Sweet Essence of Giraffe...Viv Stanshall at 68

Victor Anthony Stanshall, known as Viv or Vivian for most of his adult life, was born in Shillingford, Oxford on March 21st 1943. The story goes that after his birth the nurse brought three babies into his mothers room, two with small, neat heads and one with a huge head wearing a shock of wild ginger hair. His mother tried for one of the other babies, but there was no getting away from Vivian.

Viv and his mother lived in Shillingford while her husband, Victor (1909–1990) (a name he had adopted in preference to his own christened name of Vivian), served in the RAF.  Vivian wolud later tell his wife, that this was the happiest time of his life. When the war ended, his father returned, and with him the happiness came to an end.The family moved back to Walthamstow. The return of Victor Stanshall was a turning point in the young Vivian's life. With only him and his mother, life was ideal. With the addition of a stern, pretentious father, Stanshall's life took a serious downturn, followed by a further shock at the arrival of a new brother, Mark Stanshall, born in 1949. They were six years apart, an age difference that apparently put a certain amount of emotional distance in their relationship that was never resolved.

As a teenager, Stanshall secretly joined a gang of teddy boys, attracted both by the rock'n'roll and the clothing. Even among such dandies, though, he was a bit of an oddball. About this time, the Stanshall family moved to the Essex coastal town of Leigh-on-Sea. To put aside enough money to get himself through art school (his father having refused to fund such goings-on), Stanshall spent a year in the merchant navy, where he made a very bad waiter, but a great teller of tall tales. He enrolled at the Central School of Art in London. Here, Stanshall and his fellow students, including Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin Spear and Neil Innes, who was studying art at Goldsmiths College, came together to form a band.

The Bonzo Dog Dooh-Dah Band
The name of the band came from a word game which Stanshall played with art school peer and future 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.

In these early days they were a very loose assemblage, consisting of the core members mentioned above, plus just about anyone else who felt like joining in. At times there were as many as 30 of them, with gigs often featuring more people on stage than in the audience. Their act at this time consisted of anarchic re-workings of old British novelty songs, found on 78 rpm records bought from flea markets, spiced with improvisation and a variety of bizarre machines assembled from junk, with at least one explosion per gig.

The Bonzos might have continued in this way, probably disappearing into obscurity, had it not been for a nasty shock: the 1966 chart success of a winsomely arch number called Winchester Cathedral by The New Vaudeville Band — a band comprising session musicians created by songwriter Geoff Stephens, whose musical style was uncannily like the Bonzos' own. As soon as the record became a hit, Stephens and his record company needed a band to present themselves as The New Vaudeville Band. Bob Kerr, a Bonzo member, was asked by his friend Stephens to become the band, and he tried convincing the others that they change their name to achieve greater commercial success, but the advice was rejected...at this point Kerr left the band. Several weeks later, the band appeared on Top Of The Pops performing the songs in clothes exactly like the Bonzos. An emergency meeting was called and the band decided to wear whatever they wanted. The Bonzos realized that if they were to make a mark for themselves, they would have to forge a new path.

According to the band's manager Gerry Bron (brother of the actress Eleanor Bron), Vivian Stanshall was given several weeks to produce songs for the new professional Bonzo Dog Band. When people arrived at his studio they found he had not written a single thing, focusing instead on building a variety of rabbit hutches.

"Canyons of Your Mind" on Colour Me Pop

From here on, they started writing their own material and dropping it into the act alongside the old novelty numbers. With Stanshall now liberated from his original role as tuba player and firmly established as the front man, the act became more sophisticated, more daring, satirical, and original.  For a while the band existed as a semi-pro outfit playing the college circuit, but it wasn't long before they acquired a manager, went full time, and found themselves booked on the working men's club circuit mainly in the north of England. The band dominated their lives, traveling to low-paying gigs in an old van crammed with any number of musical instruments, an assortment of props, and prop robots.

In 1967, they appeared in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour television special playing Vivian's song "Death Cab for Cutie" during the strip club scene, and this was followed by a slot as the house band on Do Not Adjust Your Set, a weekly TV revue show essentially for children, also notable for early appearances by David Jason and various future Monty Pythons.

The Bonzos on "Do Not Adjust Your Set"


In 1968 the Bonzos scored a surprise top ten hit with a number called "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (produced by Apollo C. Vermouth aka Paul McCartney), after management wanted them to "play the game" as Innes put it, to try for a hit single. The band toured incessantly and recorded several albums, which led to a tour of the United States. This was so successful that they were booked for another US tour soon after. Neil Innes remembers that the band were reportedly stopped by a local U.S. sheriff and asked if they were carrying any firearms or drugs. When they denied both, the officer asked how they were going to defend themselves. Vivian piped up from the back of the minibus, "With good manners!"

Between the tours, however, something brought about a change in Stanshall's personality. There were rumours of a bad acid trip in the States, but Vivian never confirmed nor denied this, instead explaining it as a panic on stage which destroyed his confidence and inevitably his life. None of his fellow Bonzos claims to know just what happened, but by the start of the second tour he was taking very large doses of tranquillizers prescribed by a private doctor ostensibly to treat stage-fright, which in reality was crippling agoraphobia and panic disorder. This led also to Vivians increasingly large in take of alcohol in order to self medicate himself for the symptoms of his illness. Nevertheless, the workload never let up. The band had a punishing schedule, often playing more than one gig per evening. The band got sick of the whole touring scene, and decided to split still as friends. In 1970, after six years of mounting exhaustion, they broke up.

Post Bonzos and the Emergence of Sir Henry Rawlinson...

Stanshall went on to form various short-lived groups including The Sean Head Showband, 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. He was also still being prescribed larger and larger doses of Valium, which, he later reported, made things worse by adding another addiction. Even so, he continued to write music and tour. 

The Rawlinson family had been populating Stanshall's imagination for quite a while, their first appearance (in name, at least) being on the Bonzos' 1967 number The Intro & The Outro: "Great to hear the Rawlinsons on trombone".

An LP, "Sir Henry at Rawlinson End", which reworked some of the material from the Peel sessions, appeared in 1978. A sepia-tinted black and white film version, starring Trevor Howard as Sir Henry, and Stanshall as Hubert, followed in 1980. It was also based on the Peel recordings, with many variations from the LP. Some of the film's music was provided by Stanshall's friend Steve Winwood. A book of the same title by Stanshall, illustrated with stills from the film, was published by Eel Pie Publishing in 1980. Nominally a film novelisation, it was distilled from all the various versions of the story, including a good deal of material that was not used in the film.

A second Rawlinson album, "Sir Henry at Ndidi's Kraal" (1983), recounts Sir Henry's disastrous African expedition, but omits the rest of the Rawlinson clan. According to Ki Longfellow-Stanshall, his widow, he regarded this recording as sub-standard and it was released without his knowledge and against his wishes. He was ill when making it, and the record company issued it as quickly as possible. Stanshall was often drunk and/or depressed during production, which took place on The Searchlight, a house boat he bought from Moody Blues and Wings' Denny Laine and moored between Shepperton and Chertsey on the River Thames. He lived on it from 1977 to 1983. Converted from a Second World War era submarine-chaser, it was forever taking on water and sank with all his possessions aboard. Almost all of them were retrieved, some the worse for water damage.

After Sir Henry and So To The Big Sleep... 

Stanshall collaborated on numerous projects including Robert Calvert's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells where he is the Master of Ceremonies, breathily announcing the buildup of instruments in the finale of the first side of the album, appeared with Grimms and The Rutles, as well as occasionally working with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven.

While living on the Searchlight, Stanshall composed and recorded Teddy Boys Don't Knit, and wrote and recorded Sir Henry at Rawlinson End. There, he also wrote and filmed the film of the same name for Tony Stratton-Smith's Charisma Records company. At the same time, he co-wrote with Steve Winwood the songs for Winwood's Arc of a Diver and wrote some of the songs he later used for Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera, the musical comedy he wrote with his second wife Ki Longfellow.

After the Searchlight, the Stanshall family lived and worked on the Thekla, a Baltic Trader, which was sailed 732 nautical miles (1,356 km) from the east coast of England to be moored in the Bristol docks. Ki had bought the Thekla in Sunderland, and converted her into a floating theatre called The Old Profanity Showboat. Vivian joined her when the doors opened to the public for the first time in May 1983. In December 1985, the ship saw the debut of their production, Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera.

Stanshall wrote 27 original songs for Stinkfoot, sharing book and lyric writing with his wife. The show involved bizarre characters that they imagined living under a seaside pier as well as characters taken from Longfellow's early tale for children called Stinkfoot. It proved a success, with people coming from all over Europe and even the Americas to see it. It was revived in London some years later with Peter Moss as musical director, but was not a critical success.

"Vivian Stanshall's Week" Documentary

There is also a 28-minute film of Stanshall currently inside the BBC vault: One Man's Week, dated 1975, looks at a week in his life and includes footage of him at The Manor Studio recording studio playing music with Gaspar Lawal, Mongezi Feza, Anthony White and Derek Quinn. This film also shows him talking about his turtles and playing his 'Phonofiddle'.

Stanshall's voice won him several commercial voice-overs, including a campaign for Cadbury's Mini Eggs which involved a reworking of the Bonzos' song Mister Slater's Parrot, under the title of Mister Cadbury's Parrot.

Vivian was married twice: in 1968 to fellow art student Monica Peiser (they had a son, Rupert, that year, and were divorced in 1975); and on 9 September 1980, to novelist Pamela "Ki" Longfellow. They had a daughter, Silky, born on 16 August 1979, named after a racehorse called Silky Sullivan, her mother's childhood favourite.
In late 1988, after Fish had left Marillion, the band considered using lyrics Stanshall had written, but in the end decided to hire John Helmer instead.

In 1989, his short interview with John Wesley Harding was released on Harding's God Made Me Do It: the Christmas EP.

In 1991, Stanshall made a 15-minute autobiographical piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, aka Crank, for BBC2's The Late Show, in which he confessed to having been terrified of his father, who had always disapproved of him.

A later programme for BBC Radio 4, Vivian Stanshall: Essex Teenager to Renaissance Man (1994) included an interview with his mother in which she insisted that his father had loved him, but Stanshall was mortified that his father had never shown it, not even on his deathbed.

Death

Stanshall was found dead on 6 March 1995, after a fire at his Muswell Hill (north London) flat; coincidentally, this was one hundred years to the day after the death of (the original) Sir Henry Rawlinson. Stanshall often smoked and drank in bed and even set fire to his long ginger beard, to the frequent concern of his wife and friends, however the fire was later attributed to faulty electric wiring.