‘He was absolutely fearless,’ says Philippa. ‘But at that time he was getting very pissed and falling into the audience a lot. Supporting us were some fire eaters – so one can imagine, it was absolute chaos.’ Working with Vivian every day, she began to see a vulnerable side that he usually kept hidden. ‘That was when I really began to like him. He had this other side to him which was just magical. He could be gentle, quiet and soft. He was very bright, but he was also very fragile. He was covered in these layers of complete lunacy and he pissed a lot of people off like that. The more he pissed people off, the more insecure he got. The trouble was, he always had to be larger than life. He could be incredibly rude to people.’ He met his match back in London, at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, when he learned not to mess with jazzmen. The Temperance Seven were playing and a very drunk Vivian decided that he needed to be on the stage with them. Philippa grabbed him by the belt on his coat and pulled him back.
‘He was absolutely furious,’ recalls Philippa, ‘and when we got to the top of the stairs on the way out of the club he threw me down. Wrong place to do that. He didn’t realize a lot of jazz musicians really liked me, and he got a good kicking.’
In early autumn, the band recorded a new single, ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’, at the same time as Dave Clague was replaced by American Joel Druckman, Neil started to stand up and play the guitar, Larry abandoned the tuba in favour of the drums, and the lead trumpet player slot was dropped. The Bonzos were becoming rock and ‘…Spaceman’ was an indicator of the turbulent times. It was not a tricky song to write (it took Innes all of an afternoon) or to play, but it was the nearest they came to a standard pop song and it represented all that was complicated about the Bonzos. They had gone as far as they could as a jolly jazz band, but felt ambivalent at best about becoming a mainstream pop act. Vivian wanted to sound like Oscar Wilde, Neil wanted to be more Beatles-esque, Larry wanted to be louder and Roger simply wanted to play novelty jazz numbers. Gerry Bron just wanted to record the next track.
The arguments could be stopped, they thought, by using a pedigree producer for their new single – Vivian’s chum Paul McCartney. His presence was electrifying. Bored sound engineers, asleep or chatting, suddenly leapt up when Paul took the bass guitar from Joel Druckman and demonstrated how the bassline should go. The engineers could not see who was playing in the studio, but it had an indefinable hit quality which made them record it. McCartney wiped his bass guitar track and made the Bonzos play it themselves. He helped them sort out the production in this way for the whole song. He even started plonking away on Vivian’s ukulele, at which point Lillian Bron happened to wander past. She looked at the instrument Paul was playing. ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘A poor man’s violin?’ Quick as a flash Paul replied, ‘No, it’s a rich man’s ukulele.’
This time, Paul allowed the band to keep his version of the ukulele track on the final mix. Vivian played the tenor recorder, supplying the jaunty melody which carries the song. ‘Having said that he wasn’t a natural musician,’ admits Neil, ‘every now and then something would gel.’ Stanshall also announced his intention to use a contraption of his own devising, a length of hosepipe with a plastic funnel on one end and a trumpet mouthpiece on the other. He managed to tune it to B flat and played it by swinging the piping over his head while blowing through the mouthpiece to produce a whirring effect. With luck, he could get an impressive five notes out of it. The engineer muttered darkly about the impossibility of recording such folly, but Paul was sanguine. ‘Sure you can. Just put a microphone in each corner.’ With a final twang from Roger Spear on an instrument made from a string attached to a tailor’s dummy, the track was almost complete. Gerry Bron felt it needed just another couple of tweaks, but he knew he was taking too much on as it was with the band. The solution was a young producer working in an office almost opposite his own in Oxford Street.
Gus Dudgeon was a rising young engineer, who later achieved fame for his work with David Bowie and Elton John, and he eagerly agreed to finish ‘…Spaceman’ and the album, for which Bron promised a co-production credit. After three weeks with the Bonzo Dog Band, Dudgeon called Gerry back to say, ‘You weren’t doing me any favours,’ but his partnership with the Bonzos stretched over two albums.
By the time Gus came on board, a lot of the budget had already been spent, and he decided to pay a surreptitious visit to the studios of his old employer, Decca Records in West Hampstead. He’d left them only about eighteen months previously, so when he casually rolled in one day, the ‘Urban Spaceman’ master tape under one arm, the doorman greeted him as if he had been off on holiday for a couple of weeks. Gus consulted the session chart for the three studios and found one that appeared to be empty. The doorman said the Moody Blues were booked in and were at lunch.
‘I rushed up to Studio One, had a look at the desk. There was obviously a mix in progress,’ admits Gus. ‘So I marked all the faders, took them down, changed all the EQ and mixed “Urban Spaceman” very quickly. I knew they were coming back, probably in three-quarters of an hour. I just had time, maybe half an hour. I did three takes, put everything back as it was, got into my car and fucked off.’ ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ was released in November and the band felt that Paul McCartney’s contribution should best be kept secret. Despite Gerry’s promises to Gus Dudgeon, the production credit was simply to read ‘Apollo C. Vermouth’. Eventually the truth leaked and there was a palpable sense of relief from management and record company when the single charted, climbing steadily over the weeks to peak at No. 5 in January 1969. The Bonzos played ‘Top of the Pops’ to celebrate. Coincidentally it was the first of a trilogy of hits Gus produced with extraterrestrial connections: ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ was followed by David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’.
In true Bonzo style, even the one undisputed success of’…Spaceman’ was marred by one of the chaotic mishaps that plagued the band. When Gus Dudgeon remixed album tracks for a compilation LP, he thought it would be fun to segue ‘Monster Mash’ into ‘Urban Spaceman’. It was a neat one-off. Since then this version has been used for practically every other reissue of the single: ‘It starts off with this manic laughing which was never on the original single,’ says Gus. ‘That’s so bloody aggravating. It’s like having a bit of another track on the front of your biggest hit.’
Now the band were almost at the top. Surely now, all the tensions exacerbated by the lack of public recognition would melt away? For Vivian, that was not even the issue. He would rather they did not need to prove themselves commercially: ‘I used to think one didn’t need hit records to get on,’ he said. ‘I suppose it annoyed me to think it took a hit record to get us in the public eye, because when we started we had something different to offer, and there was nothing like us on the scene.’1 The last thing he wanted to be was simply just another part of the merchandizing process. It was not why he wanted to be in a band, when ‘Pop followers have grown up and standards have risen. I don’t like the machinery of pop,’ he added. ‘I had to fill in some God-awful form asking me my favourite food and colour. I can’t believe anybody wants to know, even if I could tell them. It distresses me there could be still a market for this kind of information.’ The band were packed off to larger venues, as their record company and management wanted to exploit their fame.
‘We were put out to sniffle around in the area of ballrooms and things. We were sent in directions that were completely unsuitable for us.’2
‘Urban Spaceman’ retained Bonzo charm while having the right combination of melody and quirkiness to appeal to pop fans. It was not a funny record or a rampant rock performance either. They had learned that comedy by itself was hard to sustain in a chart single. Frank Zappa, reviewing the single as a special guest of Melody Maker, noted that the ‘urban spaceman’ said ‘I’ve got speed’. ‘I’ve heard about the Bonzo Band, but I think