Vivian Stanshall

Vivian Stanshall (March 21 1943 – May 3 1995) was an English musician, writer, wit, and raconteur and is probably best known for his work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. He is also well known for his weird take on British society, Sir Henry at Rawlinson End.

Stanshall was born and raised in Southend-on-Sea with his mother, father and younger brother. In his teenage years he became a teddy boy and hung around with a gang where he was "tolerated as an amusing mascot". It was a conflicted situation, when with his friends he adopted the slang and dropped-t pronunciation of the street, but on returning home he would put on his best educated middle-class voice so as not to be scolded by his parents.

During his early years at this seaside resort Stanshall managed to secure employment as a bingo caller and also spent time painting some of the fairground attractions.

He was often introduced as one of "Britain's greatest eccentrics" but this was a tag that Stanshall disliked as it made it sound as if he were acting in some way, and he was almost militant in affirming that he was just "being me". However, it is not hard to see why he received the label: of their first meeting, in a large Irish pub, Neil Innes said, "He was quite plump in those days – he had Billy Bunter check trousers and a Victorian frock coat, pince-nez glasses, carried a euphonium and wore pink rubber ears."

After a period in the merchant navy, Stanshall came to London to study art and it was here that the meeting with Innes took place and the Bonzo Dog Band was born.

The band had a punishing tour schedule, often playing more than one gig per evening. Over the next half-decade the band toured and recorded several albums, the success of which led to a tour in the US. The tour was a hit and they returned for another US tour soon after. However, after six years of gruelling hard work, this resulted in the band's disintegration – as much from sheer tiredness as anything else.

Rawlinson End was first mentioned in the Bonzo Dog Band song of the same name. In the 1970s Stanshall recorded numerous sessions for BBC Radio 1's John Peel show which elaborated, with a fine mixture of eloquence and irreverence, on the weird and wonderful adventures of the inebriate and politically-incorrect Sir Henry Rawlinson ("If I had all the money I'd spent on drink...I'd spend it on drink."), his dotty wife Great Aunt Florrie, his "unusual" brother Hubert (who, for speed, stature and far-seeing habitually goes on stilts), old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer, Mrs. E, the rambling and unhygienic cook, and other inhabitants of the crumbling stately home Rawlinson End and its environs. BBC Radio 4 fished some of these recordings out of the vault for a very late-night repeat at Christmas 1996, but there seems to be little chance of a commercial release.

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 himself as Hubert, followed in 1980. It was also based on the Peel recordings, with many variations from the LP.

A book of the same name by Stanshall, illustrated with stills from the film, was released in the 1980s. It was nominally a film novelization, but was actually distilled from all the various versions of the story, including a good deal of material that was not used in the film. A projected second book, The Eating at Rawlinson End, sadly never appeared.

A second album, Sir Henry at Ndidi's Kraal (1983), recounts Sir Henry's disastrous African expedition, but disappointingly omits the rest of the Rawlinson clan.

Sir Henry's final appearance was in a TV commercial for Ruddle's Real Ale (c. 1994), where he is played by a cross-dressing Dawn French, presiding over a family banquet at a long table. Stanshall reprises the role of Hubert, reciting a weird poem loosely based on Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat, at the end of which all the diners produce oars and row the table offstage.

Stanshall's refined voice won him a great deal of work for commercial voice-overs, including a Cadbury's Creme Eggs campaign that included a reworking of the Bonzos song "Mister Slater's Parrot", under the title of "Mister Cadbury's Parrot".

He collaborated on numerous projects including Robert Calvert's Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, appeared with Grimms and The Rutles, as well as working with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven on an occasional basis. He also wrote the lyrics for two of the songs on Steve Winwood's hit album Arc of a Diver.

His life was dogged by depression and a drinking problem. He had several spells in hospital in an attempt to stop or control his drinking (this was before modern day notions of rehab). He was also prescribed valium, which — he later reported — seemed to have made things worse, simply adding another addiction.

At one time he owned a houseboat on the Thames, which sank with all his possessions aboard. He was later arrested for assaulting his step-daughter. In 1991 he made a 15-minute autobiographical piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, aka Crank, for BBC TWO's The Late show, in which he confessed to having been terrified of his late 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 he had never shown it.

Stanshall was found dead after a fire at his London flat, seemingly started by Stanshall falling asleep while smoking in bed. He was cremated, and his widow carried his ashes from the crematorium in a plastic shopping bag.

A one-hour television documentary, Vivian Stanshall: The Canyons of his Mind, was broadcast on BBC FOUR in June 2004. In common with many recent BBC documentaries, this was made in widescreen and all of the illustrative footage, which was shot in standard ratio, was cropped to fit.

Quotes

"I don't know what I want, but I want it NOW!" (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End)
"Do have an unusual day, won't you?" (Essex Teenager to Renaissance man)

Biography

Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall by Lucian Randall and Chris Welch (2001)

Paperback edition is ISBN 1-84115-679-5