Steve Winwood and Viv Stanshall: Boy in Darkness

"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.

Michael Foot sings the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band

I never did find a video of Jim Callaghan singing 'There was I Waiting at the Church' to a bemused TUC Conference in 1978. (He was mocking the press, who had turned up expecting him to call a general election.)

But here is his successor as Labour leader, Michael Foot, singing a song from the Twenties that appeared on the B-side of the Bonzos' first single 'My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies'.

h/t Alwyn Turner

Steve Winwood on working with Viv Stanshall

A reader sent me the link to this 2001 radio documentary about the great Viv Stanshall. As was inevitable in that era, it was presented by Stephen Fry.

Imagine my pleasure when Steve Winwood came on to talk about his songwriting collaboration with Stanshall. That's one of this blog's heroes talking about another.

A nephew of Ian Fleming wrote the lyrics for two tracks on Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver

This blog's hero Steve Winwood has never been a great one for talking to journalists, so I was pleased to come across a 10-minute interview from a 2010 edition of Front Row on BBC Sounds.

Winwood discusses his career and casts a little light on the remarkable period when, as a young teenager, he was playing guitar to back some of the blues greats when they toured Britain.

I've also discovered a bit of Winwood trivia. 

There are seven tracks on Arc of Diver, the 1980 album that relaunched his career. The lyrics for four of them are by Will Jennings, the university English lecturer turned top rock lyricist, and those on the title track are by the great Viv Stanshall.

That leaves two - Second-Hand Woman and Dust - and they both have lyrics by someone called George Fleming.

He turns out to be a friend of Winwood's and the son of Richard Fleming, who was a younger brother of Ian Fleming, the inventor of James Bond. Richard Fleming owned an estate near Winwood's own in the Cotswolds.

George Fleming's words for Second-Hand Woman would have been turned down by Spinal Tap as too sexist, but Winwood manages to make those for Dust sound a little mysterious and rather better than they are.

Steve Winwood: Night Train

It's strange how some music dates and some doesn't. You still hear the Spencer Davis Group singles Gimme Some Lovin' and I'm a Man in television commercials, and they're used to convey modernity rather than nostalgia.

By contrast, Steve Winwood's Eighties records now sound dated. Winwood has said himself that he was still doing what he had done in Traffic - combining folk and rock and blues and jazz - but the production of the day gave those Eighties records a surface gloss that has not aged well.

Arc of a Diver was Winwood's second solo album and the one that established him as a solo star - it sold more in the United States 

The title track has magic for me, because the lyrics are by Viv Stanshall, but Night Train is more representative. What I like about it is that it features Winwood as a guitarist - he played all the instruments on Night Train.

This reminds me of a story I read online recently. An American remembered watching some Eric Clapton's Crossroads guitar festival on television, but missing the name of the brilliant guitarist he'd been listening to.

He found out a few days later that it had been Steve Winwood - that guy all of whose records his Mom had and who he hated.

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"The self-styled free market task force seems to be yet another dark money outfit in British politics – led by senior figures from US and UK free market think tanks who have been funded by fossil fuels, the Koch Brothers, climate change deniers, the tobacco industry and much more." Peter Geoghegan looks behind the scenes of Liz Truss's new 'growth commission'.

Anny Shaw and Hannah McGivern find that funding cuts and a weak economy have sent Britain’s visual arts into crisis.

"For six decades, To Kill a Mockingbird has been taught with the comfort (and power) of white students (and their mostly white teachers) in mind. Ensuring this comfort has led millions to an absurd reading of a seminal work of literature." Andrew Simmons on teaching America's 'national novel'.

"While his florid, stentorian contributions to Dadaist 60s trad-jazz mutilators the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band influenced everyone from the Beatles to Monty Python, a peripatetic path through the 70s saw him appear as the Master of Ceremonies on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and as a regular lyricist for Steve Winwood, before his 1978 solo LP, the grandiloquent, gothic spoken-word masterpiece Sir Henry at Rawlinson End." Andrew Male has helped rescue Viv Stanshall's unfinished work.

Alex Grant says Northampton needs to grow up and become a city. On a personal note, it took me some years of exploration to realise what a historic place it is.

Rose Staveley-Wadham on baseball's fascinating history in Britain. By 1938 the game had taken such a hold that the British team beat the American one at the inaugural Amateur World Series tournament.

Leslie Sarony: Ain't it Grand to be Blooming Well Dead

There's a programme about Les Dawson that used to be shown regularly on high-numbered TV channels. One of the people who pays tribute to Dawson is John Cleese, who was a regular in two series of Sez Les.

Cleese describes Dawson as "an autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words " and mentions in passing that something the Monty Python team had in common was an interest in and affection for music hall.

And that interest in music hall may explain why Leslie Sarony is in the cast of The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short that begins Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

As I blogged last month, Sarony was the composer of Jollity Farm, a song from 1929 that the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band recorded in the 1960s, and also played Uncle Staveley in the final series of Peter Tinniswood's I Didn't Know You Cared in 1979. The Crimson Permanent Assurance was made in 1983.

So here's another of Sarony's songs. One of my pet theories is that the Victorians were less Victorian than we imagine and that much of that awful English mania for respectability actually dates from the early decades of the 20th century.

But Ain't It Grand to Be Bloomin' Well Dead! reminds us that there was a great appetite in popular culture for laughing at respectability then too.

I remember it 1971, when it served as the theme song for That's Your Funeral, a BBC sitcom starring Bill Fraser that was cancelled after one series but was still turned into a feature film, as many sitcoms were in those days, by Hammer.

One final discovery: it turns out that Jollity Farm was a riposte to a song from the previous year called Misery Farm.

The man who wrote Jollity Farm later played Uncle Staveley in I Didn't Know You Cared

On Twitter today Wayne Cowling provided one of the greatest trivial facts ever. Let's award it Trivial Fact of the Month for starters.

As a reader of this blog, you will, of course, be familiar with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band track Jollity Farm.

You will also have fond memories of the BBC sitcom I Didn't Know You Cared, which was written by the incomparable Peter Tinniswood.

But did you know that Leslie Sarony, who wrote Jollity Farm in 1929, played Uncle Staveley ("I heard that, pardon?") in the fourth and final series of I Didn't Know You Cared in 1979?

I may have to go and lie down.

Death Cab for Cutie owe their name to Simon Hoggart's father

I like to think that my readers are the sort of people who know that the American band Death Cab for Cutie named themselves after a track from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's first LP.

But where did the Bonzos get it from?

The blog Idiotic Hat explains:

The title comes from The Uses of Literacy, a rather solemn book by Richard Hoggart about working class education and the dilemma of the "scholarship boy", stranded in an uncomfortable limbo between his class of origin and his class of aspiration. I used to own (and may even have read) this book, in its blue-spined Pelican paperback incarnation. 

In a moment of uncharacteristic inspiration, it seems Hoggart made up the title "Death Cab For Cutie" as an example of the sort of trashy gangster movie that typified popular culture (he didn't much like popular culture), simply because the publisher wouldn't let him use any real ones.

And, Richard Hoggart was the father of the Simon Hoggart, the political sketchwriter, who died three months before him.

The judges were unanimous in making this our Trivial Fact of the Day, though they did add a rider deploring what Idiotic Hat says about Neil Innes.

Wizzard: See My Baby Jive

Posting a snippet about The Move the other day put me in mind of Roy Wood and his later band Wizzard.

I used to be a little embarrassed that I had liked them so much when I was 13, but no more.

Because Roy Wood is a genius and the first three Wizzard singles - Ballpark Incident, See My Baby Jive, Angel Fingers (the last two topped that charts - were superb.

So here is the second of them with no embarrassment at all. Viewing the video today, with its teddy boys and gorillas, I can see the influence of the Bonzos,

Later. Sorry about the lack of teddy boys and gorillas: I had to change the video.

Goodbye to Neil Innes

Another hero of mine who has always been there is gone. Neil Innes died at his home in France yesterday.

As the New York Times says:

Mr. Innes, a multi-instrumentalist, was a particular type of songwriter: one who excelled at satirical songs and parodies of other people’s music but who could also write a pretty good straight song. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. 

In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote its biggest hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968. 

In the 1970s he wrote material for Monty Python, the six-member comedy troupe. Midway through that decade he and Eric Idle, a Python, came up with the Rutles, a deadpan parody of the Beatles; the group not only recorded albums but made films, including the mock documentary “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” in 1978.

His "I've suffered for my music and now it's your turn" here has entered the language.

The Bonzos get their Doo Dah back

Good news from the Evening Standard:

Sixties rock legends The Bonzo Dog Band have won a legal battle to put the Doo Dah back into their name.

I blogged about this affair back in July.

Now let's celebrate with the jolliest song I know.

The Bonzos: I'm Going to Bring a Watermelon to My Girl Tonight

With our affairs at a low ebb, it is time to cheer the nation up:

I brought my girl an apple
She let me hold her hand.
I brought my girl an orange
We kissed beneath the band.
I brought my girl bananas
She let me squeeze her tight.
I'm going to bring a watermelon
To my girl tonight.

You can hear Neil Innes in an edition of the music podcast The Word talking about the early days of the Bonzos and the joy they found in discovering songs like this on unwanted 78s .

Oh and don't forger to help save the Bonzos.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band have lost their name

Worrying news about the Bonzos:

The band, whose members are now in their seventies and eighties, say they discovered two years ago that “an entity” had registered their name as a figurative trademark without their consent or knowledge. 

They are now challenging the decision to grant it, because it means they will never be able to record an album or perform a concert under their name again. 

The surviving members - who are Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin Spear, Neil Innes, “Legs” Larry Smith and Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell - say they are facing a lawsuit by the trademark owner who asserts the band does not own the name and that their attempt to win it back through the Intellectual Property Office ... tribunal service is a fraudulent act.

They have set up a site - The Bonzo Dog Banned - to raise the money to mount a legal challenge.

And my younger readers may find this history of the band useful.

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Why do nations sometimes commit spectacular acts of self-destruction? Tom Scott argues that  strange fervour that seized the Xhosa people of South Africa in the 1850s may shed light on Brexit.

"When Jean Phillipson's family returned to Fairfax, Virginia, after living in Bolivia, the main thing her 10-year-old son complained about was the bus ride home from school. 'He wasn't allowed to have a pencil out,' says the mom of three, 'because it was considered unsafe.' Lenore Skenazy on American overparenting.

Boak & Bailey are frankly gutted about Asahi's takeover of the brewing wing of Fuller’s.

Adam Scovell revisits the 2019 television adaptation of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.

Birds can see a colour that human can't, explains Tessa Koumoundouros: "In our eyes, we have three types of colour receptors, or cones - they are sensitive to red, blue and green frequencies of light. Birds have a fourth receptor that varies across species in the type of frequency it can detect."

The archaeologist Francis Pryor recalls the day his mother met Viv Stanshall.

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Michael Taylor makes the case for trade unions: "As a lifelong member of first the National Union of Teachers and then the University and Colleges Union, I can assert with authority that without Trades Union support I would have been in great difficulty at a number of points in my career."

"We have a government of hypocrites that is happy to draw votes from people through fearmongering, but which, when shamed by single cases of cruelty, pretends there is no link. And we have been failed by an opposition that historically has either followed the same policies, or has preferred until recently to maintain a cynical silence." Nesrine Malik says hostile rhetoric at the top of politics leads to bullying in the playground.

Ted Jackson visits the Louisiana coast and a native community that is being lost to the sea.

"Charles Dickens was well aware of his status and, like today’s celebs, he was fiercely protective of the image he promoted." Gerald Dickens asks what his  great great grandfather looked like.

Michael Livesley is interviewed by John Fleming about his revival of Viv Stanshall's Sir Henry at Rawlinson's End.

Lucy Scholes on the writing career of Penelope Mortimer.

Prince Charles suggested Viv Stanshall as poet laureate

Embed from Getty Images

The heir to the throne as risen in my estimation because of this story in yesterday's Daily Mail:

Prince Charles proposed Vivian Stanshall, the eccentric leader of the Sixties cult pop group the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, as a possible Poet Laureate, says the singer's widow. 

Ki Longfellow-Stanshall tells in a new book of memoirs about her husband that "sometime in the early 90's' he received a phone call from 'a representative of the Prince of Wales". 

"The voice said, 'If you were asked, Mr Stanshall, would you accept the post of Poet Laureate?", she said. 

"I watched V's face, when, not missing a beat, he replied in his best and most majestic tone, 'I should be honoured.'"

Well, Prince Charles was a fan of Goon Show.

As Ki Longfellow-Stanshall told the Mail:

"Surreal humour is not the best policy when dealing with politicians and royalty, unless it's Prince Charles, 

"Charles was a fan. He'd added V's name to the list of possibles when the time came to appoint a new poet laureate. 

"No one but Charles took it seriously… It was one of Vivian's proudest moments."

He never got to be Poet Laureate, but Viv Stanshall did write the lyrics of two Steve Winwood songs that have appeared on this blog: Dream Gerrard and Arc of a Diver.

And, young readers, click here to read more about Viv Stanshall.

At last an anthem for Brexit

We have been told. When Brexit goes horribly wrong it will be the fault of us Remainers for not getting behind the project.

"Every time a child says, 'I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead," as Peter Pan put it.

What we need is a song we can all sing to show our for support Brexit. And I have found it.

My God, have I found it.



I know England Swings from a sweet version by Roger Miller, but this is, er, different. You wonder if the Bonzos were familiar with Patty Duke's oeuvre when they came up with Cool Britannia.

She, incidentally, won an Oscar for her portrayal of Helen Keller in 1962 and is the mother of the well-known hobbit Sean Astin.

Later. I have just shown the video to Lord Bonkers. He remarked: "Guardsmen and male dancers? It reminds me of St James's after dark."

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Broadcast between 1967 and 1969, Do Not Adjust Your Set was an ITV comedy series for children.

It starred three-fifths of the Monty Python team in the shape of Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle. The show also used animations by an American called Terry Gilliam, which was how they came to meet.

Two more actors on the show were Denise Coffey and David Jason. It is their contributions that I remember most clearly.

The latter rather expected to be asked to join the others in their new project, which became Monty Python, but he wasn't.

But then this wasn't David Jason's only early disappointment. He rather specialised in playing elderly characters and was put up for the part of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army, but that went to Clive Dunn.

The show also featured the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. In his commentary of the DVD of the Rutles film All You Need is Cash, Eric Idle says the sense of humour of the Bonzos' lead singer Viv Stanshall was a strong influence on the Python team.

All in all, this was a casket of riches to set before children.

BFI Screenonline says of it:

Do Not Adjust Your Set, named after the caption broadcasters used to screen during faulty transmissions, included a number of elements that today seem out of place in children's TV. Aside from a naked, but carefully posed, Eric Idle, the series also parodied adult programmes, such as the antiques quiz show Going for a Song (BBC, 1965-77), another idea that would become a mainstay of Monty Python. 

Overall, the programme's sketch content was, as befitted its audience, fairly childish, but the overall tone of silliness was punctuated with moments of a more surreal nature, such as a shop sketch in which Palin repeatedly gives Jason a tin of shoe polish instead of his groceries. 

There were two regular features. The first was the adventures of Captain Fantastic, played by Jason, a super-hero parody about a man in a bowler hat and buttoned up raincoat whose nemesis Mrs Black, played by Coffey, is "the most evil woman in the world". The segment, with a voice-over explaining the action, consisted largely of speeded up film and slapstick pratfalls. 

The second regular spot was a musical performance from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a distinctly odd group that had a top five hit in 1968 with 'I'm the Urban Spaceman'. Band member Neil Innes, a longtime Python collaborator, later provided the music for The Rutles ... a Beatles parody written by Idle.

Anyway, after a glimpse of the Bonzos, the video above shows a sketch from the series.

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Why did white working-class men vote for Brexit? Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall suggest it is because they have lost social standing over the past three decades.

"The UK government can’t leave the Single Market and the Customs Union and, at the same time, avoid a physical border in Ireland," says Flip Chart Rick.

If you want to know who matters in Britain, wait until it snows. You will find that the roads are gritted but pedestrians are left to tackle icy pavements unaided. Ludlow's Andy Boddington thinks it is time we did something to help them.

Emma Tucker asks if it is time to reassess Britain's postmodern architecture.

"Even people who have never seen Michael Curtiz’s romantic wartime allegory can conjure up a few lines about beautiful friendships, gin joints and hills of beans… maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon." Pamela Hutchinson looks at why we are all still quoting Casablanca.

IanVisits surveys Christmas Day television over the years. As a bonus, here is something you could have watched on ITV 25 December 1968. Maybe I did...