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  3. New name for me but Madfish specialise in neglected giants of the past and are probably well-known to many of you.

    “Breathing vital new life into essential back catalogue (via its imaginative packaging) and providing a contemporary platform for such diverse talents as Rick Wakeman, Peter Green, Ian Anderson, and Caravan as well as the legendary Pretty Things, Tangerine Dream, Fleetwood Mac and Family. Madfish’s key strength lies in its respect for and belief in well-known artists whose catalogues have been comparatively neglected in the digital music age.”

    https://www.madfishmusic.com/artists/

    How about an 8 CD box set of Family live at the BBC!

    The notes on the project are an interesting read.

    It mentions this, which was broadcast by John Peel.

    https://www.madfishmusic.com/artists/vivian-stanshall/

    How little I know!

    Viv’s work at the Beeb spanned a long period and many people were involved.

    “Rawlinson End was a series of thirteen 15-20 minute radio broadcasts, created and performed by Vivian Stanshall (formerly of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band) for BBC Radio 1 between 1975 and 1991.”

    The Wiki page is extremely informative.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rawlinson_End

  5. The first instalment of Rawlinson End was actually in a session Viv & Co recorded for Peel under the moniker ‘Freaks’ (they had briefly toured as ‘Bonzo Dog Freaks’. I inherited an off-air reel with it and uploaded it a while back. I gave Madfish a copy.

  6. From Bert Jansch to the Bonzos! You have your finger on everything that was going on. I am not surprised but I am impressed.

    Both Bert and Viv “peaked” commercially in the 60s, but continued to be active, influential and very respected in the 70s and 80s.

          • I didn’t mention it, because I didn’t know, @Colin H. Which I’m pleased about.

            It’s very sad to read about Viv’s problems with booze. But it’s his extraordinary gift with language and humour that I really want to hear more about. Maybe I’m naive to think one can have one without the other?

            Bert was born on 3 November 1943 in Glasgow.

            Vis was born on 21 March 1943 in Shillingford, Oxfordshire

            I googled Bert and Viv together to see if there was any connection. I came to this page:

            https://www.prestomusic.com/jazz/products/8855571–eve-folk

            The missing link is “Bert Jansch biographer and 60s Brit Folk chronicler Colin Harper”. That amused me no end.

            • That special was called Crank. His life story.

              Here’s the script from this site:

              http://www.iankitching.me.uk/music/bonzos/early-years.html

              Crank
              1991 Late Show playlet, featuring Rodney Slater on sax. (Producer Mark Cooper, director Sheree Folkson.)
              Fuller transcription
              [Song]

              Why me? Why won’t it stop? I don’t know. Are there any clues?

              [Draws two “?” in the air]

              Clues. A few years ago a woman from the Daily Mail phoned to inform me they were doing a piece on Sir John Betjeman and they would like me to companion him in the article, I being representative of the younger English eccentric. She wanted to know if was still doing it. Well, I don’t do it, I’m merely myself, as near a dammit, without frightening the housing estates, and her question was absurd rather than fatuous, as it suggests deliberation, as rather as though you woke up and decided “I’m going to be a garnaum today” or [twit voice:] “I’m going to be giant squid for the weekend” or [Sir Henry:] “That’s it! I’m going to be a wardrobe for the rest of.. um.. my word! Well, strap me to a tree and call me Brenda!”

              I’m whatever you like, just don’t expect me to join in. I do like games, though. You see, I’m not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can’t join your gang: you’d think I was a phoney and I’d know it.

              [Song about his father]

              The first two years of my childhood were wonderful: just me and Mum and me and my voices, evacuated from the East End to Shillingford, Oxfordshire. Idyllic. And I remember everything: bombs whumping and deranged cows budging into the kitchen and Mum shuffing them out with a broom. I was freakishly precocious: first words at four months and I could have conversation with you at ten months, and that’s pretty scary. And I was running, running, running. I had to be strapped into my pram. I can still smell that pram and feel the sticky blue leatherette of it. I hated it – and the tugging. At the bottom of the garden, the long garden, the Thames with paddle boats. Sardined they were, with dancing, battle-happy on-leave soldiers and their girls, dancing and laughing and shouting back to me. And the music… this sort of stuff…

              [20s-style jazz song]

              Sadly for me, when the boys did come they included my demobbed father, who’d now got it into his noddle that he was officer class. By the time we’d moved back to Walthamstow, East 17, he spoke like this [posh accent:] “Hello”. So on the streets I’s speaking loike this otherwise I’s definitely goin’ ter get me ‘ead bashed in woilst at ‘ome it’s all “What ho, Ma-ma! Hello Pa-Pa! And shall there be buns for tea?”

              Officer class, he determined to be a Chartered Accountant. And to this end he polished his shoes so shinily that when you looked down you could see all the way up to his suspenders (or up skirts, if you fancied it). And then he’d cover the shoes with protective rubber galoshes, and with bowler hat rammed tight and brolly grasped, he’d would every morning roller-skate from Walthamstow to the City. It was thus explained to be, and with the utmost solemnity, that, common as I was, with polished boots and accent, it was possible to roller-skate right to the top of, and out of, your tree. The self-made man formula, manifest. My father was quite normal. I quickly learned to roller-skate and go bald.

              I was downright terrified of my father, I still am and he’s been dead for more than a year. Everything I did was a disappointment and everything I didn’t do (sport, maths and so on) was unnatural because he could do it. And when it became clear to him that I was incorrigeably to become one of them, that is to say an artist of some sort, he disowned me. He even refused to hold my hand after the age of five. It was the beginning of the beginning. Not surprisingly I became quite a…

              [Ginger Geezer]

              I do remember persuading my mother to persuade my father to allow me have a duffle coat and of the first day of wearing it in the street a little boy cried to his Mum “look at that man!” and she repied to him “don’t look at him, he’s a crank”. My fringe was licked and secured with a hairclip, I was wearing my school tie. My Mum explained to me: “cranks, we don’t know any of them and moreover they’re common.” I was thirteen. I then tried to be a Teddy Boy, hiding my drape jacket and drainpipes behind the coal bunker. The posh accent which had been literally bashed into me kept leaking out so in that particular gang I was tolerated as an amusing mascot. My Mum taught me to knit and crochet when I was tiny and… teddy boys don’t knit.

              Meanwhile my father spent the last twenty years of his life vigourously watching television.

              [Possibly An Armchair and Fresh-Faced Boys]

              About this time I became disaffected with the Roman Church. It wasn’t so much being slapped round the chops at Communion. Me, fourteen and naughty, kneeling at the alter rail and Canon Bishop, a fierce Irishman, his head carved from the beetroot, bearing down dispensing the Host… catches me ‘aving a crafty butchers at the other Communicants… eyes closed, tongues lolling out… and I can’t keep a straight face, so in the In Nomini Patrii Et Filii I cop the Et Spiritus Sanctii [slap] right round the noui. Went back to me pew like this [squints] and me Mum thinks “bedad, the boy has the state of Grace in him!” No, it was the translating of the Mass into English so’s you could understand it. I confessed to my Mum that I now didn’t understand it at all. Without the hallucinatory mumbo-jumbo it became for me at best vulgar and far too dull for my kidney. [Sir Henry:] “I like my steak heretic and bloody.”

              [Spreading His Light]

              From the sqeezable age of three till I went to art school and sipped of the mad, generous grip of classless meritocracy, even yobbos can sculpt, I can recall almost nothing. For most of it, the horror, has been quite blanked out, save that I was improper, unfit, unfit and a sissy. But rather curiously clever, so I was doing it deliberately and was therefore a shocking waste.

              My biological childhood wasn’t so much bad as bewildering and I got though it, not so much courageously, but rather hopelessly, innocently burdened with the inreluctable conviction that I was destined to be an artist. And I really couldn’t help that. Shocking waste or not, the trials and the astonishments did provide the stuff from which I fashioned my work. So the childish things I had then to do in secret I now do in public.

              [Song]

              • One of the things he perhaps doesn’t recall between the ages of 3 and art school was driving a stake into the first eleven cricket pitch at Southend High School for Boys (my alma mater), which he attended between 1953 and 1959. He had detected vampires, presumably.

                Viv was in a school party of boys my dad (a teacher at SHSB) took to Tuscany to view frescos etc. Dad said he was a complete nightmare, forever acting the fool and going AWOL. He found it hard to view Viv’s subsequent antics with any great affection.

                • What a story! @mikethep.

                  I can very easily imagine it was the school trip from hell for the poor teachers. It’s easy for us to laugh all these years later.

                  A school trip to Italy in the 1950s. That was ambitious.

                  Your story makes think of Neil Innes describing his first meeting with VS:

                  ‘We first met in a big Irish pub in South London, the New Cross Arms … he was quite plump in those days, and he was wearing Billy Bunter check trousers, a Victorian frock coat, black coat tails, horrible little oval, violet-tinted pince-nez glasses, he had a euphonium under his arm, and large rubber false ears. And I thought, well, this is an interesting character.'”

                  I wonder to what extent the teenage Stanshall had developed his sartorial style.

                  • I had two meetings with him in a doomed attempt to get a book out of him. First time was just before his houseboat went up in smoke, the second time was not long before he died. I always assumed I’d be getting a carrier bag full of random bits of paper that I’d have to wrestle into some sort of narrative, but I was disappointed not to get the chance.

                    • You might not have received any morsels, Mike. But reading about all the odds and sods that the musicians working on the reissues had to deal with, it’s clear they were there a-plenty.

                      For you as a publisher, I can imagine that Viv was not the easiest writer to deal with.( Then again, I suspect many writers are high maintenance. It’s a strange, lonely profession.)

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