‘Gorilla’: the psychedelic comedy revolution of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
The decade of the 1960s was a period of radical change in virtually every sense of the world. As the youth of Britain found their voice as the rebellious post-war generation, there was a cultural explosion within the nation’s capital. All of a sudden, there were countless young musicians, artists, and writers pushing the boundaries of acceptability and perceived normality. Bands like The Kinks, The Who and The Rolling Stones soon rose to the top, but some of the country’s most innovative artists existed within the world of avant-garde experimentation and obscurity.
Among the most original artists to emerge from the art schools of London in the 1960s was the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, formed by students Vivian Stanshall and Rodney Slater in the early part of the decade. The band’s name should indicate their output, a mixture of the cartoon character Bonzo the Dog and the avant-garde art movement of Dadaism. Originally, the group was mainly focused on comedy records in the wake of groups like The Barron Knights, but as the decade progressed, the students became more and more enamoured with the mind-bending world of jazz and psychedelia.
As they grew a dedicated audience for their surrealist comedy performances, the band found fame in the circuit of working men’s clubs up and down the nation. While that might not sound too noteworthy, you have to take into account the state of comedy in the UK during this time. The wake of alternative comedy and stand-ups would not arrive until decades later, and so the comedy scene was largely dominated by old-school comics telling outdated jokes often rooted in racism and misogyny. So, the Bonzos offered an alternative for the post-war generation, which was challenging the beliefs of their parents.
After some appearances on national television, namely Blue Peter, the Bonzos proved popular enough to dedicate themselves to their art on a full-time basis. This decision coincided with a move from parodying jazz to embracing contemporary rock and roll.
This new era for the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band proved so influential that they were invited onboard The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film, performing ‘Death Cab for Cutie’. Building upon that success, the group scored a role on the ITV children’s programme Do Not Adjust Your Set, which also featured members of Monty Python – with whom the Bonzos forged something of a friendship. Although the idea of a children’s programme featuring both Monty Python and the psychedelic surrealism of the Bonzos sounds like a dream come true, the show was fairly short-lived. Thankfully, it didn’t really matter. The band had already established themselves as something of a cultural phenomenon in the UK.
It was during this period that the collective produced their greatest and most popular works, particularly the 1967 album Gorilla. The groundbreaking release saw the band expand upon its avant-garde jazz roots, with the added influences of rock and psychedelia, which was unlike anything mainstream audiences had ever heard before.
For Gorilla, the band were forced to complete the recording in a very short space of time, which meant that the album was imbued with a sense of organic brilliance and spontaneity. Even today, over 50 years since its original release, it is still difficult to find anything across the musical landscape that sounds remotely similar to Gorilla. The album is an absolute tour-de-force from the vaudeville surrealism of ‘I’m Bored’ to the deliberately inept jazz of ‘Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold’. In fact, the album is probably among the finest psychedelic records of the 1960s, which is a bold claim given that it was released the same year as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
In the years that followed Gorilla, the collective would have chart success with the hippie folk track ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’, but for many fans, they would never eclipse the brilliance of Gorilla. After disbanding in 1970, and reuniting sporadically over the following few decades, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band firmly cemented their place among the greatest cultural products of the 1960s and beyond. A lot is made of the supposed ‘innovation’ of groups like Cream, The Stones or the Grateful Dead, but none of them could compare to the euphoric psychedelic comedy of the Bonzos.
