‘I couldn’t believe anyone was that bad,’ recalls Roger with awe. In the context of a stuffy trad-jazz scene, where most bands were note-perfect but played with no passion, the Bonzos represented freedom and fun. Another friend who sometimes played in the band, Sid Nichols, introduced Roger. That night he and Lenny sat in for a session and the arrangement became permanent. Roger thought the props the band were using were fantastic, particularly Vivian’s take on the Temperance Seven’s life-sized dancing doll. Only the Temps’ doll was an exquisitely made Victorian beauty, while Vivian’s, christened Alma, was a rough papier mâché bird, a ‘grotesque woman covered in warts’ according to Roger. Vivian danced romantically with the doll attached to his feet.
With a background of study both in the sciences and art, Roger was uniquely placed to take the Bonzos beyond Albert-copying in terms of robotic props and with ever more dangerous explosions. The band became more popular as they gained experience. They were asked to play a lavish twenty-first-birthday party, held in a large private house in Kensington, at which Vivian turned up roaring drunk and promptly collapsed on the carpet. The band had to play without him.
By early 1963, Roger Wilkes graduated from the Royal College and left the band to concentrate on his career as a furniture designer, under pressure from his girlfriend, Rosalyn. She came along to a gig immaculately clad, with a mink stole. The band generally behaved so badly they all found it difficult to keep girlfriends and on this occasion they were so coarse they were thrown out of the venue. Rosalyn made it abundantly clear to Roger that she did not care much for their lifestyle, and so he bowed out, to be replaced by Bob Kerr, on cornet and trumpet.
Rodney Slater was coming to the end of his course and Vivian had one more year to go at Central. Now established enough in the band to make his opinions known, he took the opportunity to create further line-up changes by picking on their trombone player, John Parry. Vivian was ‘a terrible snob’, says Vernon, ‘and so anybody like John, who didn’t have a degree, was in “a different class’”. Vivian criticized Parry’s playing, his punctuality and his ‘cheap trombone’. When Parry crashed his scooter on the way to a gig, Vivian sent a letter to sack him while he was in hospital.
The band got a new regular gig at the Tiger’s Head in Catford. It was bigger than the Bird in Hand and the band now included Syd Nichols, the replacement for John Parry. Syd and Vernon would alternate on tunes like ‘Tiger Rag’, played at tremendous speed. The band rocketed through old novelty numbers such as ‘Ali Baba’s Camel’, ‘Little Sir Echo’ or ‘When Yuba Played the Rumba on the Tuba Down in Cuba’. They were developing an original cabaret act of manic invention. A typical evening began with an extremely slow and sombre version of ‘Rule Britannia’, accompanied by the Queen Machine. This contraption gave a series of Royal Waves, until the climax of the anthem, when a shattering explosion ‘invariably got the audience’s attention’, recalls Neil Innes. It also set the tone for the evening, which passed in a bewildering stream of explosions and maniacal playing, supported by props, visual gags, shouting, abuse and yet more explosions, so many that some in the band later developed severe tinnitus, Vivian among them.
They discovered that if they taped their explosives more loosely they got a red flash and lots of smoke. Roger had a wind-up gramophone case on stage and he would wire up the fuse, put it in the case and let it go off. The case gradually filled with flash powder, which was very sticky. One night at the Tiger’s Head somebody dropped a lighted cigarette end into the case and it all lit up and burned ferociously. ‘I’ve never seen a pub empty so quickly,’ says Vernon. ‘They all went outside with their pints and had to wait for half an hour before the smoke cleared!’ All these explosions and fires did at least mean they could frighten an unruly or unappreciative audience into submission. The rush of bangs, the cartoon speech bubbles held up, the props – it all came at a dizzying pace. Between and indeed during the numbers there was all manner of comedy business as the band dressed up as camel drivers, policemen, ice-cream salesmen, sword swallowers and tap dancers. Sam used three wooden blocks for an old music-hall routine, appearing to be juggling the blocks, while one was attached to his belt.
For the audience, the show was exhilarating, shocking and hilarious. An early set list gives an idea of a typical gig. It starts off with a number which has, inevitably, ‘explosion’ written against it. Their choice of tunes that night included ‘Ain’t She Sweet’, ‘Bubbles’, ‘Abie’, ‘Alexander’s Rag-time Band’, ‘Whispering’, ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, ‘Ukulele Lady’, ‘Sheik of Araby’, ‘Bill Bailey’ and ‘Tiger Rag’. The Bonzos alternated between ‘fast’, ‘slow’, ‘novelty’ and ‘waltz’. Halfway down the list was marked ‘Military medley’ and, in brackets underlined twice, an ominous ‘pyrotechnics etc.’. They ended with ‘There’ll Always be an England’.
Whenever the band needed a new number, they would go out and scour the second-hand shops for a song with a silly name. Spotting ‘I’m Going to Bring a Watermelon to My Girl Tonight’, they’d hand over a few pence for the sheet music and it would become another Bonzo favourite. Few people in the average pub crowd had been exposed to much in the way of ‘live’ theatre or come across such apparently exotic characters outside of a music hall. Stanshall’s stage persona in particular seemed to change before their eyes. He was sophisticated, knowing, worldly and effete; then crude, coarse and streetwise. The effect was mesmerizing. Audiences sat entranced by the spectacle. The songs, gags and routines took hours to work out and the band put in many anxious hours to improve the performance. Their reward was gales of laughter. Even Vivian’s father might have been mesmerized and cracked a smile, had he turned up. Vivian’s brother Mark, then running antique shops in London, came down to the Tiger’s Head to see the band, who also played three gigs a week at the Deuragon Arms in Hackney. It meant cranking out a lunchtime gig, rehearsing all afternoon and then rushing over to the Tiger’s Head for an evening show. Landlords were happy to have them, as people bought much more booze during the show, and the band were actually making something of a living: a whole £25 a night in some venues. They were the envy of any impoverished student, still at college, but earning the equivalent of the national wage.
‘Until the year I was taking my finals we were working six nights a week,’ said Vivian. ‘At an earlier stage, from the Royal College days, the band consisted of maybe forty people with the same attitude and it didn’t really matter if they could play or not. I can remember turning up at some boozer which was so tiny and the stage was so packed that we performed along the top of the bar. Sometimes there’d be one pianist and nine banjo players. You never knew who was turning up. Eventually people would say, “I’m an artist” and drop out. As far as I was concerned what we were doing was merely an extension of what we were doing as artists and a damn sight more fun. So it just narrowed down to those of us who weren’t serious about “art” in the context of art school.’
It became increasingly obvious that Vivian Stanshall had a real talent for mime, mimicry and visual comedy. Long before the age of professional Elvis lookalikes, he loved to offer skilful imitations of Presley, even at the risk of causing offence to teddy boys, who loudly protested at his mockery of the King. Most audiences howled at Viv’s increasingly clever and theatrical performances. This was not just the result of art-student foolery. He took his craft more seriously than anyone knew, spending the summer of 1965 at the Edinburgh Festival studying with the mime artist Lindsay Kemp, whom he had met at the Central School of Art. It was the same Kemp who later took David Bowie under his wing.
Kemp’s show, ‘Bubbles’, was at the Traverse Theatre Club over the summer. Andy Roberts, guitarist with the group Liverpool Scene at the time, remembers Vivian as ‘a pasty-faced chap’ on stage. There was lots of Marcel Marceau-style material, involving pretending to be trapped in a box and similar routines. ‘The show was sly, camp, gentle and revealing,’ says Andy. ‘Viv looked stunning in white face and he did these epigrammatic interludes where he came on playing the euphonium and stopped to say something like “Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down”. Then he’d play the euphonium