http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7015472.ece
The surviving members of the Bonzo Dog Band have reconciled their
differences to go on the road again
Alan Franks
February 5, 2010
No one is more surprised by the re-emergence of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band than the veterans of this fabled and uncategorisable outfit, who
began performing their loony blend of trad jazz and freestyle humour
48 years ago and so predate the point at which Philip Larkin said the
Sixties really started. Since then they have fallen out quite as
venomously as the Davies brothers from the Kinks and the Gallaghers
from Oasis and had more comebacks than a boomerang festival.
They have played on the same bill as such young hopefuls as Eric
Clapton and The Who, been admired by the Beatles, sneered at by the
Sex Pistols, and fairly widely misunderstood. They will say there has
already been an error in this article because they are no longer the
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band but rather Three Bonzos and a Piano. The band,
they accept, died with the death of their frontman and the departure
of his deputy.
The first was Viv Stanshall, the boozy genius who died 15 years ago
at the age of 51; the second, Neil Innes, the musician and lyricist
behind many of their best numbers. No one who can write an
anti-protest song that goes, "Lie down and be counted. What are we
standing for?" deserves to be ignored for long.
You often hear pop historians talk of the Bonzos as a missing link
between the Goons and the Pythons. Certainly they stand in the long
English lineage of stage eccentricity that runs from music hall
through comedy jazz and into the novelty numbers of the hit parade.
Even in their heyday, which just about coincided with the Beatles,
they were never remotely commercial. For a while it was almost an
article of faith not to be; these were young men from the art schools
of London. There were still beatniks about. The liberty of
self-expression at the end of a straitened time was reward enough.
Nonetheless, they had something suspiciously resembling a hit in 1968
with a single called I'm the Urban Spaceman. There was also The Intro
and the Outro, their sublime spoof of instruments soloing in a jazz
band; and Trouser Press, an oeuvre for an amplified version of that
hotel appliance. This, they say, has since been used on television by
The Clothes Show for a fee of £86. Yet a tour to America cost them as
much as they had made from their latest LP.
The three survivors in the new line-up are: Roger Ruskin Spear, son
of the late satirical artist Ruskin Spear; Sam Spoons (Martin Ash
really), named after his instrument; and Rodney Slater, whose long
absence was the result of a heart attack on stage in Hemel Hempstead.
These three, joined on piano by Dave Glasson, Spear's confrère from
the Slightly Dangerous Brothers, are nearer 70 than 60 and between
them they cover most approaches to hair or the lack of it. The new
bits of their repertoire reflect this maturity. There is a whimsical
bar ballad in the manner of It Had to Be You called I Used to Have
Hair; Senior Moments; Old Geezer Rock and more in a similar vein.
On the night I caught them, in the middle of a wintry week in
Hampshire, they played like wild things at the Lights Theatre in
Andover; half a house with grey ponytailed men and couples now deep
into the comfort of final-salary pensions. Not bad for a Wednesday
night, end of January. Word-perfect on Canyons of Your Mind, some of
them: "Every time I call your name/ Oh, how it hurts/ In the wardrobe
of my soul/ In the section labelled shirts."
As Spear explains, their resurgence is largely due to the reunion
concerts that they did four years ago, when seriously famous Bonzo
fans such as Stephen Fry, Paul Merton and Ade Edmondson joined them
on tour and took turns to be Viv Stanshall at the mic. He also
acknowledges a big debt to the producer Bob Carruthers, who had
invited them to be one of the subjects in a series of films he was
making about life inside various bands.
"It's strange," he muses. "And wonderful too, still to be doing this.
We came together when the world was a different place. We shared a
love of old sheet music, broken instruments, Vaudeville. We were able
to bring in an awful lot of stuff that other musicians would have had
to shelve Mickey Spillane, Marcel Duchamp, Manuel and his Music of
the Mountains, Horace Batchelor [a man who advertised his
"infra-draw" football pools method on Radio Luxembourg's erratic signals]."
The Bonzos could have been set for a monster-fade, a career
equivalent of the end of Hey Jude. In fact it has all gone back to
front. They were dreadful at the start, so out of time, tune and
everything else that drinkers packed the pub they were playing to see
if they really were as dire as that. But they got good and became
professional enough to convey amateurishness. They even survived
punk. "Viv was booked to do this gig at the Nashville Rooms in West
Kensington," Spear says, "but they couldn't dig him out of bed, so I
took his place. There was a support band booked called the Sex
Pistols. They were being sick all over the place and hitting each
other all the time. Sid Vicious was hitting anyone he could find. I
took one look and thought, the robots [delicate models forming part
of his act] aren't going to survive this, so I went on first and then
left. Johnny Rotten was going to throw up on them."
Spoons and Slater also miss Stanshall but agree that he could be
impossible to work with. "If he'd been around," Spoons says, "the
reunion would never have taken place."
"No one could know the problems he had," Slater says. "His mind was
like a Bosch painting, full of sirens and monsters that produced
beautiful imagery but horrors as well."
Theirs is an exuberance that has been held together by doggedness;
that and the sheer terror of losing access to their old sources of
happiness. "For us," Slater goes on, "the music we played was a way
of going back to the inane crap of the Twenties in order to avoid the
inane crap of the [early] Sixties." Of course this prompts the
question of what they are trying to avoid now, a similar distance
from their own starting date. The answer is the same as it always
was: anything with a niff of tedium or conformity. They would go
anywhere to outrun that. It's what they're doing now.
--
Three Bonzos and a Piano play at the Boomsbury Theatre, WC1 (020-7388
8822), tomorrow
.
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