The Bonzo Dog Band
The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse

THE REVIEW

The assault on the sky is the business of the saint, but also of the clown. It's not bad to nibble at the blue and then spit it back at the poor in spirit (a category to which I am honored to belong).

The assault on the sky is everyone's business. And everyone climbs as they wish; there's someone who uses a ladder, someone who jumps, someone who closes their eyes... and then there's someone who jumbles up meanings by blowing on them like the wind does.

Because, etymologically, the word "buffoon" originates precisely from a type of wind.

Oh, be careful children, today's topic is the paradise/hell of English eccentricity, that little nothing that the most perceptive call the granddaughter of melancholy and cousin of wisdom.

This paradise/hell has a funny name, indeed a hilarious one...

And this name is Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the most perfect paradigm of the magical little word it contains. Which word? Bonzo? Dog? Doo-dah? Band? But, you see, deep down they're all magical. But I vote for the one with the hyphen.

And then, to say, how do you translate Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band? The dada band of the bonzo dog? The bonzo band of the dada dog? The dog band of the bonzo dada? The bonzo dog of the dada band? Oh, the problem doesn't exist, it sounds good any way you say it.

And anyway, imagine: the Quartetto Cetra and Uncle Frank playing together at the Mad Hatter's tea party; the perfect English lawn turning into a dump of every musical debris or trifle, the nighttime raid on the town band's instrument repository.

"Gorilla", the first album, is a stunning light gas that escapes from the alchemist's room like soap bubbles from a hoop. Only those little bubbles, when they explode, they don't just go poof.

It starts with a kind of TV jingle worthy of G.A.S.A.D (Groups to the left of the other Sunday), it continues with a little Beatles-esque thing embellished (?) by rococo drops and splashed with a bass tuba orgasm.

Then comes "Nella vecchia fattoria", a crooning from a comic opera, a skipping nonsense, a steamboat dixieland... and a lot of various trivialities...

If you're thinking of a horrid and unlistenable mess, you're way off track.

Everything is tempered by a bizarre five o'clock tea atmosphere and an almost sweet madness. And all those oddities, held together by a childlike taste for play, finally slip away smoothly in song fashion. As if chaos refused to take itself seriously.

And the impression is that of being on a cloud. Only that from that cloud hangs a holey sock.

The conversation is different for the next one, "The doughnut in granny greenhouse", more devoted to a canon (although canon is just a manner of speaking) pop rock. Sure, there's no lack (and how could there be?) of trombone effect on a march or a raspberry on a music box, but in place of the almost nineteenth-century delight of the previous one, there's a quite different tone.

And along with the usual super-silly trinkets, there are fantastic fake rock and fake blues (read parody) and even very avant-garde moments where Uncle Frank, with a tear, definitely stretches ahead of the Quartetto Cetra and the Beatles seem to connect with the Soft Machine pataphysicians, those of the first two albums.

What to say, for example, of the concluding "Mustachioed daughters", where reciting voices rest on a comic tribal background torn by sound effects and horror organs? And of "We are normal" which is circus, sarabande, little orchestra, glorious free-form joy and furious rock'n'roll?

But then in the end, just like for "Gorilla", there is an overwhelming sense of absolute psychedelic, and these little songs provoke the same disorientation as an "I am the walrus" (Beatles) or a "Flaming" (Floyd Barrett era). After all, those were the years.

Then, of course, these guys had to be seen live. It is said of fabulous concerts (each different from the other) and of a band of four or five members that on stage grew to twenty/thirty. Of verbal flashes, excursions into the grotesque and tributes to nonsense. Of abstruse robot mannequins and a million clowneries... pity not to have been there.