> The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band / |
VIVIAN STANSHALL | < Collaborator of V |
>
Here's a band that truly does deserve
it's cult reputation. Combining comedy, 30's-style music-hall sounds and the
wacky, bizarre humour of the band's two major figures Neil
Innes and Vivian Stanshall, the Bonzo's had their best time in the late
60's, when they filled large-halls and even had a hit single with "I am
the Urban Spaceman".
Red-haired as Calvert (discretely
hidden on the photo you see on the left), and certainly as eccentric (possibly
even more), Vivian
Stanshall, famous comedian - musician; front-man of the Bonzos; the "court-jester
of the underground scene" as John Peel described him.
"The
quintessential art school band, the
Bonzos were
a chaotic mixture of music hall, rock parody and Dada nonsense. Resolutely
English, Stanshall & co. brought an absurdist sense of humour to a scene
that was already beginning to take itself too seriously."
To shed some light on his somewhat bizarre and outrageous sense of humour: he obviously took delight in cruising through the pubs of London with his good friend Keith Moon - wearing Nazi uniforms. What fun! (Read more on Stanshall's career in the article below.) Stanshall made a significant contribution to Calvert's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters album, performing most of the lead character's in the sketches that appear between the songs, accompanied by Tom Mittledorf, Richard Ealing, Jim Capaldi and Calvert himself.
And Calvert obviously knew that Stanshall
was THE man for this: Here you can hear Stanshall
in top-form, making full use of the whole range of his famous "posh
talk" - On Captain Lockheed... Stanshall impersonates all sorts of characters: from the mad-fat German then defense minister Franz Joseph Strauss to a neurotic test-pilot, whose mother crashed while she tried to cross the atlantic single-handedly...and they only found her false eye-lashes, floating on the waves...and that's why he is wearing mascara....for her sacred memory...all clear? Well, get an audio
taste of it here - LISTEN
to: However, the strange way Calvert and Stanshall got to know each other did not point to a later collaboration - quite on the contrary....: Read the hilarious story of the first meeting of Calvert and Viv Stanshall on the QUOTES pages - told by Arthur Brown who introduced them to each other. <
Find out all about
Viv Stanshall, the Bonzo's and their
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