…The Bonzo Dog Do Daah Band.
Yes, that’s a rather eclectic choice isn’t it? I happened to catch a Sounds of the 60’s on Friday night on BBC4 before I absconded to the pub. It started off with the rather surreal Canyons of Your Mind by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band:
Wow. I have to say, hearing the song, it was instantly familiar but I think my brain had compartmentalised it as a Monty Python song. How wrong I was. I quickly decided to play some Bonzo Dog to the kids on Sunday afternoon to see what they thought of it all.
I selected a best of album (a cop out I know but I didn’t have much time for research) that was on Spotify and pumped it through to our SONOS Play:3.
The chaps could have titled the album something a little less difficult to explain to kids but aside from that it was child friendly fair. Listening to The Intro and the Outro, I thought, this really reminds me of something and I was right- a bit of digging around and I found out that the lead singer of the Bonzo Dog Doo Daah Band, Vivian Stanshall, provided the voice of the “Master of Ceremonies” who reads off the list of instruments during Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. The Python link is there too as Neil Innes, one of the band members, was involved in song writing for the final series of Monty Python.
So the lyrics were kid friendly but did they actually like it? The Boy was generally avoiding me on Sunday as I was trying to get him to do his drumming practice but Fifi and Ned enjoyed it tremendously. There was a degree of strut and swagger in the music that made it easy to dance to and by the third play of Canons of My Mind, Fifi was belting out half the words. Some of them were even the right words.
The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band were psychedelic popsters of the finest order. I like to listen to some pretty out there stuff from that era and this is definitely up there with the best of the strange. And the kids approved too, which is a bonus. I was playing Magnet’s Wicker Man sound track album last night and the Boy came downstairs and told me to turn it off as it was too spooky. That told me!