There never was a band like The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – nor a rock ‘n roll god like Viv Stanshall. Nor did anyone else ever write hit songs about drainpipes … Mind you, there was never anyone quite like Tiny Tim, either.
Pop and rock isn’t really known for its eccentrics. Everyone tries to be different, of course, and ends up fundamentally being just like everyone else. The Sixties pop scene did throw up two genuine eccentrics though. One American and weird as hell, and the other English and lovable when sober. And the world is a sadder place for the fact that neither is with us now.
Herbert Buckingham Khaury owed his outstanding ugliness to his Polish mother and his Lebanese father; the former was Jewish and the latter Roman Catholic - and to the fact that, while still a child and out on a school trip, he fell and shattered his nose against a cannon which was once the property of George Washington. Ugly isn’t quite the word for Tiny Tim - as he became after going through dozens of stage names and aliases, some male, some female, some androgynous. In a business where people work hard to look anything between different and downright bizarre, Tiny Tim had it in spades, without trying. Mind you, a little white make-up did help things along just a touch. In the world of the weird, Tiny Tim was king. Or Queen.
It’s difficult to adequately describe Tiny Tim’s looks. Although he was very large, his head was too big for his body and his nose far too big for his head. His eyes were hooded and staring, and his hair was lank and looked rat-infested (though in fact he was obsessional to the point of mania about washing). His lips looked like something you discard from the inside of a dead chicken. His hands were spooky and his mannerisms were affected in a way that goes off at a tangent from the adjective ‘camp’. His giggle,smile and obvious desperation to please and be loved made you want to thwack him in the face with a six foot length of three inch lead piping.
At the end of the Sixties, a couple of decades older than the record-buying public, and to everyone’s amazement, Tiny Tim had a short run of hits. He had started singing in the Fifties in New York bars frequented by gentlemen of dubious morality and had taken to playing the ukulele and singing in a cracked falsetto - much to the anger of his parents (his mother’s fond nickname for him was ‘Dope’). In 1968 he appeared in a film, You Are What You Eat, and appeared on Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In on network TV. A recording contract flowed from that exposure, and he released the album God Bless Tiny Tim, which went to number seven in the American charts and stayed around for more than two months over that summer.
The single which was pulled from the album was Tiptoe Through The Tulips, which has been described as ‘unforgettable’. Personally I’d go for excremental and would cheerfully put a single bullet in the necks of each and every person who bought a copy. While the album was in the album charts, the single went into the singles chart and topped at 17. Think for a minute; The Beatles and The Doors were in the charts at the same time. By the end of the year he had played The Royal Albert Hall.
Tiny Tim actually had a vast knowledge of early American music, especially the tinny and innocent earliest phonograph recordings. As a lonely and bizarre-looking misfit of a child he had retreated into a private world where the wireless and the gramophone were his only pals. As an adult he was probably just what he looked; a ludicrous innocent at a loss in the grown-up world, and his public were either equally hopeless losers who wanted to mother him, or were laughing at him. There are theories that he was starved of oxygen at birth, and that he had slight cerebral palsy. But the ethics of the day ordained peace and love to everyone, even the weirdoes.
Other records followed, including a 1969 version of Great Balls Of Fire which was a very minor hit in the UK. Of that record he said, ‘When I sing (it) I enter the body of Elvis Presley for a moment’. It’s surprising that Elvis didn’t have him shot, and that no-one pointed out that it was in fact Jerry Lee Lewis who had recorded it.
That year he married Vicki May Budlinger live on The Johnny Carson Show. He called her ‘Miss Vicki’, which was sweet in a vomit-inducing sort of way. He had refused to even kiss her before they were married in case he was overcome by the desires of the flesh. He was a fundamentalist Christian of a very primitive kind, and that lead him to come out in favour of the Vietnam war, which wasn’t a wise thing to do in the late Sixties if you wanted to sell records to a teenage market. In 1970 he played The Isle Of Wight festival and ended his set with a community singing session reminiscent of an old cup final, as those who could followed him through Land Of Hope And Glory.
To the surprise of many, his marriage produced a daughter in 1971, who was named Tulip. Yes, Tulip Tim. I wonder what has become of her? The marriage broke up the following year. He blamed the Women’s Liberation movement for the failure.
By now the joke was over, the novelty had worn off, and all those 45s of Tiptoe Through The Tulips were being flung into a far corner of the attic. It was if he didn’t notice though, and he carried on as if he was Diana Ross (well ...). The Eighties was a nadir for him. He appeared in a circus, a second marriage lasted just a few weeks, his album Tiny Tim Rocks (with a cover designed by the same artist who was responsible for Cream’s Wheels Of Fire album cover!) bombed out, and he set a world non-stop singing record in Brighton of all places (three hours and eleven minutes). As I say, terrible times.
Things looked up somewhat in the Nineties in that he married a girl who had apparently been hopelessly in love with him for years. Ever since adolescence she had had photos of him pinned up in her bedroom and she admitted that she had felt out of step in having Tiny Tim as her idol when all her contemporaries were into Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix. She did the chasing. As weird as him.
He declared that 1996 was going to be ‘his year’. It wasn’t. In the September he attended a ukulele-fest in Massachusetts and died of a congestive heart problem. It was the only way to go.
About three years before he died, Viv Stanshall undertook a modest tour of the UK, playing small venues, and was a mass of nerves before, during and after every performance. He sang a few songs, told an autobiographical story or two, and recited from his masterpiece, the film Sir Henry At Rawlinson’s End. I have never seen a performer of any sort greeted with such warmth and - in the best sense of the word - sympathy by an audience. Each and every one of them was willing him to enjoy the gig even more than themselves. Each and every one wanted to take him home, pop him into a warm bed and ply him with hot cocoa and a couple of chocolate digestives. Each and every one was secretly dreading that he would fall apart at any moment. He didn’t, and it was a wonderful and utterly original evening.
Vivian Stanshall was born out of his time, and most certainly should not have become a ‘pop star’. He was a highly intelligent, articulate, creative and deeply troubled man. He belonged perhaps in the Eighteenth century, when the word eccentric had a more genuine currency and he could have lived a loopy but more innocent life. He might also have thrived in the middle of the Nineteenth in the classic role of an Englishman abroad, whose idiosyncrasies would not have exposed him to such vulnerability. In which ever case, a private income would have been required to keep him from Bedlam. As it was, he simply didn’t fit really in anywhere (because of his neurotic problems he left school without any qualifications at all), a fact which lead to periods of incarceration in mental institutions, and terrible doses of tranquillisers and alcohol. Pop music allowed him to indulge a lot of his lunacies, but he never found his true vocation.
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - originally The Bonzo Dog Dada Band, later reduced to the Bonzo Dog Band, and also known simply as The Bonzos - could not have been anything but a product of a British art school. They began recording in 1966 and broke up at the beginning of 1970. In a decade dedicated to originality, The Bonzos were the most original band by far. In that time they released half a dozen albums and well over a dozen singles. They were world masters in the ludicrously-named songs stakes, with No Matter Who You Vote For The Government Always Gets In scoring just ahead of My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe.
They are best known for the single The Urban Spaceman (which Viv always hated), which went all the way to number five late in 1968, but it wasn’t the best thing they ever did - just the most commercial. It was produced by Paul McCartney (under the interesting pseudonym Apollo C Vermouth), who Viv had met in a pub nearby a few minutes earlier (Viv had had a part in The Beatles’ TV film ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ in 1967). Viv actually didn’t front the band, or sing on Spaceman (Neil Innes did), but he made his mark in another way. As The Daily Telegraph remarked, ‘(It was) perhaps the only top-ten single ever to feature a hosepipe solo’. Played by Viv.
The Bonzos were Neil Innes, Roger Ruskin Spear, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Rodney Slater, Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell (which ought to have been a Bonzo pseudonym, but wasn’t), Sam Spoons (which was) and Viv. Dennis Cowan joined on a part-time basis in 1968. Other arrivals were Joel Druckman and Dave Clague. The band’s line-up was influenced by who had actually turned up, who had stayed at home, and who was still in the pub round the corner.
Their music may have started with a Dada-esque art school philosophy but it wandered off into the charming, the bizarre and the mildly disturbing at will. They had all been students at – yes, of course, art school. The Central London School of Art in this case, which Viv joined in 1962 at the age of nineteen after a year spent in the Merchant Navy. Various band members had been in various jazz bands, but when they first starting working together it was as a Twenties-style dance band with Viv as the call-master and singer (often amplified with a boating megaphone). They sounded to the unsympathetic ear like The New Vaudeville Band, and owed a bit to Spike Jones - but they grew out of both influences rapidly. Beyond that, The Bonzo’s music could be anything from utterly inspired to downright silly, and pivoted around the broadcasting style of the Fifties and the cultural legacy of the British Empire.
Apart from his imagination, Viv’s talent lay in his voice. He could be an old gentleman in a club in St James one moment, a Fifties rock ‘n roll star the next, and then - best-loved of all - a wireless announcer from the Home Service of the 1930s. After The Bonzos had evaporated, the voice at least stood him in good stead and he earned what passed for a living from voice-overs.
The children’s TV series ‘Do Not Adjust Your Set’ starred four men who would go on to be in ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ (Idle, Jones, Gilliam and Palin) - as well, unimaginably now, as David Jason - and in 1968 the Bonzos acquired a residency on the show. It’s not hard to imagine that they influenced the Python crew considerably. The following year they played the second Isle Of Wight festival, on a bill that included The Who and Bob Dylan. By this time the band was touring regularly (including, twice, and not entirely successfully, in the USA - where they did have a sizeable cult following). For Viv at least, it was all becoming hard work, and the rewards were modest.
The band came to a natural halt at the beginning of 1970, and though he was instrumental in an attempt at a revival late the following year - which produced an album, largely for contractual reasons - it came to nothing. That year he recorded a single, Suspicion, which was produced by Keith Moon. When asked how he came to be credited as producer, Moon replied, ‘I produced the booze’. Viv and Moon were soul-mates in many ways, and were cursed by similar demons. They were happiest playing elaborate (and often expensive) practical jokes, often with Larry Smith, and often dressed up as priests, nuns or Nazis. In all this they were equals. Neither was the straight man (as Moon usually required of his drinking partners); they were both uncontrolled and uncontrollable comic geniuses. They were content in each other’s company, but were probably equally bad for each other; each encouraging the other to higher lunacies and ever greater consumption of alcohol.
After that Viv did the announcer’s vocals on Mike Oldfield’s huge-selling album ‘Tubular Bells’, plucking an innocent syllable from any phrase and squeezing it into action. Viv had many friends and admirers, and as well as working with Innes and Steve Winwood, he was backed financially by Stephen Fry and Pete Townshend in putting on the operatic stage show ‘Stinkfoot’.
He was in great creative form when long-time BBC Radio One producer John Walters recruited him to present John Peel’s programme in Peel’s absence. Viv recruited Moon and together they came up with any number of mad ideas, including a series about Colonel Knut (played by Viv) and his side-kick, a cockney named Lemmy (Keith). The result was brilliant but Walters had to keep both (Viv more than Moon, he said) on a very tight rein. Later, thanks to Moon’s insistence, Viv acted in a small role in the movie ‘That’ll Be The Day’.
His one great work from the post-Bonzo decades was the film ‘Sir Henry At Rawlinson’s End’. It starred Trevor Howard, startlingly, as a faded, impoverished and debauched remnant of the British aristocracy, living a bizarre existence in a dusty mansion. Viv was banned from the set when the film was being shot; he tried to make constant amendments, and was never sober. It wasn’t a satire and it had no point to make; it was simply gloriously mad and brilliantly funny. It is also quite unlike anything else ever committed to film. For best effect it should be watched with a reasonable percentage of alcohol and/or cannabis in one’s bloodstream.
By this time he was suffering terribly from anxiety and panic attacks, and was shuttling between a modest flat in Muswell Hill and at his mother’s bungalow on the Essex coast. He was totally dependent on alcohol and pills and was terrified of the world beyond the front door. Not long before he died he was attacked in a burger bar by a gang of youths armed with craft knives. He had been enjoying a small renaissance on the back of a series of television adverts for Ruddles beer.
A few years prior to his death he survived a fire on his house boat; an ex-coastal patrol boat of the Irish Navy which he kept moored on the Thames at Chertsey. In the spring of 1995 Viv Stanshall died in a fire at his tiny flat in north London which was probably accidentally caused. We shall not see his like again.