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Vivian Stanshall (March 21 1943 – March 5 
1995) was an English musician, writer,
wit, and raconteur, probably best known for his
work with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, but also
known for his surreal exploration of the United
Kingdom|British upper classes in Sir Henry at
Rawlinson End.

==The great eccentric==
Stanshall was often called a "great British
eccentric", but this was a label he hated as it
suggested that he was putting on an act, whereas
he always insisted that he was merely being
himself — which is arguably a requirement
for genuine eccentricity. However, it is not hard
to understand why he received the label: Neil
Innes said of their first meeting, in a large
Irish pub: "He was quite plump in those days
— he had Billy Bunter check trousers and a
Victorian frock coat, violet pince-nez glasses,
carried a euphonium and wore pink rubber ears."

==Early life==

Stanshall was born Victor Anthony Stanshall at the
Radcliffe Maternity Home in Oxford on 21st March
1943. Originally from Walthamstow - a suburb on
the borders of East London and Essex - his mother
Eileen had moved to Shillingford, Oxfordshire
during the Second World War to escape the bombing,
and lived there happily with her son while her
husband Victor (a name he had adopted in
preference to his christened name of Vivian)
served in the Royal Air Force|RAF. With the end of
war, the family moved back to Walthamstow and his
father returned.

Things at home quickly became fraught. Although he
was of working class origins, Mr Stanshall wanted
his son to go to public school and pressed him to
perform well in sports. Young Viv, however, was
completely uninterested in such pursuits,
preferring - to his father's horror - to devote
his energies to art, music and literature.
Consequently, he grew up living a dual life: at
home, he would have to speak "properly" or face a
beating from his dad; on the street he spoke with
a broad Cockney accent in order to avoid a beating
from his peers.

As a teenager he secretly joined a gang of local
Teddy Boy (youth culture)|teddy boys, attracted
both by the rock'n'roll and the clothing. Even
among such dandies, though, Vivian was a bit of an
oddball. The polished vowels that had been bashed
into him kept leaking out, and his cockney mates
looked upon him as something of an amusing freak. 

Around this time, the Stanshall family moved to
the Essex coastal resort of Southend-on-Sea. Here,
a teenage Vic managed to earn some money doing
various odd jobs at the "Kursaal" funfair. These
included working as a bingo caller and spending
the winter months painting the fairground
attractions.

In order to put aside enough money to get himself
through art school (his father having refused to
fund it), Vic spent a year in the merchant navy,
where he made a very bad waiter, and learned how
to knitting|knit. Then, in a telling act of
anti-paternal rebellion, he changed his first name
to Vivian - the very name his father had abandoned
- and enrolled at Central School of Art in London.
Here, Viv and fellow students including Rodney
Slater (musician)|Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin
Spear and Neil Innes, who was studying music at
Goldsmiths College, decided to form a band.

==The Bonzo years==

The name of the band came from a word game
involving cutting up sentences and juxtaposing the
fragments to form new ones. One of the
combinations that came out of this exercise was
"Bonzo Dog/Dada". The band initially performed
under this name but soon grew tired of explaining
what "Dada" meant to audience members with no
knowledge of art history. Thus they became the
Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band — later abbreviated
to "The Bonzo Dog Band", or just "The Bonzos".


In these early days they were a very loose
assemblage, consisting of the core members
mentioned above, plus just about anyone else who
felt like joining in. At times there were as many
as thirty of them, with gigs often featuring more
people on stage than in the audience. Their act at
this time consisted of anarchic re-workings of old
British novelty songs, found on 78 records bought
from flea-markets, spiced with a great deal of
larking about and (from Roger Ruskin Spear) at
least one deafening explosion per gig.

The Bonzos might have continued this way, too, and
probably disappeared into obscurity, had it not
been for a nasty shock: the 1966 chart success of
a winsomely arch number called "Winchester
Cathedral" by "The New Vaudeville Band" — a
rival outfit (formed by an ex-Bonzo member) whose
musical and visual style bore an uncanny
similarity to their own. The Bonzos realised that
if they were to make a mark for themselves, they
would have to forge a new path. From here on, they
started writing their own material and dropping it
into the act alongside the old novelty numbers.
With Stanshall now liberated from his original
role as tuba player and firmly established as the
front man, the act became more sophisticated, too:
daring and satirical. Quite aside from the
adventurous music and lyrics, it was quite a
performance: Stanshall sang, played a variety of
instruments and on a good night would also perform
a prolonged and hilarious fully-clothed strip
mime, culminating in some spectacular
tit-juggling. His very non-PC Jesus joke was also
a highlight of the act. 

For a while they existed as a semi-pro outfit
playing the college circuit, but it wasn't long
before they went full time. Over the next
half-decade the band toured incessantly and
recorded several albums, which led to a tour of
the US. This was so successful that they were
booked for another US tour soon after. Between the
two, however, something brought about a crippling
change in Vivian's personality. None of his fellow
Bonzos claims to know just what caused it, but by
the start of the second tour he was on very large
doses of tranquilizers prescribed by a private
doctor, ostensibly to treat stage-fright.
Nevertheless, the workload never let up. The band
had a punishing schedule, often playing more than
one gig per evening. In 1970, after six years of
it, they decided to call it a day — as much
from sheer tiredness as anything else.

Vivian went on to form various short-lived groups
including "The Sean Head Band", "Bonzo Dog Freaks"
(featuring the guitar talents of the rotund Bubs
White) and "BiG GrunT". At one point, he even went
into teaching art and drama at a boy's secondary
modern school in Surrey. By now, his life was
dogged by depression and a drinking problem, and
would remain so. He had several spells in
hospitals in attempts to stop or control his
drinking, but they never worked (this was before
modern-day notions of rehab). He was also still
being prescribed large doses of Valium, which
— he later reported — made things
worse by simply adding another addiction.

In 1974 he collaborated with Steve Winwood to
produce his first solo album, Men Opening
Umbrellas Ahead. A complex, rambling affair, its
lyrics filled with acutely personal insights and
references, it has a jazz-rock flavour, rich with
African percussion.

==Rawlinson End==

Viv's next big success came with 'Rawlinson End'.
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 Colonel Blimp|blimpish Sir Henry
Rawlinson, 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 many other inhabitants of
the crumbling stately home Rawlinson End and its
environs. In fact, the Rawlinson family had been
populating Vivian's imagination for quite a while,
their very first appearance (in name, at least)
being on the Bonzos' 1967 number "The Intro & The
Outro": "Great to hear the Rawlinsons on trombone"
.

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. Some of the film's
music was provided by Stanshall's friend Steve
Winwood. A book of the same name by Stanshall,
illustrated with stills from the film, was
published in 1980. Nominally a film novelization,
it 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. It was to have started:

:In the blue wardrobe of heaven are many unused
clothes, too tight fitting yet too beautiful to
throw away. And in that wardrobe we hang our
likenesses, yellow diaries yellowed with
yesterday, thumb smeared with tomorrow. But the
now, the present, like the hollow screech of
ancient flamingos in search of shrimps, is still
vibrantly shocking pink.

A second Rawlinson album, Sir Henry at Ndidi's
Kraal (1983), recounts Sir Henry's disastrous
African expedition, but disappointingly omits the
rest of the Rawlinson clan. It is debatable
whether this album should ever have been put out
at all. It was recorded on portable equipment at
Vivian's home, at a time when he was at his most
depressed, drugged-up and drunk. The results were,
at best, a bit of a mess. Then, while his wife Ki
was away organising the purchase of the boat
Thekla (see below), the record company (convinced
that Vivian was on the verge of death and
determined to capitalise on the grief of his fans)
grabbed the tapes, cobbled them together and
released them.

At Christmas 1996 BBC Radio 4 fished some of the
Peel show recordings out of the vault for a very
late-night repeat, but there seems to be little
chance of a commercial release.

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 offscreen.

==And...==

From mid 1977 to early 1983, Vivian lived on The
Searchlight - a houseboat purchased from Denny
Laine of Wings and moored on the River Thames.
Converted from a First World War submarine chaser,
it was forever taking on water and eventually sank
with all his possessions aboard.

Later, Vivian and his family lived and worked on
the Thekla, a Baltic Trader, sailed 732 nautical
miles from the east coast of England and then
moored in the Bristol docks. His wife Ki
Longfellow (on whom see below) had bought the
Thekla in Sunderland, and converted her into a
floating theatre called The Old Profanity
Showboat. The ship saw the debut of Ki and
Vivian's comic opera Stinkfoot. Vivian wrote 27
original songs for Stinkfoot, sharing some of the
lyric writing with Ki.  It was a huge success:
people came from all over Europe to see it; some
from as far away as America.

Stanshall's remarkable and instantly recognizable
voice won him several commercial voice-overs,
including a campaign for
Cadbury-Schweppes|Cadbury's Creme Eggs which
involved 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 where
he is the voice breathily announcing "...and
introducing Tubular Bells.", appeared with Grimms
and The Rutles, as well as occasionally working
with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven. He also
wrote the lyrics for two of the songs on Steve
Winwood's hit album Arc of a Diver.

He was married twice: in 1968 to Monica Peiser
(they had a son, Rupert, in 1968, and were
divorced in 1975); and in 1980 to the novelist
Pamela Longfellow aka Ki Longfellow. Vivian
dreamed her name was Ki, and as Ki she is now
known. Ki and Vivian had a daughter, Silky, born
1979. Silky's birth was celebrated in song, "The
Tube", on Vivian's second solo album Teddy Boys
Don't Knit, made in 1981.

In 1991 Vivian made a 15-minute autobiographical
piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years,
aka Crank, for BBC Two|BBC2'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 Vivian was
mortified that he had never shown it.

Stanshall was found dead on March 6th 1995 after a
fire at his Muswell Hill flat, seemingly started
by him falling asleep while smoking in bed.
Fuelled by brandy fumes, the cigarette had set
fire to his long ginger beard. (Although Vivian
did indeed often set fire to his beard, the fire
was begun by faulty wiring near his bed.)

A one-hour television documentary, Vivian
Stanshall: The Canyons of his Mind, was broadcast
on BBC Four in June 2004.

==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)
* "Do you know what a palmist once said to me? 
She said: WILL YOU LET GO!"  (Sir Henry at
Rawlinson End.)
* "If I had all the money I'd spent on drink - I'd
spend it on drink."  (Sir Henry at Rawlinson End)
* "You got a light, mac?  No...but I've got a dark
brown overcoat."  (Big Shot)

==Bibliography==
* Sir Henry at Rawlinson End: And Other Spots.
London: Eel Pie, 1980. ISBN 0-906008-21-2
* Ginger Geezer: The Life of Vivian Stanshall by
Lucian Randall and Chris Welch. London: Fourth
Estate, 2001. ISBN 1-84115-678-7 (hardback); 2002.
ISBN 1-84115-679-5 (paperback)
* Stinkfoot: An English Comic Opera. Rotterdam:
Sea Urchin, 2003. ISBN 90-75342-13-6, a
celebration of Vivian and Ki's comic opera
(http://www.sea-urchin.net/indexeng.html?books/sti
nk.html publisher's page)

==External links==
*http://gingergeezer.net/ Ginger Geezer (Official
website)
*http://www.petitiononline.com/MOUA/ Men Opening
Umbrellas Ahead Online petition to re-issue
Vivian's first solo album.
*http://www.shuttleworths.co.uk/sirhenry/MOUA.html
 The whole Umbrellas album in mp3
*http://www.rawlinsonend.org.uk/ Rawlinson End
*http://www.bodnotbod.org.uk/kettering/Kettering1.
pdf Kettering #1 - (note, link is to a
Portable_Document_Format|PDF Document; this
fanzine of "elderly British comedy" has an article
on 'If It's Wednesday It Must Be...' with
Stanshall and Kenny Everett)
*http://basic1.easily.co.uk/03C052/042055/Eating.h
tm  Eating at Rawlinson End