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