Ladies and gentleman, I've suffered for my music, now it's your turn.
Neil Innes
Eric Clapton always wanted to come out onstage with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder.
I suppose Roger had the license to do anything that fitted the venue.
And Roger was crazy with his robots and everything.
Because Larry, by then, was a drummer, who would sort of get bored and tired, and rather stand up and blow kisses to people. So we needed the bass to sort of drive along.
Viv had this kind of stage presence where you couldn't ignore it. He walked onstage, he looked dangerous. You just didn't know what he was going to do.
I see my role in the Bonzos as being the straight man, in many ways.
When we did Top of the Pops for the third time, we decided to do it as a television program here called Come Dancing, which is not as rude as it sounds.
But we used to go to flea markets and things, and look for old 78 records that had silly song titles.
It was just us lampooning our own peer group, saying, well hey, where did this stuff come from? And where does British guys get to be so good at it suddenly?
But I remember we sold nearly 18,000 records in one day.
So we used to look for funny songs, and learn them and play them. And we used to play them in pubs.
We then took a shortened version of what we'd been doing in the pubs, with the best gags and things like that, out to cabaret clubs and things in the north of England for six weeks. And we became a big success.
I mean Gorilla was really our first sort of goes at songwriting.
I wasn't aware that Track Records were interested in the Bonzos.
In fact, Moon came on tour with us for a bit just before a big festival in Brighton, I think.
I mean in recent years, I think you've only got to sell thirty or forty thousand to get a #1.
As I said, when we needed to move over to rock'n'roll, Sam and Vernon couldn't quite make the shift. So that's when Larry took over on drums, and we needed a bass player.
But Dennis was a really solid musician, and we really needed somebody who could play bass like him.
In many ways, Viv and I were the only ones who were really songwriters.
Larry only ever wrote one song, and he wrote that with Tony Kaye, I think it was, from Yes.
But mostly, I wrote songs and Viv wrote songs.
I used to help Viv with the chords and melodies sometimes.
We weren't by any means like the Grateful Dead or something, who could just roll on and on and on.
I suppose we all loved those kind of sci-fi movies where terrible things came out of swamps and came to Mars. And there's usually some poor girl. All the guys are trying to desperately handle levers and saying, go to something or other.
We weren't going to play the show-biz game, and be obsequious.
But I mean, again, Zappa's far more musical than the Bonzos ever were.
I think most musicians do like to have a laugh.
