A man called Vivian

[imomus]

Vivian Stanshall's plummy, plumaged voice injected psycho-Victoriana into my adolescence via his sessions for the John Peel show -- non-linear tales of family life like this one, Aunt Florrie Remembers:

[Error: unknown template video]

When I was writing my Book of Jokes last year, I noticed an unmistakable Stanshall tone creeping into certain passages; Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (the book, the album, the film, the radio sessions) concerns an extremely eccentric family. Cassettes of Stanshall seemed to be playing back in the deeper nooks of my imagination as I wrote. His voice -- his brandy-fuelled fluidity, his tangent-leaps, his subtle perversity -- stays with you.



There's something in Stanshall's combination of perfect diction and shambolic scato-dada events which is irresistible; like clipped, correct, British Trevor Howard reading Tristan Tzara or Kurt Schwitters. (Howard of course played Sir Henry in the film.) I've never really got into the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, though.

Stanshall was both a rock and roll bad boy (his drunken exploits with Keith Moon are legendary) and a neo-Victorian art school dandy. The 1975 BBC documentary Vivian Stanshall's Week makes a good introduction:

[Error: unknown template video]

[Error: unknown template video]

[Error: unknown template video]

That other clipped-voiced Englishman, Stephen Fry, made a BBC 4 documentary film about Stanshall in 2004 called Vivian Stanshall -- The Canyons of His Mind, which I'm going to watch in about thirteen hours, according to my torrent software.

I wonder if I'll be able to find footage of Stanshall's 1991 appearance on The Late Show? Just four years before his own death in a fire, Vivian (who took his father's rejected real name) talks about his distance from, and fear of, his father, who'd died the year before. That too really stays with me -- something to do with his outlandish, bright yellow clothes and huge spectacle frames, but also the candour of what he was saying. And that Peter O'Toole-like voice, calmly recounting Rabelaisian outrages.

Comments

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

I've never really got into the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, though.

"My Pink Half of the Drainpipe" is a fav of mine.

Best known in the U.S. as the voice introducing the instruments at the end of "Tubular Bells"

[(Anonymous)]

I love this clip of Big Grunt, delightfully absued

[(Anonymous)]

absurd that is

Fry / Stanshall

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh, I'd never known of that documentary! Thank you!

On the other hand, the only torrent I've been able to find of it currently seems dead dead dead, although I am holding out hope, because torrents from prq.to seem to scrape out as totally dead even when they are quite alive.

[projectmustache.livejournal.com]

Weird. I was just watching those clips earlier this week! For more of Vivian's brilliance, many of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's performances on "Do Not Adjust Your Set" are available on YouTube as well...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Could have helped ole Viv with caring for his turtles--I find stinkpots all the time on my treks.

He would've liked my garden, I think.

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

I love reading about Viv, and that documentary you're downloading is great. But I just can't bear to watch him / Bonzos perform. It might just be my inbuilt wariness of any combination of comedy and music, but I think it's all aged incredibly badly, in the same way that 95% of Monty Python stuff has.

But I could listen to him reciting Rawlinson End stuff all day.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

A bit to the right of Gallagher at times, this stuff. That said, having grown up with this sort of thing in the air, I will always have affection for this gentle brand of late 60s-early 70s neo-vaudevillian cornball naffery, smiling and cringing in equal measure.

[evxanadu.livejournal.com]

http://evpopsongs.com (http://evpopsongs.com)

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

All of the Rawlinson End stuff is lovely: that glorious voice can lull you, until you are suddenly brought up short by some great swerve of logic. I listen to him often, the voice, not the music. The Late Show documentary featured his best music, I think. Have all of the tracks, and the instrumentation - acoustic brass and strings - is what one would have wished he'd used throughout his career.

There were some great radio documentaries just before his death - from what I remember he seemed to be coming full circle, talking about his father a lot and returning to the music he loved at the start of his career (rather than the stadium rock that he became involved in at the Bonzo's height).

Everyone remembers the space age forward looking aspect of the sixties, but I love how it was coupled with an appreciation of and strange take on Victoriana and the music of the early 20th Century - you can see it in the work of people like "Professor" Bruce Lacey & The Alberts and how it was carried through into pop.

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

I'm not a huge Bonzos fan, but I have to agree with old Viv that their humor was much less caustic than Zappa's. Zappa could be a dick, and often was.
I'm surprised that Iness's solo on "Canyons of Your Mind" wasn't at least a fragment of the inspiration behind your nylon string guitar solo from "I Love You". But I'm also frequently alarmed at my ignorance of musical semantics.

http://rurritable.wordpress.com/

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Apparently I can't remember song titles, either. I think the song I was referring to is "I want you, but I don't need you."

Re: http://rurritable.wordpress.com/

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, I've just listened to Canyons of Your Mind for the first time in my life, and I don't hear any similarity between those guitar solos. Mine in IWYBIDNY just follows the vocal melody, doesn't it? There's no Derek-Baileyesque swerving out of tune going on, is there? I'll have to listen to the track again.

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

I think I'm probably confusing the attack with the the addled macho swagger of Innes' solo. Again, I've misheard, and therefore misinterpreted your intent.
Excellent song, by the way. I used to play it frequently at the college radio station where I worked the 5-6AM slot. The FCC would not have been pleased.

[(Anonymous)]

Zzzzzzz

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Sir? Hello? I'm sorry, you can't sleep here.

Sit up, sir, good, that's right. Now, can you tell us your name? Do you have a home? Can you remember where you slept before you started sleeping here?

[(Anonymous)]

Why I've always slept here Sir. You need to sharpen you observational skills further. We are an army here and growing.

talk about coincidences

[pitcherthis.livejournal.com]

we just watched the sir henry film last night!

the vaudevillian

[(Anonymous)]

mister momus
viv Stanshall wrote my favorite song about going to the bathroom called the strain. i played the vaudevillian twice on my xmas day show [no xmas songs, all comedy & terrible songs} if you go to the wprb website you can see the worried waltz playlist for xmas day. i will be playing the song again tonight 10pm to 1am est.

Re: the vaudevillian

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it only seems right to thank you twice, back-to-back.

So thank you. And thank you!

but humour me and lets see if your

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Lewis Caroll would be thrilled with Vivian's poetic signs and symbols of arrested juvenile vision.
I'm sure some drizzled into the Americas.

Re: but humour me and lets see if your

[(Anonymous)]

Arrested juvenile vision seems to be doing more than drizzling here in the states. Over the past eight years at least, it's been baseball sized hail.
Vivian's humor seems to have been more good natured than the date-rape stuff that passed for funny here. And The idiotic crucible of the sixties that launched P.J. O'Rourke and John Belushi isn't finished with us yet.

Why does 'funny music' suck so much?

[(Anonymous)]

No-one likes it. John Peel's first rule of demos-he-wouldn't-even-listen-to was 'funny hats'. Funny suggests a flightiness and self-consiousness that seems to be the opposite of good music. It auctions timelessness and re-listenablity for instant fizz. English bands are prone to it, unless whipped by a stick. It sucks.

Re: Why does 'funny music' suck so much?

[loveishappiness.livejournal.com]

There was a programme on BBC Four about comedy songs recently that was appropriately excruciating.

Re: Why does 'funny music' suck so much?

[(Anonymous)]

it either works or it doesn't, Weird al's music is sometimes funny if you hear it once, but then the joke is over and his music doesn't stand on it's own without the jokes, but then there are Ween, Butthole Surfers, Adam Green, Pavement, Zappa, Beefheart, etc., not to mention Momus, who use humor in their music more artfully, and avoid turning into novelty acts. My favorite pop artists aren't above silliness and poking fun at themselves.

Re: Why does 'funny music' suck so much?

[(Anonymous)]

Wit and self-mockery is one thing, but 'funny' overcomes the sound.

The energy of music might be close to sexual energy. And no-one wants to be fucked by a clown. The joke seems to end very quickly.

Re: Why does 'funny music' suck so much?

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

no-one wants to be fucked by a clown.

You clearly need to get out more.

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

American groups could use a little working over with sticks because of the humor thing, too. Particularly this John Daeker guy who comes in at 0:50.

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Damn. here's the video:
http://reciprocalcrapexchange.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-name-is-john-daker.html

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Aw, that's not humour, that's Alzheimers.