"I suppose I sort of went underground a little," Steve Winwood once told Classic Rock, looking back on the mid Seventies:
One of his 'underground' activities involved a musical liaison with the eccentric Bonzo Dog man Viv Stanshall. The pair had already co-written Dream Gerrard for Traffic's swansong album and collaborated on Stanshall's solo record Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead. They then concocted a soundtrack for a film version of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, hoping for financial backing. It never arrived.
They did, however, manage to funnel some of its ideas into Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, Stanshall's surreal satire of upper-English mores that was eventually made into a film starring Trevor Howard in the title role.
"Viv was hilarious," Winwood says, laughing. "He always sort of needed a straight man to do the musical things that he was wanting to do. And for a while I became that. We'd go into pubs and people's houses and start off some kind of act. I'd play some music, he'd play a bit on his euphonium, then try to do conjuring tricks."
A track said to be from their Gormenghast project, Boy in Darkness, was included on Dog Howl in Tune, an album put together from the confused archive Viv Stanshall left at his death by his son Rupert.
And then the other day I found this track. It too is called Boy in Darkness and it has much the same time as the Viv Stanshall one, though different words. But here Winwood, who presumably wrote that tune, is playing keyboards and Stanshall the euphonium. The band, the YouTube blurb speculates, may be filled out by Traffic members Rebop Kwaku Baah and Rosko Gee on percussion and bass guitar respectively.
This video was posted there by Berkin Altınok, whose account is filled with Winwood rarities and covers of his songs.
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