Vivian Stanshall

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Image:Vivian Stanshall with Sound of Music eyes from DNAYS.jpg Vivian Stanshall (21 March 1943 – 5 March 1995) was an English musician, painter, singer, broadcaster, songwriter, poet, writer, wit, and raconteur, best known for his work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and for his surreal exploration of the British upper classes in Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.

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The great eccentric

Stanshall was often called a "great British eccentric", but this was a label he hated as it suggested that he was putting on an act, whereas he always insisted that he was merely being himself—which is arguably a requirement for genuine eccentricity. However, it is not hard to understand why he received the label. Neil Innes said of their first meeting in a large Irish pub: "He was quite plump in those days. He had on Billy Bunter check trousers, a Victorian frock coat, violet pince-nez glasses, and carried a euphonium. He also wore large pink rubber ears."

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Early life

Stanshall was born on 21 March, 1943 at the Radcliffe Maternity Home in Oxford, and christened Victor Anthony Stanshall.

Originally from Walthamstow — a suburb on the borders of East London and Essex — his mother Eileen had moved to Shillingford, Oxfordshire during WWII to escape the bombing, and lived there happily with her son while her husband, Victor (a name he had adopted in preference to his own christened name of Vivian), served in the RAF. With the end of war, the little family moved back to Walthamstow and his father returned.

Stanshall's brother, Mark, was born fairly soon after this return. They were six years apart, an age difference that apparently put a certain amount of emotional distance in their relationship.

Although he was of working class origins, Stanshall's father wanted his sons to go to public school and pressed them to perform well in sports. Young "Vic", as Stanshall was known, however, was completely uninterested in such pursuits, preferring — to his father's horror — to devote his energies to art, music and literature.

Consequently, he grew up living a dual life: at home, he would have to speak "properly" or face a beating; on the street he spoke with a broad Cockney accent in order to avoid a beating from his peers.

As a teenager Stanshall secretly joined a gang of local teddy boys, attracted both by the rock'n'roll and the clothing. Even among such dandies, though, he was a bit of an oddball. The polished vowels that had been bashed into him kept leaking out, and his Cockney mates looked upon him as something of an amusing freak.

Around this time, the Stanshall family moved to the Essex coastal resort of Southend-on-Sea. Here, Stanshall managed to earn some money doing various odd jobs at the "Kursaal" fun fair. These included working as a bingo caller and spending the winter months painting the fairground attractions.

In order to put aside enough money to get himself through art school (his father having refused to fund such "goings on"), Stanshall spent a year in the merchant navy, where he made a very bad waiter, but a great teller of tall tales.

He enrolled at the Central School of Art in London. Here, Stanshall and his fellow students, including Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin Spear and Neil Innes, who was studying music at Goldsmiths College, came together to form a band.

Stanshall changed his first name to Vivian — the very name his father had abandoned. Those who knew him from his student days continued to call him "Vic," however.

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The Bonzo years

The name of the band came from a word game involving cutting up sentences and juxtaposing the fragments to form new ones. One of the combinations that came out of this exercise was "Bonzo Dog/Dada". The band initially performed under this name, but soon grew tired of explaining what "Dada" meant to audience members with no knowledge of art history. Thus they became the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band—later abbreviated to "The Bonzo Dog Band," or just "The Bonzos."

Image:The Bonzo Dog Band play The Monster Mash.jpg

In these early days they were a very loose assemblage, consisting of the core members mentioned above, plus just about anyone else who felt like joining in. At times there were as many as thirty of them, with gigs often featuring more people on stage than in the audience. Their act at this time consisted of anarchic re-workings of old British novelty songs, found on 78 rpm records bought from flea markets, spiced with improvisation and a variety of bizarre machines assembled from junk, with at least one deafening explosion per gig.

The Bonzos might have continued in this way, probably disappearing into obscurity, had it not been for a nasty shock: the 1966 chart success of a winsomely arch number called Winchester Cathedral by The New Vaudeville Band — a "band" consisting of session musicians created by songwriter Geoff Stephens, whose musical style was uncannily like the Bonzos' own. So soon as the record became a hit, Stephens and his record company needed a band to actually present themselves as The New Vaudeville Band. Bob Kerr, a Bonzo member, tried convincing the others that they should craft a similar sound to achieve greater commercial success, but the advice was rejected. Still, the whole situation made the remaining Bonzos realise that if they were to make a mark for themselves, they would have to forge a new path. From here on, they started writing their own material and dropping it into the act alongside the old novelty numbers. With Stanshall now liberated from his original role as tuba player and firmly established as the front man, the act became more sophisticated, more daring, satirical, and original. Aside from the adventurous music and lyrics, it was quite a performance: Stanshall sang, played a variety of instruments and on a good night would also perform a prolonged and hilarious fully-clothed strip mime, culminating in some spectacular tit-juggling. Stanshall provided one of the highlights of the show: a vulgar joke about Jesus.

Image:Bonzo.jpg

For a while the band existed as a semi-pro outfit playing the college circuit, but it wasn't long before they acquired a manager, went full time, and found themselves booked on the working man's circuit mainly in the north of England. The band dominated their lives, traveling to low-paying gigs in an old van crammed with any number of musical instruments, an assortment of props, and prop robots. In 1967, they appeared in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour television special playing "Death Cab for Cutie" during the strip club scene, and this was followed by a slot as the house band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a weekly TV revue show also notable for early appearances by most of the Monty Python troupe. The band toured incessantly and recorded several albums, which led to a tour of the U.S. This was so successful that they were booked for another U.S. tour soon after. Between the two, however, something brought about a crippling change in Stanshall's personality. None of his fellow Bonzos claims to know just what caused it, but by the start of the second tour he was taking very large doses of tranquilizers prescribed by a private doctor, ostensibly to treat stage-fright. Nevertheless, the workload never let up. The band had a punishing schedule, often playing more than one gig per evening. In 1970, after six years mounting exhaustion and depression, Stanshall decided to quit.

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After the Bonzo Dog Band

Stanshall went on to form various short-lived groups including "The Sean Head Band," "Bonzo Dog Freaks," (featuring the guitar talents of the rotund Bubs White) and "BiG GrunT". At one point, he even went into teaching art and drama at a boys secondary modern school in Surrey. By now, his life was dogged by alcoholism and panic attacks, which he tried to control with Valium; he would have these problems for the rest of his life. He had several spells in hospitals in attempts to stop or control his drinking, but they never worked (this was before the existence of modern-day notions of rehab.) He was also still being prescribed larger and larger doses of Valium, which, he later reported, made things worse by simply adding another addiction.

For all his problems, Stanshall never lost his sense of humor. In particular, his exploits with close friend Keith Moon are legendary, perhaps the most notorious involving Stanshall going into an unsuspecting tailor's shop and admiring a pair of trousers; Moon then came in, posing as another customer, admired the same trousers and demanded to buy them. When Stanshall protested the two men fought over them, splitting them in two so they ended up with one leg each. The tailor was by now beside himself but right then a one-legged actor, who had been hired by Stanshall and Moon, came in, saw the trousers and proclaimed "Ah! Just what I was looking for."

Aside from such pranks, the two also worked together. For instance, when Stanshall took over the John Peel radio show for awhile, Moon appeared as Lemmy in the ongoing saga of "Colonel Knutt," idiot adventurer-detective. Moon also produced Stanshall's recorded maniacal version of Elvis Presley's "Suspicion."

In early 1974, Stanshall wrote, arranged, and recorded his first solo album, Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. A complex, idiosyncratic affair, its lyrics were acutely personal insights laced with poetry, as well as overt references to his own penis. The album has a jazz-rock flavour, rich with African percussion. Such artists as his friend Steve Winwood, Innes, Bubs White, Jim Capaldi, Ric Gretch, Doris Troy, and Madeline Bell made guest appearances.

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Rawlinson End

Stanshall's next big success was Rawlinson End. In the 1970s he recorded numerous sessions for BBC Radio 1's John Peel show which elaborated, with a mixture of eloquence and irreverence, on the weird and wonderful adventures of the inebriated and blimpish Sir Henry Rawlinson, his dotty wife Great Aunt Florrie, his "unusual" brother Hubert (who, for speed, stature and far-seeing, habitually goes on stilts), old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer, Mrs. E, the rambling and unhygienic cook, and many other inhabitants of the crumbly Rawlinson End, plus its environs.

The Rawlinson family had been populating Stanshall's imagination for quite a while, their very first appearance (in name, at least) being on the Bonzos' 1967 number "The Intro & The Outro": Great to hear the Rawlinsons on trombone.

An LP, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, which reworked some of the material from the Peel sessions, appeared in 1978. A sepia-tinted black and white film version, starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry, and Stanshall himself as Hubert, followed in 1980. It was also based on the Peel recordings, with many variations from the LP. Some of the film's music was provided by Stanshall's friend Steve Winwood. A book of the same name by Stanshall, illustrated with stills from the film, was published by Eel Pie Books in 1980. Nominally a film novelization, it was actually distilled from all the various versions of the story, including a good deal of material that was not used in the film.

A projected second book, The Eating at Rawlinson End, never appeared. It was to have started:

"In the blue wardrobe of heaven are many unused clothes, too tight fitting yet too beautiful to throw away. And in that wardrobe we hang our likenesses, yellow diaries yellowed with yesterday, thumb smeared with tomorrow. But the now, the present, like the hollow screech of ancient flamingos in search of shrimps, is still vibrantly shocking pink."

A second Rawlinson album, Sir Henry at Ndidi's Kraal (1983), recounts Sir Henry's disastrous African expedition, but omits the rest of the Rawlinson clan. Stanshall was often drunk and/or depressed during production, which took place on The Searchlight, a house boat he bought from Wings' Denny Laine and moored between Shepperton and Chertsey on the River Thames. He lived on it from 1997 to 1983. Converted from a WWI-era submarine chaser, it was forever taking on water and eventually sank with all his possessions aboard. Almost all of the were eventually retrieved, albeit some the worse for water damage.

On Christmas 1996, BBC Radio 4 fished some of the Peel show recordings out of the vault for a very late-night repeat, but there seems to be little chance of a commercial release.

Sir Henry's final appearance was in a TV commercial for Ruddle's Real Ale (c. 1994), where he is portrayed by a cross-dressing Dawn French, presiding over a family banquet at a long table. Stanshall reprises the role of Hubert, reciting a poem loosely based on Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat, at the end of which all the diners produce oars and row the table offscreen.

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There's Always More...

He collaborated on numerous projects including Robert Calvert's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells where he is the 'Master of Ceremonies' breathily announcing the buildup of instruments in the finale of the first side of the album, appeared with Grimms and The Rutles, as well as occasionally working with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven.

While living on the Searchlight, Stanshall composed and recorded Teddy Boys Don't Knit, and wrote and recorded Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. There, he also wrote and filmed the movie of the same name for Tony Stratton-Smith's Charisma Records company. At the same time, he wrote the songs for Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver and many of the songs he later used for Stinkfoot, the musical comedy he wrote with his second wife, Ki Longfellow-Stanshall.

After the Searchlight, the Stanshall family lived and worked on the Thekla, a Baltic Trader, which was sailed 732 nautical miles from the east coast of England to be moored in the Bristol docks. His wife had bought the Thekla in Sunderland, and converted her into a floating theatre called The Old Profanity Showboat. The ship saw the debut of Stinkfoot.

Stanshall wrote 27 original songs for Stinkfoot, sharing some of the lyric writing with his wife. People came from all over Europe to see it, and some from as far away as America.

Stanshall's instantly recognizable voice won him several commercial voice-overs, including a campaign for Cadbury's Creme Eggs which involved a reworking of the Bonzos' song Mister Slater's Parrot, under the title of Mister Cadbury's Parrot.

He was married twice: in 1968 to fellow art student Monica Peiser (they had a son, Rupert, that year, and were divorced in 1975); and on September 9, 1980, to novelist Pamela "Ki" Longfellow. They had a daughter, Silky, born on August 16, 1979, named after a racehorse called Silky Sullivan, her mother's childhood favorite. (Stanshall was seriously considering Dorothy.) His marriage was celebrated in the song, Bewilderbeast, as was Silky's birth in The Tube, on his second solo album Teddy Boys Don't Knit (1981).

In 1991, Stanshall made a 15-minute autobiographical piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, aka Crank, for BBC2's The Late Show, in which he confessed to having been terrified of his late father, who had always disapproved of him.

A later programme for BBC Radio 4, Vivian Stanshall: Essex Teenager to Renaissance Man (1994) included an interview with his mother in which she insisted that his father had loved him, but Stanshall was mortified that his father had never shown it, not even on his deathbed.

Stanshall was found dead on March 6, 1995, after a fire at his Muswell Hill flat, seemingly started by him falling asleep while smoking in bed or by the constantly lit lamp at his bedside. Fuelled by vodka fumes, the cigarette had set fire to his long ginger beard. (Although Stanshall did indeed often set fire to his beard, the coroner found that the fire was begun by faulty wiring near his bed.)

A one-hour television documentary, Vivian Stanshall: The Canyons of his Mind, was broadcast on BBC Four in June 2004.

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Quotes

  • "I don't know what I want, but I want it NOW!" (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End)
  • "Do have an unusual day, won't you?" (Essex Teenager to Renaissance man)
  • "Do you know what a palmist once said to me? She said: WILL YOU LET GO!" (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.)
  • "Gentlemen, I am a bulldog, and you will find my bark is worse!" (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End)
  • "If I had all the money I've spent on drink — I'd spend it on drink." (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End)
  • "You got a light, mac? No...but I've got a dark brown overcoat." (Big Shot)
  • "This is inedible muck, and there's not enough of it." (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End)
  • "Why can't I be different and unusual...like everybody else?" (Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead)
  • "Mercifully, he hit him with the soft end of the pistol." (Sir Henry)
  • "Frankly, once I've eaten a thing, I don't expect to see it again." (Sir Henry)
  • "I've never met a man I didn't mutilate." (Sir Henry)
  • "It was a great party until someone found the hammer." (Bonzo days)
  • "And, looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler on vibes." (Intro and the outro)
  • "If you're going to say anything filthy, please speak clearly." (message on his answering machine)
  • "I've been looking for that particular son of a bitch for seven years. I could have been a doctor, or an architect." (Bad Blood)
  • "Five years ago I was a four-stone apology — today I am two separate gorillas." (Mr. Apollo)
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Bibliography

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External links

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