Vivian Stanshall: Chief Bonzo Dog Turns Human Bean

“I had written a play about Robin Hood in which Maid Marion was a bird I rather fancied. In the play I got to kiss her, but the main thing was that I actually got to fire an arrow. For one moment I could fire an arrow perhaps 50 feet in the air just to menace the clouds. It was a divine moment.”

After the convent school came Southern High School, from which, at the age of 15, Viv came very close to getting the boot for various crimes against the state. But, he says, “Instead, my mother went to a local art school and asked them: ‘Will you take this boy?’ They did, and I was saved the Tom Brown ignominy of actually being expelled, whipped out and booed by all the other chaps.”

At art school, Stanshall turned Teddy Boy and hung out with a gang of local toughs and gypsies. “During that period,” he says, “my major achievements were learning a lot of Gypsy tongue and getting involved in fights, brawls and outrages. I didn’t even know any upper- or middle-class kids, but I was saddled with a posh accent that was totally unjustified by my background. I didn’t know really which side I was on.”

After the first art school, Stanshall couldn’t get a government grant to go on in school because his father made too much money, so he shipped out in the Merchant Navy for a while. At first he was a waiter, but he made so many snide remarks to the dining passengers that he was soon made a utility steward. “This was better, really,” he says, “since you didn’t have to mix with the passengers and could grow a beard.”

After six months at sea, Stanshall went back to art school, ending up at Central Art College where he studied illustration. It was at Central that he met “Legs” Larry Smith, one of the original Bonzos. Members gathered from other London colleges, and the Bonzo Dog Dada Band (as it was first called) become a reality.

“Actually,” Stanshall says, “the Bonzo Dog began as a gang of wankers, 30 or so people who got together to fool around. Perhaps four of us were really stalwarts. It was just a release from college. We had no idea it was going to become as big as it did.”

This was in the early Sixties, and when Stanshall and the others graduated, the hard core of the band went professional as the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. “We didn’t want to promote the New York-Paris Dada art thing,” Viv says, “so we made it Doo-Dah, which meant anything you wanted it to. But the main abrasive was the Dog part of our name. Several times we got mixed up with people who thought we were a dog troupe with mutts jumping through hoops, pushing tiny barrows and shitting on the audience at specific times to tremendous applause.”

The Bonzos staggered and lurched along professionally for nearly four years and reached some surprising heights before going down in self-ignited flames in early 1970. “We thought we were playing crap, and nobody was developing the way he wanted to,” Stanshall says, “so we said let’s jack it in. Besides, I was obviously cracking up.”

The real crack-ups came a few months later after Viv had shaved his head and started a new group called Big Grunt. The new group barely got going when Stanshall had a nervous breakdown. This was in the late spring of 1970. “It was weird,” Viv says. “I had a tremendous spurt of creativity and ideas were pouring out so fast that I had to dictate them to my wife. But then I slowly became a real vegetable.

“I found that I could look at a page of print and didn’t have any idea what it said. Then it got down to paragraphs, sentences and even words. I just couldn’t read. I got so I’d sit there and say ‘carrot’ 50 times in a row. Finally, the quack was called, and I was put inside.”

“Inside” was Halliwick Hospital, a small mental institution a couple of miles from Stanshall’s North London home. He was to spend seven weeks there.

“The first thing they did,” Viv says, “was put me on ten or 12 pills a day and throw me into the group therapy sessions with maybe 40 patients and three psychiatrists. There were people bouncing off the walls all day and screaming all night. I saw the quack and told him I wanted off the pills, so they cut me down to two or three a day and I wasn’t floating around in such a haze.”

After a while in Halliwick, Viv says, “I began to feel that I was a fake—not quite as loony as I was supposed to be. I mean, you sit in group therapy and hear some woman whose husband deserted her tell how she woke up one day and found her kid dead of malnutrition, and you begin to wonder: What the fuck am I doing in here?”

Even in Halliwick, Stanshall found ways to carry on a life-long campaign of calculated lunacy. “On visiting days,” he says, “I used to sidle up to outsiders and ask them if they wanted to see foaming at the mouth. Or I’d invite them in a very matter-of-fact way to come see the scratches on the walls.”

These and other typically Stanshall activities led the authorities at Halliwick to suspect that Vivian had recovered. After he’d been in Halliwick nearly two months, he was called in for an interview with his doctor.