Bonzo Dog Band, The
Entry updated 27 January 2020. Tagged: Music.
The Bonzo Dog Band, billed as The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on their earliest singles and first album, was founded in 1962 by a group of art students including Vivian Stanshall (1943-1995) and joined in 1963 by Neil Innes (1944-2019). They combined various musical styles with surreal Humour anticipating Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-1974); the band received widespread public attention when they performed on the children's Television comedy programme Do Not Adjust Your Set (1967-1969) alongside Python team members Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Their second single, "Alley Oop" (1966), was based on Alley Oop; their fourth single and only hit was "I'm the Urban Spaceman" (1968), at the end of which the spaceman reveals that he does not exist. The band's first album, Gorilla (1967), includes "Look Out, There's a Monster Coming", about a man who in an attempt to find love uses surgery and inadvertently turns himself into a Monster. The second album, The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse (1968) includes "Beautiful Zelda" which tells of a femme fatale from Galaxy 4, and "Humanoid Boogie". A third album is Tadpoles (1969), a Tie to Do Not Adjust Your Set, which includes "I'm the Urban Spaceman", a version of "Monster Mash", and "Canyons of Your Mind", the last being an exploration of Inner Space. [MH]
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