‘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