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The Bonzo Dog Band | Keynsham
(Liberty, 1969)

 

 

“Hello, and how did you find yourself this morning?”
“I just rolled back the sheets and there I was.”

Mention the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and most people will picture a collective of art students in two-tone suits honking away on brass instruments behind a smiling ginger-haired gent crooning some awful 1920s novelty song.  These same people might imagine they had a hit with “Winchester Cathedral” (that was, of course, the New Vaudeville Band), and some will even remember their Elvis pastiche at the end of the Magical Mystery Tour movie.

What is less well-known is that the band eventually branched out into full-blown psychedelic rock.

Towards the end of the 1960s, run-ins with drink, prescription tranquilizers and hallucinogenic drugs transformed lead singer Vivian Stanshall from the cheery crooner of the Bonzos’ early days into a bellowing, hollow-eyed monster.  Images of Viv from the 1970s and 1980s show a thin man with a frightened, thousand-yard stare peering out from behind thick octagonal glasses, all bald-head and knotted beard.

This was yet to come, but by 1969 Viv had left the old 78s behind and had immersed himself in the possibilities afforded him by psychedelia.  No longer content to crank out jollity, his demons were coming to the fore, and the band's final album, before a mediocre 1970s contractual obligation, would be the platform for his own nightmarish vision: the surreal kingdom of Keynsham (in real life a small town between Bristol and Bath in the UK, and the mantra-like mailing address for pirate Radio Luxembourg).

Keynsham is a concept album of sorts; perhaps more a texture album, as there's no real story or theme to the songs, but somehow they all seem to fit.  It's as if they're the soundtrack to an unproduced film or a particularly strange stage show.  Mr. Slater's Parrot likes biting fingers in his horny beak; a bookish child is tormented by sport-loving bullies; a hideous monster makes lustful advances upon our terrified hero; a disembodied observer spies upon romantic outings, and then there's the “leg” and its “noises”.

I don't want to give the impression that this is solely a Viv Stanshall masterpiece, though.  What makes Keynsham stand out as a lost classic it its balance.  The whole time Viv was exploring his inner demons, future Rutle Neil Innes was honing his craft.  Always a songwriter with a keen ear for melody, Keynsham arguably represents the high watermark of Neil's output. While in later years he would often disguise his natural talent behind parody, here you get Neil being Neil, and it's pure pop, as creative and tuneful as anything by the Kinks or Small Faces or Beatles from around the same time.

The album opens with a run of three Neil Innes compositions.  “You Done My Brain In” is a 12-bar rocker with a similar theme to his earlier “Beautiful Zelda,” seeing Neil apparently menaced by the romantic intentions of a supernatural being, made rather jolly by Rod Slater's playful sax.  By contrast, the album's title track is an achingly pretty oddity, tangled clarinet, piano and bass lines weaving around each other while Neil sings about toxic chemical agent hexachlorophene (spelt hexachlorafine on the sleeve notes) and tells us “there are no coincidences, but sometimes the pattern seems more obvious”.  “Tell me more about Keynsham,” implores Viv, and Neil treats us to his wistful, heartbreaking ballad “Quiet Talks & Summer Walks”. This time. recorders mark out the territory along with the bass and piano lines.

(This seems like as good a place as any to mention bass player Dennis Cowan.  After the departure of the distinctively-named Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, the tall, trilby-wearing bassist seen in Magical Mystery Tour, dumped by Viv for being too old, and a string of short-lived session players, the band settled upon popular young heartthrob Cowan to fill the bass position full time.  Now practically a forgotten man, Dennis was a musician of amazing versatility and creativity.  His bass-work on Keynsham binds the album together; high in both the mix and on the fretboard, the bass actually becomes a lead instrument throughout in the absence of a lead guitar.  Had he joined a “serious” rock band, I'm convinced he would now be remembered as one of the greats.  As it is, he contracted peritonitis in 1977 and died at the stupidly young age of 27.)

Following a brief interlude by a sadistically-chuckling dentist, the album moves from Neil's trilogy to Viv's first track, the legendary “Tent,” a growling, lascivious, deranged stomp.  “I want to get you in my tent so we can both experiment,” drools Viv, who then detours into a frightening and blackly comic portrait of decaying mental health.  “I can't control this paranoia,” he complains, tellingly.

The rest of the Bonzos get more of a look-in, vocally, for the remainder of Side A: flamboyant tap-dancing drummer “Legs” Larry Smith duets with Viv on the campy doo-wop ballad “We Were Wrong,” then takes centre stage as a pampered crooner in “Look At Me I'm Wonderful.”  Meanwhile, the whole band take it in turn to outline the injustices of a band's life on the road in “The Bride Stripped Bare By ‘Bachelors’”, and Neil treats us to the vaguely threatening “Joke Shop Man”. Far too short at just over a minute, the song nonetheless contains a couple of lovely melodic and lyrical twists, from jaunty to suddenly plaintive: “Joke Shop Man, help me if you can, it's oh-so very hard to understand”.

Side B opens with Neil's psychedelic pop anthem “What Do You Do?”,with its haunting trumpet and deliberately vacuous lyrical content: “What do you do?  I don't know, but I know I do it every day.” (Vivian's sleeve-notes seem dismissive of this in their own disjointed way.) Then, it's a flashback to the jolly good-time jazz of the old days and “Mr. Slater's Parrot,” an up-tempo romp which sits a little uneasily alongside the darker and richer moments on the record, but is nonetheless a catchy highlight. British readers may recognize this song from a chocolate commercial of a decade or two back.

But perhaps the lynchpin of the album is the staggering “Sport (The Odd Boy)”, a magnificent song about a literary misfit whose life is made miserable by sport-loving bounders, part spooky medieval lullaby and part bombastic anthem in the manner of the old empire: “Sport, sport, masculine sport, equips a young man for society.” The song then closes, rather surprisingly, as an up-tempo psychedelic jam for glockenspiel and bass.

Following “Sport” is Neil's highlight of the album, the beautiful “straight” pop single “I Want To Be With You,” a delightful anticipation of Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Have You Ever Seen The Rain?,” sadly failing to trouble the charts with its presence despite being one of the best things out there that year.

Father of a famous son, and the man behind the nightmarish robots and cherry bombs, the perpetually zany Roger Ruskin-Spear takes centre stage next for a tormented “procession of the freaks”, a medieval instrumental played on a theramin built in the shape of a human leg; then for the grand finale, “Busted”, a sprawling satirical mini-rock-opera that pokes fun at both the flower-power set and the British police, and fades out with an extended bass solo, mooing, hysterical laughter, a passing freight train and finally a cavalry trumpet which morphs into breezy jazz courtesy of Mr. Stanshall, rounding off an LP which should be recognised as a classic, but which is instead the obscure entry in a run of four obscure albums by one of the more obscure acts of the 1960s.  Such is justice.

P.S. I went to see a Bonzos reunion concert in November 2006.  With Viv long gone, I expected it to be a safe and slightly half-hearted jolly for a collection of elderly gents.  Actually, it turned out to be one of the best gigs I've ever been to – anarchic, under-rehearsed and dangerous as ever. For me, the high points of the show were hearing “What Do You Do?,” “Busted”,  “Keynsham” and “Sport” in all their psychedelic glory.

Adam S. Leslie

Adam S. Leslie is a British songwriter and recording artist, who is finishing up an album entitled Fingerprints.

Go to: Adam S. Leslie