The band who set out to be the worst in the world and ended up in the Top 10
The year is 1968, music is starting to grow more experimental, and with that experimentation came the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.
While most bands and creative ideas from the ‘60s started in the pub, the Bonzo’s originally found form on the end of a radio, as two boxing enthusiasts huddled around the crackling speaker and attempted to listen to the heavyweight bout of Floyd Patterson vs Sonny Liston. Those two boxing fans were Rodney Slater and Viv Stanshall, two would-be members of the Bonzo’s, who had no idea they were about to stumble upon the name of their band that would one day have a Top 10 song.
“Heavyweight contests were big events in those days, and they always used to be broadcast live on the radio,” recalled Slater. “I was sitting there, waiting for it to start. My flatmate, Tom Parkinson, had run into Viv Stanshall in a pub in the West End, when Viv had nowhere to stay.”
He continued, “Tom brought him home, and Viv and I just started nattering. We decided: ‘Let’s wait up till three in the morning for this boxing match.’ In those three or four hours beforehand, these conversations really began. We played this silly word game, which produced the ‘Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’ – with a little bit of fiddling.”
The band’s sound very much followed suit with the chaotic name. There was no real structure to what The Bonzos wound up doing, as more members were added from art colleges, other bands, and recruited from the pub, the aim was to make noise and try to push the boundaries of what could be considered music. This meant adding theatre to their live shows, and playing instruments that had been made by fellow art student Martin Ash, who later became known as Sam Spoons (the reasons why will soon become apparent).
“Playing the spoons was always a party piece of mine,” he explained. “I played down in Plymouth with all the sailors in the pubs, and I got free beer because they thought it was wonderful! I brought all that to the art college. The Bonzos all went, ‘That’s so ridiculous!’ And they asked me to join.”
One of the most high-profile members of the band was Roger Ruskin Spear, who was the son of the painter Ruskin Spear. He had just broken up with his band and was looking for something new, which was when he stumbled upon The Bonzos in the Kensington Arms. The band had really started attracting big crowds as people wanted to see what weird stuff they would pull from the abyss of their minds next, and Spear found himself barging his way through a busy crowd just to get a look at the band. What he saw was bizarre and yet somewhat endearing. He had to join in.
“It certainly was a horrendous noise – but it just about suited my current desire to break free from the confines of ‘serious’ music. It was the kind of British culture that was interesting me at the time,” he explained, “When I joined, our idea was to play as loudly and badly as possible until someone took notice. Which they did when the Bonzos played every Sunday evening at the Tiger’s Head in Catford.”
This band, who were born from a word game played before a boxing match, and whose intention was to make what can only be described as a racket, were somehow capturing the hearts of live audiences everywhere. As such, when they started releasing music in 1968, there was an audience ready to buy, which led to their track ‘I’m The Urban Spaceman’ landing in the top ten. We consider a lot of experimental music a modern invention, but it was happening back when genres were still developing. The Bonzos might not have intended to make anything listenable, but during a period of musical excitement, they captured the hearts of the open-minded everywhere.
