Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
British band led by Vivian Stanshall
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (also known as the Bonzo Dog Band or the Bonzo Dog Dada Band or the Bonzos) was a comedic music band created by a group of British art-school students in the 1960s. Combining elements of music hall, trad jazz and psychedelia with surreal humour and avant-garde art, the Bonzos came to public attention through appearances in the Beatles' 1967 film Magical Mystery Tour and the 1968 ITV comedy show Do Not Adjust Your Set.
History
Formation and early years (1962–1966)
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band was officially formed on 25 September 1962, at 162c Rosendale Road, West Dulwich, when Vivian Stanshall (lead vocals, tuba and other wind instruments) and fellow art student Rodney Slater (saxophone/clarinet) bonded over the late-night transatlantic broadcast of a boxing match between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, after being introduced by Slater's flatmate Tom Parkinson. At the time, Slater was already playing in a traditional jazz band at college with Parkinson on sousaphone, and Chris Jennings on trombone. Trumpeter Roger ('Happy' Wally) Wilkes and banjo-player Trevor Brown were the founders of this loose conglomerate at the Royal College of Art, although the lineup is thought to have been exceptionally fluid and constantly revolving, consisting of as many as forty to fifty rotating members if Stanshall's later recollections are to be believed.
Stanshall joined the band in September 1962. He and Slater rechristened it The Bonzo Dog Dada Band. In the 2004 BBC Four documentary Vivian Stanshall: The Canyons of His Mind, Slater claims that the name was inspired by playing a Dadaist word game using cut-up technique, which involves writing words or phrases on paper, tearing the paper into strips and then randomly re-assembling the strips to form new phrases. One of the phrases created was "Bonzo Dog Dada Band": Bonzo Dog after Bonzo the dog, a popular British cartoon character created by artist George Studdy in the 1920s, and Dada after the early 20th-century art movement.
In the early 1960s comedic pop records by artists such as Charlie Drake, Bernard Cribbins and Spike Milligan were popular in the UK and enjoyed chart success alongside pop music parodies by pop cabaret acts such as the Barron Knights, and this fledgling version of the Bonzos was already slowly turning its style from more orthodox music towards the comedy-tinged 1920s popular jazz-style sound of groups such as the Alberts and the Temperance Seven.
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