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Concert
Review by Nick Morgan |
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BONZO DOG DOO DAH BAND REVISISTED
Astoria, London, January 28th 2006 |
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Life’s
like that isn’t it? I mean sometimes it’s
hard just to know where things went wrong. There
I was, a nice lower middle class boy, school rugby
team, brought up on roast meat, home grown vegetables
(we even had kept hens at one stage, which has now
become fashionably chic), Three Way Family Favourites,
The Navy Lark and the Sunday Express. And then –
whoosh – rock and roll hit me like a disease.
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| But
it didn’t happen like that – it never
does. So there was a gradual process of exposure
before the infection properly took hold –
my chum from the States playing me his West Coast
rock records, illicit trips to the Blues Attic (you
know, the one that wasn’t really an attic
but a function room – “weddings, family
parties, funerals” – at the back of
the Jolly Weavers), John Peel on the radio (did
I ever tell you about the first time I heard Interstellar
Overdrive, sitting in the back of the family car
in a pub car park in Kenilworth, eating crisps,
drinking lemonade and listening to Peel?). |
| And
of course, at the more surreal end of things there
was the short lived television programme (1968-1969)
Do Not Adjust Your Set, 29 episodes, Thursdays (or
was it Wednesday?) at 5.30, featuring the rump of
what would be Monty Python, David Jason and Denise
Coffey and the mind altering Bonzo
Dog Doo Dah Band (you probably know
Serge that they were originally called ‘Da
Da Band’, which I think means ‘father’
in your French, but changed it to ‘Doo Dah
Band’ to prevent any confusion with your Gallic
Dads). |
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The
Bonzos provided wit, music, tomfoolery and an infectious
madness. In fact once bitten by this dog you would
be deeply scarred for life. Ask me, I know.
The Bonzos had been formed out of a thriving art
college jazz scene in London in the mid sixties,
but took traditional jazz as their starting point,
mixed with a heavy splash of surreal seasoning.
However as they developed they pioneered a unique
mixture of jazz, rock and roll, satire (readers
of this website should try and track down their
John and Yoko parody ‘Give booze a chance’),
bizarre slapstick (mainly fuelled by Ruskin-Spear’s
robots, musical legs, and other mad inventions)
and otherworldly humour. |
 |
By
1967 they had released their first album, Gorilla,
lost a few early members – notably Sam Spoons
and Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell (who joined another
early Bonzo Bob Kerr in his Whoopee Band) –
and relatively ‘settled’ into a line-up
of Vivian
Stanshall, Neil
Innes, Roger Ruskin-Spear, Dennis Cowan, Legs
Larry Smith, and Rodney Slater. Minor chart success
(‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’) - several
albums (the classic Doughnut in Granny’s Greenhouse,
Tadpoles, Keynsham) was followed by two fruitless
US tours and near bankruptcy, leading to the break-up
of the band in 1971 and a final contract fulfilling
album Let’s make up and be friendly in 1972.
|
In
the aftermath only Innes sustained a musical career,
performing (sometimes with Stanshall) with Grimms
– an poetic scousers amalgam of Liverpool
Scene and Scaffold, pursuing a solo recording and
touring career, tying up with the Pythons, various
TV series, The Rutles (with Python Eric Idle) and
most recently co-writing and performing some frankly
mediocre radio comedy programmes. Stanshall never
lived up to the promise of his enormous talent,
plagued by alcohol dependency and illness his work
mainly centered on Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (recorded
in 1978 and finally filmed in 1980) and various
outstanding radio and TV cameos, ‘till his
untimely death in 1994. Perhaps most famously he
was ‘the voice’ on Mike Oldfield’s
Tubular Bells. Cowan died in 1972; Slater whilst
performing occasionally turned to social work; Ruskin-Spear
to teaching art (his Dad Serge, is apparently a
famous painter), Legs Larry Smith to design and,
err, tap dancing. A Bonzos’ reunion? Pigs
might fly!
So like most of the aged audience in the Astoria
on this coldest of January nights I’m pinching
myself, partly to get my circulation going after
queuing outside for an hour, but also out of disbelief.
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| The
pickle factory is packed – well not really
packed as it’s seated, plastic chair village
hall style, so probably only half the normal crowd
are in. Maybe partly explains why tickets went so
quickly and were so hard to find – changing
hands, or so I’m told, for hundreds of pounds
(it must be that madness). I’m in the second
row! To my left the Chelsea and Kensington set,
fur coats, jewels and all – but having a great
time (Mrs Chelsea and Kensington was almost word
perfect). To my left a man with a weak bladder and
pre-senile dementia (I promise I’m not making
this up Serge) – so everytime he goes to the
Gents the very patient steward has to rescue him
as he wanders – lost in his personal Bonzo
heaven - around the auditorium trying to find his
seat. The excitement and sense of expectation is
palpable. The gig is being filmed for TV and a DVD.
And we’ve been asked very nicely not to take
photographs – a shame, as in the temporary
absence of The Photographer I’d smuggled the
new Whiskyfun camera in inside my sock (maybe I
could be one of Her Majesty’s Spies in Moscow?).
So no picture from me boys. |
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| The
stage is packed. In the centre is Innes on keyboard
and guitars, in so far as it’s possible directing
the course of the evening. To the right is the band,
Innes collaborators J J Jones (drums) Tom Fry (bass)
Mickey Simmonds (keyboards various) and Liverpool
Scene veteran guitarist Andy Roberts. To the left
are the Bonzos. At the rear Sam Spoons on drums
and Bohay-Nowell on banjo and saw. At the front
a straight-faced Kerr (quite how he managed this
all night is a mystery) on trumpets, cornets and
teapot, a very lively Slater on saxophones, clarinet
and percussion, and in his own chaos corner Roger
Ruskin-Spear, on god knows what. He was so wired
up with energy that I feared he might explode. Legs
Larry Smith was downstairs putting on his make-up. |
Neil Innes |
It’s
easy to forget what a wealth of material the Bonzos
put together, and it obviously proved no easy task
to agree the set list, which at two hours challenged
the Astoria’s Saturday night curfew. What
we got was, roughly speaking, a jazz set, followed
by an electric set, both kicking off, in suitably
patriotic vein, with ‘Rule Britannia’.
The first half included ‘Hunting tigers out
in Indiah’, ‘Little Sir Echo’
(with Sam Spoons as the ventriloquists dummy), ‘Ali
Baba’s camel’, Bohay-Nowell singing
a Euro version of ‘Falling in love again’,
‘By a waterfall’, ‘My brother
makes the noises for the talkies’ (with Ruskin
Spear on his improvised sound-effects rig), ‘Look
out there’s a monster coming’, and ‘Jollity
Farm’. Somewhere in the middle of this we
caught our first glimpse of Legs Larry Smith –
“Hello Mabel!” – “Hiya fellas”,
not looking at all bad in his tartan mini-skirt
and breast-hugging sweater as he tap-danced across
the stage with Ruskin-Spear following at his feet
with a microphone. |
He
reappeared later to perform ‘Three hands’.
And Ruskin-Spear, introducing an element of shambolic
anarchy into almost everything he did (“are
you waiting for me Neil?”, “well yes
Roger, but I don’t think I’m the only
one”) performed, so to speak, with his Theremin
Leg. “Well, that was a surprise to all of
us” concluded Innes.
The ‘electric’ second half focussed
primarily on the material most readily identified
with Vivian Stanshall, much of it from the Doughnut
album. To help them out in Stanshall’s absence
the Bonzos got assistance from comedian Phil Jupitus,
who sang and played on ‘Mr Apollo’ (perfectly),
‘Can blue men sing the whites?’ and
‘Canyons of your mind’. Adrian Edmondson
sang the lavatorial ‘Strain’, ‘Tent’,
and (excellently) ‘I’m bored’;
cavorted around as a parrot for ‘Mr Slater’s
Parrot’, and turned in an outstanding version
of the wonderful ‘My pink half of the drainpipe’,
with word perfect narration by Rodney Slater –
“have you seen my bullfight poster on the
wall?”. Paul Merton sang ‘Monster mash’
(and demonstrated to everyone in the audience that
he really can’t dance) while Sam Spoons played
a spoon-playing monster to Ruskin Spear’s
Frankenstein. |
| And
Stephen Fry
was simply perfect – and you should realise
how hard it is for me to write that about this usually
grotesquely self regarding egotist – but yes,
Stephen Fry was simply perfect on ‘Sound of
music’, ‘Sport’ and ‘Rhinocratic
oaths’. He also added the coda (“the
part of old Bill was played by a Frying pan, the
rest of old Bill was played by …”) to
Ruskin-Spear’s masterpiece ‘Trouser
Press’. Quite what the wigged and white-coated
Ruskin-Spear was doing is another matter, but fighting
with an exploding musical trouser press (which looked,
as did most of his props, to be close to the original
one he had used in the late 60s) probably best sums
it up. Is that clear Serge? |
Stephen Fry |
|
I should add that the guests avoided that stage-hogging
limelight-grasping behaviour that often happens
on such occasions, and that they were anyway all
upstaged by Legs Larry Smith performing ‘Look
at me I’m wonderful’ and ‘I left
my heart in San Francisco’. It was only a
shame that someone had decided to end the evening
with the recorded version of ‘The Intro and
the Outro’ – as the stage filled with
costumed family, friends and relations the whole
thing became a bit of a mess, and ended with a fizzle
rather than a bang, with the Bonzos not even getting
an opportunity to line up at the end to take the
audience’s fulsome applause. But they’d
given us a memorable two hours of under-rehearsed
and rather poorly prepared pleasure, full of a somewhat
old-fashioned, innocent and naive humour tinged
with contagious lunacy. There was a lot of laughter,
loads of applause, and not a few tears as the evening
went on. But it was probably the expletive fuelled
Adrian Edmondson who captured the spirit of the
moment for everyone: “I just can’t fucking
believe this, I can’t fucking believe I’m
here. These guys were my fucking heroes, my fucking
heroes …” - Nick Morgan |
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Nick's Concert Reviews
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