that. But he was dangerous. He was dangerous the minute he went on stage. You had to watch him. You’d think, “What the hell is he going to do?” He might come out and say, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen. The next time I say that, I want you all to shout ‘Balls!’” And the audience would happily oblige. At one venue, the band ran across a comic from the circuit who was seated with his drink in the bar. He approached Vivian and glumly told him, ‘You know that thing where you get the audience to say “Balls”? I tried that in Jarrow and got paid off.’

‘Nobody else could do it like Viv,’ says Neil. ‘He was definitely our front man. Once, he got food poisoning in Sunderland from shellfish and he couldn’t possibly perform. The rest of us had to try and cope and I remember desperately trying to get through “Jollity Farm” without him and it was really hard work.’ At another club, Vivian was conducting the band with gusto and managed to dislocate his shoulder yet again. Larry Smith helped him away, pouring a large brandy down his throat. The ambulance men were called and Vivian was taken out of the club on a stretcher, getting the medics ‘to make it look as much like a straitjacket as possible’. With a blood capsule foaming away in Vivian’s mouth, they lifted him over the tables, much to the delight of the audience. ‘They all came up to touch the body. All theatre. And they said, “Bloody great! Aye, bloody great, champion.’”⁸

Vivian became used to certain conventions of performing that passed by sophisticated metropolitan types. BBC producer John Walters, a great champion of Stanshall, worked with the Bonzos on Radio 1 and made the mistake of thinking Stanshall would relish seeing a popular northern singer of the day called Lovelace Watkins. When a Lovelace show was announced at the Talk of the Town in London, John got tickets for himself and John Peel, their partners and Vivian. While the southern contingent prepared to enjoy an ironic view of events, the rest of the club was filled by the inevitable busloads of Lovelace’s northern fans. Vivian, accompanied by a girlfriend, arrived wearing a kind of string bow tie, a purple sombrero and a purple vest, with blondish hair bursting out all over. ‘Hello amigos! How are we all today?’ he boomed, glancing over at the ladies. ‘Ah, the memsahib!’

Vivian bounded on to the dance floor with his girlfriend. ‘Come on then, darling, let’s trip the light fantastic.’ This involved a kind of proto-punk pogoing routine. As the rest of the dancers pirouetted placidly around, Peel and Walters could occasionally see a flash of purple sombrero as Vivian bounced up and down. By contrast, Lovelace himself was a bit of a letdown: Vivian didn’t see any inherent comedy in the melodramatic ballad style, which made Walters realize that he really could not always understand what made the man tick.

‘I’ve seen all that kind of thing in northern clubs before, dear boy,’ Vivian explained. He knew that one of the reasons the Bonzos went down quite well was that, like Lovelace, they had a perfect cabaret act. Vivian held hard-working entertainers in respect. The Bonzos worked the clubs like anyone else. If people requested chart hits, they would generally play them. ‘We would turn up and find that we were billed as “Britain’s zaniest trad band”,’ explained Vivian, ‘and so we’d be Britain’s zaniest trad band – until we got bored with it. But I liked that.’⁹ One of Vivian’s bits of business involved wearing a gorilla mask and impersonating Frankie Vaughan. They inevitably met the man one night and Vivian, a confirmed fan, was mortified, though Vaughan laughed it off.

The band’s reputation was strengthening through their increasingly powerful live shows. A young radio producer named Richard Gilbert was one of the converts. He first saw the Bonzos at University College. ‘I found them quite extraordinary,’ says Richard. A particular stand-out for him was Vivian’s Elvis act: the gold lamé suit with the stuck-record routine. Richard determined to get the band’s frontman on his BBC radio programme, a World Service show called ‘The Young Scene’. Having seen them two or three times, he managed to get Vivian into Bush House to interview him for his show and went on to write about the Bonzos in the national press. He became quite close to Vivian and discovered his genuine enthusiasm for rock’n’roll went as deep as the Bonzos’ affectionate parodies suggested. There was an Elvis Presley club which held their annual convention in Nottingham and in the latter part of the 1960s Vivian took guitarist Andy Roberts and Richard Gilbert along. Rather than trying to upstage the acts or fans, Vivian did not attempt to stride around in his gold lamé outfit. He was content to soak up the atmosphere of the event.

The Bonzos played all over the country. They were booked down south just after the summer by an art school for a ball in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Before the show started they repaired to the bar, which was set up in the cellar. To their alarm they found the local chapter of the Hells Angels had somehow got tickets or simply forced their way into the building. The bikers jumped over the bar and were pouring their own pints of beer; the staff were too frightened to stop them. The band hastily retreated back up the stairs into the hall and on to the stage to hide behind the red velvet curtains. Reg Tracey was on hand to supervise the gig and he signalled when it was time to go out and perform. There was already trouble out front. Shouted Reg: ‘Get the curtains open and start playing!’ The boys kicked in with ‘Cool Britannia’ as missiles hurtled towards the stage. Vivian edged back and Big Sid shouted to their manager: ‘Don’t be an arsehole – close the curtains!’

‘No, play on!’ insisted the manager, like some World War One general ordering his troops over the top. Heavy objects rained down on the stage and some of the Hells Angels decided it would be fun to jump up, grab the instruments and start playing themselves. There were two huge dustbins either side of the stage which had been there for decoration. Trumpeter Bob Kerr picked one up and yelled, ‘You’re not having my trumpet!’ and hurled the huge bin at the Hells Angels. They rolled back out of the way and at the same moment the curtains were drawn and the band fled. Meanwhile the police had been called to quell the riot.

Outside the hall Reg was furious. ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again,’ he warned. ‘If I tell you to play, you will play.’ Bob Kerr said he certainly would not when his instrument could have been destroyed. So Reg said: ‘You’re fired!’ Big Sid said, ‘If Bobby goes – I go!’

‘In fact,’ says Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, ‘Bob didn’t care because he had just been asked to form the New Vaudeville Band.’ The New Vaudeville Band. Not a name to be mentioned around Vivian Stanshall. While the Bonzos were great live, they were not doing so well in the record market. There were already rumblings of competition on the horizon. There were now several comedy bands playing 1920s-style music, including Spencer’s Washboard Kings. It came to a head when composer and record producer Geoff Stephens wrote ‘Winchester Cathedral’, done in Temperance Seven style, complete with camp mega-phone-effect vocals. It was a smash hit, reaching UK No. 4 in September 1966. Astonishingly for such a novelty number, it got to US No. 1 the following November. It was a bitter blow to the Bonzos.

Even worse, it was all studio men behind the hit. There was no actual Vaudeville Band. Bob Kerr was one of the Bonzos who was asked to form a live Vaudeville act and he took the chance. It was later rumoured that the Bonzos had been asked en masse to do the gig, which Bob insists was not true. He also asserts that it was nothing to do with the sacking – he simply left after one of their northern tours due to personality differences with Vivian. But it made no difference to the way his departure was received by the Bonzos. Vivian, in particular, was extremely angry. After their triumphant American tour the New Vaudeville Band went out on the same British cabaret club circuit as the Bonzos. Sometimes they played a club only a fortnight after the Bonzos, who would leave abusive messages on the changingroom walls. In return, when the Vaudevillians played a venue before the Bonzos, they left an envelope with the manager for them. Inside were little books: How to Play the Cymbals, How to Play the Trumpet, one for each Bonzo. Each one was marked with one of their names on the top: How to Play the Banjo: The First Steps.

‘It was a bit of an in-joke, but I think Viv took great exception,’ says Bob. Underneath it all, Vernon Bohay-Nowell believes that, as with John Parry, snobbery was at the root of Vivian’s real problem with Bob. ‘We’d all been to art school and got our degrees. Bob didn’t have one, so Viv called him “a little pig”,’ says Vernon. ‘He particularly didn’t like Bob telling him what to do musically and he was very jealous of anyone who was a superior musician.’ ‘Winchester Cathedral’ itself was covered by all sorts of artists, including Frank Sinatra and Dizzy Gillespie. When the Vaudeville Band folded, Bob eventually started his own Whoopee Band, an outfit that was still playing more than thirty-five years after he left the Bonzos. While he was swanning around America at the peak of the Vaudeville’s phenomenal chart success, the poor old Bonzos were still travelling in Vernon’s rickety ambulance. Somehow the indignity of using this mode of transport, when their pop-star contemporaries were being ferried around in a Rolls-Royce, only added to the simmering atmosphere of discontent.

Says Vernon: ‘When we were on the road Larry, Viv and myself travelled together because I had the transport and we were the dirty stopouts. Viv and Larry never wanted to go home, while the others did because they had wives or girlfriends. There was a lot of grumpiness in the band mainly because we felt so impoverished. I was older and so I could understand the situation. I didn’t get upset when things went wrong. The others were more egotistical about their careers and the things they were going to do. I realized you had to make some allowances. We were on to a good thing and we ought to have gone far. Somehow we had to try and be tolerant of the different factions within the band. The trouble was some of the guys were not prepared to make those concessions. There was a lot of built-in friction all the time.’ Plenty of bands with far fewer members experience worse difficulties. Holding a hyperactive, creative bunch like the Bonzos together was a matter of managing extreme tension.

The fractious group were more determined than ever to make the transition from pub and vaudeville-style cabaret act into a fully fledged rock and pop act. This meant parting company with Reg Tracey and finding a new manager. They settled on Gerry Bron, a gentleman of the old school whose family had long associations with song publishing acting as agents. His father was publisher Sydney Bron and his sister the actress Eleanor. Gerry worked with his wife Lillian in their rapidly expanding business, which handled such luminaries as Manfred Mann. Bron was later to set up his own Bronze label with a roster including Colosseum and Uriah Heep. Before the Bonzos could go with him, however, they had to work to pay off Tracey, the first in a series of not particularly favourable contracts: ‘Viv was nasty about working off all the gigs that Reg had booked for us,’ says Vernon, ‘and made one or two slanderous remarks. Gerry had to pay £3,000 in compensation to Reg, which in the end came out of our pockets. Viv was always doing outrageous things which upset the apple cart.’

Gerry took over the Bonzos in late 1966. It was on the recommendation of bassist Jack Bruce, from Cream, that he took them on and he would manage them for about two years. Bron thought their act was ‘wonderfully funny’ and went backstage after the show to see them. He saw their huge potential, while finding them a tremendous handful, once rather desperately describing them as ‘five lunatics and a musician’. He was straight and direct in his dealings with the band, but worked them hard, getting as many bookings as possible. Vivian would later complain bitterly about the workload and their lack of money, compared to the bigger rock acts of the day. However popular they were with a cult audience, the Bonzos could not compete as a major concert attraction with the high-earning bands they admired, like the Who or the Rolling Stones. This was one factor that accelerated the change from performing comedy routines to trying to be more like a pop group. It served to highlight how each member was moving in a different direction with his music. As the trad jazz took a back seat and instruments were plugged in, discontent mounted within the ranks.

‘I didn’t find it easy to get a deal for them,’ says Bron. ‘We spent months making demos in an attempt to get a record deal. I only got one in the end because I approached Liberty, who had just started in London. I persuaded them they wanted a happening English band.’ Liberty eventually decided they did and the Bonzos recorded Gorilla for them. Gerry Bron proudly handed over the tape and told the record company to press 50,000 copies, assuring them that every last one would walk off the shelves. So Liberty pressed just 2,000. By the time it was released, the Bonzos had already become pop stars, none of them more so than Vivian Stanshall.