Between the
years following the split of the weird and wonderful Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
(the Dadaist wing of Psychedelica Britannia) and really getting his mojo back
with the deliciously surreal Sir Henry At Rawlinson End broadcasts on the John
Peel show, Vivian Stanshall was involved with various short lived musical
projects that have more than often been relegated to little more than a
footnote in articles and books about him. Somewhat overshadowed by his drunken,
and often hilarious, escapades with drinking chum Keith Moon (which included
touring the drinking dens of Soho dressed in full Nazi regalia……bad taste for
even the early 70s), biG GRunt where one of the many collective alter
egos/bands fronted by Stanshall post split………….. If you have ever considered
what the Bonzo’s would of sounded like stripped of Neil Innes’s pop smarts but
with Vivian Stanshall’s fertile imagination and penchant for musical
experimentation given free reign then biG GRunt were that band. Including
former Bonzo’s, bassist Dennis Cowan and saxophonist Roger Ruskin Spear (in
addition to having been the most manic member of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band
onstage and after Stanshall and Innes the third most prolific songwriter of the
band, was also a self-styled inventor who built bizarre robots, exploding props
and absurd mechanical contraptions for their live shows) along with guitarists
Bubs White and Borneo Fred Munt, both of whom had been members of The Bonzo Dog
Doo-Dah Band's road crew, plus powerful drummer Ian Wallace (who was later to
join King Crimson and then drummed for a whole host of 70s/80s rock A-listers),
even without biG GRunt having played a note of music in public, the background
of the individual members made it clear that they were a formidable prospect
both musically and as performers. Tipped for “very big things”, music press
interviews of the time caught Stanshall enthusiastically discussing his
ambitious plans for the band, aiming to create “a fusion of serious music with avant-garde humour and over-the-top
visuals” However, Stanshall's well-documented personal problems made it
difficult for him to give the project his full attention and keep the line-up
together, so by the summer of 1971 biG GRunt were unofficially but obviously
defunct. Leaving a slight legacy of a few well received live shows, a B-side of
a single which had the dubious honour of being produced by Keith Moon, a berserk live performance on "Marty Amok" (a BBC1 special featuring
the comedian Marty Feldman) and a lone session for John Peel, biG GRunt
disappeared, reduced to mere mentions when Stanshall was finally recognised as
“The Greatest Living Englishman” before his untimely death in 1995 ……..until
now. The biG GRunt Peel Session, after languishing in the BBC vaults for nearly
half a century, has been dusted down for the first official release of these
historic recordings by the good folk at Mega Dodo. What is surprising is that
these tracks remained in the vaults for so long with the
Bonzo’s/Innes/Stanshall outstanding work from the 60s/early 70s has never being
recognized with a full on, deluxe packaged retrospective box set when lesser
lights of that era have had every single note of music of varying quality exhumed…….it
has taken the musicologists at Mega Dodo to unearth this gem.
Broadcast on
21/3/1970, the biG GRunt Peel Session saw the band perform four tracks of
mostly brand new material, each of tune as exciting and invigorating as the
initial promise had suggested and totally justifying the buzz around the band
at the time. ‘Blind Date’, a track later to turn up as a the B side of a cover
of the Elvis Presley tune ‘Suspicion’ by Vivian Stanshall & Gargantuan
Chums, is typical of the mannered, over-articulated material Stanshall would
write for the Bonzo’s………….a C&W shuffle through a first person tale of boy
meets girl for a blind date at Waterloo Station with the twist being that it is a primate and a pygmy monkeying about before the narrator is captured and returned to
Whipsnade Zoo. There is an apocryphal tale that ‘Blind Date', had been “written when Vivian Stanshall, for some
bizarre and unexplained reason, was asked to provide a song for the wholesome
easy listening crooner Matt Monro. The singer's management, who were presumably
expecting something more in the style of the Bonzo's crooner parody 'Canyons Of
Your Mind' were understandably less than pleased to be presented with a song
that, while undeniably catchy, was about a gorilla and a pygmy being introduced
by a dating agency”. Revisiting the Avant-Jazz shronk of ‘11 Mustachioed
Daughters', a hypnotic and rhythm-heavy track with strange lyrics concerning witchcraft,
paganism and voodoo which had originally appeared on The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band's second album "The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse" in 1967, biG
GRunt retool the tune as an Beefheart-esque psychedelic wig out with dynamic
guitar riffs, funky bass and massive drumming underpinnng Stanshall's demented
vocal delivery. This is a tantalizing taste of the direction that Stanshall and
biG GRunt may have taken if the band had lasted more than twelve months…………ditching
the vaudevillian whimsy of the Bonzo’s and moving towards a heavier, far out “Art
Rock” sound which has a proto-Prog/Psych vibe, it is unknown whether biG GRunt
actually recorded any more material in the studio, but it's tempting to
speculate what may be gathering dust in the vaults. Also recorded for this
session was 'The Strain'……..another song associated with the Bonzo’s which
turned up on the lacklustre 1972 contractual obligation reunion album Let's
Make Up And Be Friendly. However, it started out as a biG GRunt number and was
noticeably different in its original incarnation, as presented here. The Peel
session version is far more rough and ready than the version that the Bonzo’s
recorded with a basic good-time Pub Rock boogie feel. The track that is going
to get the hardcore Bonzo/Stanshall fans drooling is the final track on the EP,
the previously unreleased instrumental ‘Cyborg Signal'. Although its melodic
motif would later form the basis for 'Strange Tongues' on Stanshall's solo album
Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead, ‘Cyborg Signal’ has, up till now, not been heard
since the session was originally broadcast……………………unlike anything you would
normally associate with Viv Stanshall, this track is a Progressive Rock outing
to the stars and back in time for tea, cramming more interesting and complex
compositional ideas into a five minutes than some early 70s bands managed over
six sides of vinyl. Light
years ahead of its time, this astonishing track is a firm reminder that there
was so much more to this man than the eccentric “ginger geezer” who cropped up
on John Peel during the 70s and 80s with tales of the gloriously dysfunctional
Rawlinson’s and what a genuinely exciting musical project biG GRunt were…………..if
not for Stanshall’s unfortunate personal problems at the time, in an era of
long haired, ex-Army greatcoat/afgan wearing ProgHeads, biG GRunt couldda bin
serious contenders. As Tim Worthington wrote in Issue 26 of the Arts and
Culture magazine Paintbox, “For a brief
but invigorating moment, they appeared to be doing something that was genuinely
intriguing and pioneering. It could be said that it's easy to speculate about
what might have been, but the band's Peel session is evidence of what actually was, and it still sounds thoroughly
exciting to this day”.
Due for official
release towards the end of September as a limited edition run of 500 copies on
12” yellow vinyl, the biG GRunt In Session EP will be available to pre-order in
August from the Mega Dodo website……so keep ‘em peeled. It goes without saying
that this is an essential purchase for the legion of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah
Band/Vivian Stanshall fans out there.
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