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Vivian Stanshall: Bonzos
built 423 days ago
Now a nightclub, once owned by Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, this is the Thekla. The venue for Viv's musical Stinkfoot, it seems to be such a permanent part of Bristol that it's even mentioned on the street direction signs.
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The name of the band came from a word game which Stanshall played with art school peer and Bonzo member Rodney Slater, 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. Thus they became the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band — later abbreviated to The Bonzo Dog Band, or just The Bonzos.
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The most recognised of the Bonzos has to be Vivian Stanshall, variously described as “the court jester of the underground rock scene in the Sixties” by the late John Peel and as a “unique and inspired comic genius” by Stephen Fry. The classic track “The intro and the Outro” from the album Gorilla features Viv introducing, after the other members of the Bonzos, various celebrities of the time, such as Roy Rogers on Trigger, the Count Basie Orchestra on Triangle, Quasimodo on Bells – you get the idea.
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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 drug rehabilitation). He was ... still being prescribed larger and larger doses of Valium, which, he later reported, made things worse by simply adding another addiction.
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Vivian 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 boy's secondary modern school in Surrey. By now, his life was dogged by depression and a drinking problem, and would remain so. He had several spells in hospitals in attempts to stop or control his drinking, but they never worked (this was before modern-day notions of rehab). He was ... still being prescribed large doses of Valium, which — he later reported — made things worse by simply adding another addiction.
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At home, rattling around a house full of Bonzo props and weirdness on his own, Vivian thought up some more schemes to divert himself. He went up to town to play darts with the Melody Maker team, playing a side fielded by the Strawbs. He turned up dressed as a dart, wearing dart flights on his trousers, a spiked helmet and declaring he would play by lowering his head and running at the board. The Strawbs entirely failed to be amused by this, or by the state-of-the-art equipment Vivian had constructed to foil their efforts, such as shaped wire coat hangers which he claimed were sights to improve his aim.
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