The local constabulary were aware of Mr Stanshall’s presence, and once almost arrested him for breaking and entering. Admitted Vivian, ‘I must say, the one I met last night when I was breaking into the house was a perfectly nice chap. But it was quite obvious he thought anybody with long hair had no right to live in a house, and it was my house. I had forgotten my key and didn’t want to wake up the wife.’4 The family put up with this kind of thing on a daily basis, but then it was hard to be surprised when their garden was kitted out with an eight-foot-tall gnome who smoked dope. A tube was connected through the kitchen to a set of bellows on which Vivian stamped to make the papier-mâché gnome emit clouds of smoke.
Whenever the urge to create some new piece of art or invention took him, Vivian utilized whatever came to hand, no matter whom it belonged to. ‘He used to pinch things. If he liked something, he’d just pinch it,’ says Rupert. ‘I don’t know if he did it to friends, but he did it to his family. “Oh, I like that ornament.” Gone. And he had a habit of altering them and decorating them in his own special way, which could be anything from painting over them to sticking fag butts on them.’ The Bonzos sang about suburban convention. This was Vivian’s own ‘pink half of the drainpipe’.
1967–68
A year dominated by the hippy revolution, 1967 ushered in the dawn of a new age of experimentation. All the freedoms denied to Vivian as a child were now available to the young performer. It was the year that the Bonzos enjoyed their own kind of flower power. They released their debut album Gorilla to wild acclaim, and even the revered Beatles embraced them. Everyone wanted the band that made the music industry laugh at itself at a time when music was a very serious business indeed.
An uproarious party was thrown at Raymond’s Revue Bar in Soho for the October 1967 launch of Gorilla, ‘Dedicated to Kong, who must have been a great bloke’. The band played a half-hour set, including ‘By a Waterfall’, complete with a tacky wheel covered with silver paper. A whole circus of animals was hired, with people riding camels and elephants around Soho Square.
‘They had a champagne reception in the park and all the press were invited,’ recalls Lee Jackson, bass player with the Nice. ‘It got a bit riotous and one of the camels panicked, back-kicked a Mini and stove in the side of the car.’ Vivian tried to imagine the driver’s insurance claim. ‘My car was kicked by a camel in Soho Square.’
The album reviews were encouraging. Typical of the comments was: ‘A knockout! An hilarious, often brilliant first album that combines some marvellous send-ups and some attractive new songs.’ The public were slower to embrace the record and sales were slow. ‘There have been distribution problems,’ explained Vivian. ‘I think the record company are swapping over to some new steam machines or something.’ Overall, though, he said the success had made an ‘amazing difference’ to what the band were doing.
Gorilla has rarely been out of circulation in the EMI/Liberty catalogue since its release. It is packed with some of the Bonzos’ most memorable moments, kicking off with ‘Cool Britannia’. Larry Smith urged the others to go more rock’n’roll as the album was being recorded and Neil suggested they should do ‘Rule Britannia’ in a ‘twist’ style. Vivian came up with the lyrics, a kind of double satirical poke which highlighted the pomposity not only of the Establishment, but also of the facile buzzwords of the time, which he clearly thought were really just as ridiculous. He sang about taking a trip and the painful hipness of the in-crowd in a succinct track.
The most enduring of all the tracks was the trad-jazz spoof ‘The Intro and the Outro’. The Bonzos used the old jazz convention of introducing the band’s players and instruments in turn. They took it to ridiculous lengths, with an increasingly bizarre selection of instruments and players including, Eric Clapton on ukulele, the Count Basie Orchestra on triangle, General De Gaulle on piano accordion and J. Arthur Rank on gong. The Rawlinsons, a Gorilla innovation who would be fleshed out on later albums and would be so central to Vivian’s solo career, made their first appearance here on trombone. ‘The Intro…’ was one of the Bonzos’ most original creations – even if the ‘Outro’ was based on Duke Ellington’s ‘C Jam Blues’. Some of the names dropped in the song have dated but it is the way in which the basic riff was layered so cleverly which makes the piece stand up years afterwards. They only had a four-track recording machine, and each newly introduced instrument would play only a few notes then drop out, but they managed to give the impression of an increasingly fuller sound.
‘Jazz Delicious Hot Disgusting Cold’ was another standout that in many ways epitomized the whole Bonzo approach. Skilled masters of parody, their secret was to know exactly what to play badly and loosely for comic effect. It was not something that a band who wanted to be stars could have done. A breakneck trad workout, ‘Jazz…’ was not played badly as such, but the clichés and the air of studied Dixieland perfectly capture the stiffness of a very English kind of jazz. It is a favourite of BBC producer John Walters, who recorded sessions with the Bonzos. He had come across the kind of enthusiastic amateurs parodied in the track all the time, particularly that guy who has one phrase that he cannot seem to get away from, like the clarinet solo in ‘Jazz…’, and those outfits which rely on the sort of tremendous crashing stop-chord section the Bonzos use towards the end of the track. ‘Absolutely blissful,’ says John. It’s a song that has everything, even the cringingly inappropriate cry of ‘Oo-ya, oo-ya, oo-ya, oo!’ at the very end. It is all there, the history of English trad jazz in one song, a parody of those scholarly efforts at doing jazz with absolutely no feeling for that, or indeed any, form of music at all – great British rubbish at its best. John asked Vivian how the band managed to capture all that in one song. ‘Well, it’s easy, mate,’ Vivian told him. ‘We just all played each other’s instruments.’ And while John knew that this could easily be a Stanshall riposte made up on the spot, he thought it certainly deserved to have been the right explanation.
There was calypso on the album, in the form of ‘Look Out, There’s a Monster Coming’, and plenty of the old novelty jazz numbers, like ‘Jollity Farm’ and ‘Mickey’s Son and Daughter’, of which Vivian said: ‘It’s a wonderful title and a silly song. I like chanting rubbish.’1
Under the aegis of manager Gerry Bron, the band were now reaching a much wider audience. Busily promoting Gorilla, they guested on the BBC’s ‘Dee Time’ in October, hosted by DJ Simon Dee. They also appeared at London’s Saville Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, on 29 October as guests of Cream. The legendary supergroup, comprised of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, despite their sonic power, were matched by the Bonzos for a stunning set. Vivian’s brother Mark remembers the Bonzos being particularly good that night.
The Bonzo pace was fast and the jokes came from every member of the band, sometimes all at the same time, whether a cherry bomb down a saxophone, or a band member coming up to a mike stand with a real bathroom tap and ‘tap, tap’-ing on the mike. Melody Maker raved about the first Saville show: ‘The Bonzos proved a wild success before a predominantly Cream audience. From an uncertain start as the fans got to grips with the heady mixture of satire, vaudeville and musical anarchy, they concluded a superb performance to cheers, applause, and three curtain calls.’2 There was genuine shock when Larry traded abuse with a heckler who had been shouting ‘Rubbish! Get off!’ A spotlight swung up to the box and Larry was seen struggling with this rude person. As the punter – in reality a member of the Bonzo crew – knocked the drummer to the floor of the box, he picked up a dummy version of Larry and hurled it into