Songs and sketches newly emerged from the locked vault of VIVIAN STANSHALL offer new reasons to join the BONZO DOG DOO-DAH BAND one-off’s silly cult. But, as friends and family reveal, behind the hilarity and eccentricity hid a conflicted man transfixed by “foul yellow fright” and addicted to self-sabotage. “He didn’t know when he was brilliant and when he was terrible,” they tell MAT SNOW. Portrait by BARRIE WENTZELL.

THEY’RE ELDERLY GENTLEMEN now, the last knockings of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Co-founder Rodney Slater, 81, sports a snowy halo offset by a spectacular muttonchop and handlebar combo, while ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, 79, is now ‘Legs’ plus stout walking stick.

There are many absent friends here in north London’s august Union Chapel before the show mounted by keepers of the flame Michael Livesley and Andy Frizell, with cameos from the old stagers. This evening we mark what would have been the 80th birthday of the XXXL-size character who, in a better world, would be doing ample justice to a groaning pre-show buffet without needing to enquire grandly, as was his wont when confronted by guest house breakfast choices, “What’s the most I can have?”

It’s been 55 years since the Bonzos charted Top 5 with I’m The Urban Spaceman – produced by Apollo C Vermouth, AKA Paul McCartney – nearly 40 since Stanshall’s last album Sir Henry At N’didi’s Kraal, and 28 since his tragic death. But seemingly out of nowhere, there are stirrings in the undergrowth.

Next month, an album of songs and a new batch of Sir Henry monologues, rescued from the dog’s dinner of Stanshall’s affairs and completed with expert care by fans Frizell and Livesley, are released by Madfish. It’s a day that few fans thought would come, another day in the sun for the wayward genius who was not just a frontman, wordsmith, lyricist and grandstanding personality on-stage, screen and wireless, nor just a painter, potter, sculptor, sketcher, snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, motley fool, Prospero, Falstaff and Lear, but all these things and more. “I’ve never been able to work out whether I’m a vocalist, a comedian or an entertainer,” Stanshall told Record Mirror in 1970. “Maybe I’m a plumber.”

EVEN IN THE MILIEU OF LONDON’S ART schools in the ’60s, Vivian Stanshall stood out – and not just on account of his towering stature. In 1962, Rodney Slater of St Martin’s was playing trad jazz in a deconsecrated church “and this fat, redbearded guy got up into the pulpit and started shouting. The police broke up the party.” Slater got to know this “extraordinarily funny bloke with stories about his life in Southend, a breath of fresh air”. The pair would form The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

All at sea: Vivian Stanshall in 1970 during his post- Bonzos voyage with the band biG GRunt.

Barrie Wentzell

Radio Doo-Dah: (above) the Bonzos in 1969 (clockwise from far left) Neil Innes, Vivian Stanshall, Legs Larry Smith, Rodney Slater, Roger Ruskin Spear, Dennis Cowan; in the studio, 1969; spatmungous in ’65 (from left) Spear, Big Sidney Nicholls, Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, Slater, Innes, Smith, Sam Spoons, Lenny Williams, Stanshall.

Barrie Wentzell (2), Dezo Hoffman/Shutterstock

Stanshall also befriended a fellow student at Central School of Arts and Crafts, Larry Smith. Outfitted by the Moss Bros secondhand department in the vintage tweeds (“We’d smoke Du Maurier cigarettes in flat packs of 10 that wouldn’t spoil the line of your clothes”) of the deceased squirarchy – Sir Henry of Rawlinson End in sartorial utero – the two flatmates formed a flâneur dandy double act about town.