Softly, Dear Boy

Dear Joe, we feel that normalisation is fastly taking over industry in this country. And so we three will conspire together for as long as it is necessary to keep music and the trade that surrounds it safe from this atrocity. 

Thus spaketh the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band directly to me in the wonderful booklet enclosed within one of my very favourite LPs, The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse.

I love the Bonzos, several of my most meaningful friendships have been built around them and Gorilla was my very first album 43-ish years ago. The band’s melody, stylings and humour runs through me like the message in a stick of rock. Their wry hippy-adjacent take on ancient novelty and music hall tunes, Goon-show irreverence and pure English eccentricity is like nothing else before, or since in music. The wonderfully-titled Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse* is where this was best fused with some splendidly far-out music.

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Rather wildly weirdly the LP opens with something of an anthem, a satirical one in the context of 1968, ‘We Are Normal’, described as ‘a breezy opener’ in the accompanying booklet I couldn’t have put it better myself. In fact it contains the only song lyrics that I would ever consider having tattooed across my nipples:

We are normal and we demand our freedom
We are normal and we dig Bert Weedon

Then we step away from the rock straight into the wistful, wacky ‘Postcard’ where we get to send-up all manner of holiday norms, amidst some interesting musication. It’s a much lesser treat, but still I know every word, the rather camp line ‘I hope I get bronzed this year’ being a favourite. The intergalactic music hall girl group mega smash that never was, ‘Beautiful Zelda’ is a charmer and the reason I am writing this now is because I found myself humming it tunelessly in the post office the other day.

The Bonzos score a hit, a very palpable hit, in the Hamletian sense with ‘Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?’, which skewers the British blues boom precisely; ‘can blue men sing the whites, or are they hypocrites?‘ I always liked them when they added a gentle sting to their work; see the small-minded, semi-detached neighbour mocking ‘My Pink Half Of The Drainpipe’^^.

The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse saunters onwards with the beautifully old-timey ‘Hello Mabel’, which is rendered even more exquisite by the knowledge of the way the band looked at the time, looking 60’s channelling 20’s.

Then we’re firmly back in the late 60’s with ‘Humanoid Boogie’, which puts me in mind of Arthur Brown’s Kingdom Come Galactic Zoo Dossier, one of my dad’s fave LPs. It’s out there.

As is the glorious ‘Trouser Press’, the gloriously camp youth craze that never was, featuring a glorious solos played on a trouser press by Roger Ruskin Spear, a real live favourite I am reliably informed by old people. ‘Rockaliser Baby’ is another tour de farce, alternatively rocking it up and bringing it down with Viv Stanshall’s wonderfully plummy speaking voice^*.

The real gem here is ‘Rhinocratic Oaths’ where Stanshall waxes at his most poetic and funniest, a flash forwards to his later majestic solo LP Sir Henry At Rawlinson End. Neil Innes’ tune makes a great vehicle for the words here and defies much description.

As does the closing truly freaked out witches sabbat of ’11 Mustachioed Daughters’; ‘The crow pecked gibbet’s victim swings broken in his cage / His hands cut down to make a crown to wear as a homage’. It’s a strange as hell slow burner that I never used to like very much, but now I think is a real highlight. Out of all the 60’s attempts to capture a black magic ritual on LP (see Coven, Black Widow, White Noise, Anton LaVey …) this is my favourite and any LP whose last sung words are, surprisingly ‘Worship Satan, hee hee’ has to be up there in the pantheon.

Of course the Bonzos are riffing on how ridiculous it all is.

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The idea of any band putting out something like The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse now is unthinkable, whether in terms of how it looks, how it sounds, how jolly odd and oddly jolly it is. There is trenchant wit, talent, young man’s arrogance and inspiration found in some deuced odd places hereabouts.

The Bonzos create a rather wonderful vision of England in their music, an idealised between the wars Albion, which grows ever more piteous as the tolerant, eccentric nation I love becomes more intolerant and homogenous with each passing week. It is a rare LP, whether released in the revolutionary stir of 1968 or afterwards, that can evoke P.G Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome, rather than the usual fret-bombing neanderthals.

We are not normal and I would prefer to live in their world.

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I have two copies of The Doughnut In Granny’s Greenhouse, my initial 1974 re-release on Sunset Records and then an original 1968 copy on Liberty Records, which is far superior for cover art, awesome booklet and I think a better sound, 53 years since it was released it is still in great nick.

1114 Down.

PS: Technically the Bonzos had lost their Doo-Dah by this point, but that’s not how I think of them and this is my world.

PPS: I did once put a doughnut in my granny (and grandad’s) greenhouse and took a photo of it. Sadly, it has been lost to the ravages of time. Shame.

*a title I have always found hilarious but which I only learned yesterday was a very obscure euphemism for the lavatory** the band first heard from Michael Palin.

**a terrible necessity that even the worst sort of cad^ would ever dream of mentioning in polite company.

^or resident of one of our former colonies.

^^which incorporates a wonderful Roger Ruskin Spear sax solo.

^*growing up relatively poor, this was achieved via his stern father forcing him ‘to talk posh’.