How someone so charismatic and flamboyant could end up dying in a house fire, his home infiltrated by a gang of homeless alcoholics, stripped bare of furniture and most fittings and blackmailed for their return, is a mystery. Yet for many of his friends the death of Vivian Stanshall - the lead singer and comic artist of 1960s cult surreal rockers, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - was a final-curtain performance of typically surreal proportions. His second wife, Ki, maintains that Stanshall, in a bout of absurdist defiance, deliberately allowed the derelicts into his house in the belief that they would methodically remove his belongings, one by one. For a man who viewed the divide between art and life as a nebulous concept, his Viking-style death - literally going out in what he presumed was a blaze of glory - was perhaps apt; tragic, but apt.
Born in 1943 in Oxford, Stanshall gradually made his way to London. A precocious child soon turned into a quick-witted if somewhat pretentious teenager, eager to impress and enrage with his artistic leanings and natural anarchic humour. He would consciously upset people to gauge their reactions, simultaneously erudite and rude, and in the early 1960s he discovered a group of like-minded people he could relate to. Thus was born Britain's first post-Goons pop group, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a largely satirical outfit of misfits and one of the most amusing of the 1960s. A generally informal band, made up of a core group of musicians but with many floating members (at early performances, no one actually knew which members would turn up), the Bonzos combined middle-class eccentricity and whimsical pop music with on-stage props and machinery - a mixture fraught with commercial improbabilities. Despite a hit single in 1968 - I'm The Urban Spaceman, produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth - the band split up, leaving Stanshall to hone his comic talents. Yet on a personal front, things weren't working out: his prodigious mixing of valium and alcohol revealed a man fearful of his own creativity, someone who was scared stiff of the "real" world. Talent would out, however, and he went on to create Sir Henry At Rawlinson End, a series featuring an eccentric British aristocrat that has attained comic genius cult status.
But as the 1980s stretched into the 1990s, the demons were calling fast and furious. Nervous breakdowns and a foreboding sense of dread would drag him under, resulting in a reclusive existence defined by his friend and Bonzo colleague Neil Innes as "a sinking battleship firing on his rescuers". At his memorial service on March 22nd 1995, Liverpool poet Roger McGough described Vivian as someone who walked life's tightrope "with the safety net firmly nailed to the floor".
