REAL GONE
He sawed and conquered: Vernon Dudley BowhayNowell, early Bonzos driving force.
Vernon Dudley Bowhay-Nowell
Bonzo, Whoopee and Nigel Nice
BORN 1932
DOUBLE-BARRELLED by his parents Walter Nowell and Bessie Bowhay, Vernon Dudley Bowhay-Nowell was nominatively destined for a career in zany, japing, art-school parody hot jazz combos, first The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, then Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band. Yet within weeks of Vivian Stanshall relishing every syllable of his moniker in The Intro And The Outro on the Bonzos’ 1967 debut album Gorilla, bass/banjoist Bowhay-Nowell was elbowed out. He’d been a vital early cog, however, not only introducing his lodger Neil Innes – who’d pen the Bonzos’ only hit, 1968’s I’m The Urban Spaceman – but ferrying the band about in his calamity-prone Daimler ambulance. VDB-N carried on regardless, playing Nigel Nice in the 1980 movie version of Stanshall’s Sir Henry At Rawlinson End and, just one of his specialities, Marlene Dietrich’s Falling In Love Again on the saw while wearing a pickelhaube.