In the USA in late September 1962, presiding world heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson stood in the way of Sonny Liston’s ambitions. Patterson was KO’d in round one, the third-fastest knockout in heavyweight boxing history. But while his career was flattened, the fight also provided the catalyst for something wholly original some 4,000 miles away.
Over in London, art student Rodney Slater was tuning in from his shared digs. “Heavyweight contests were big events in those days and they always used to be broadcast live on the radio,” he explained four decades later in 2012. “So I was sitting there, waiting for it to start. My flatmate, Tom Parkinson, had run into Viv Stanshall in a pub in the West End, when Viv had just come up to Central [St Martins College of Art] and had nowhere to stay. So Tom brought him home and Viv and I just started nattering. Then we decided: ‘Right, let’s wait up till three in the morning for this boxing match to start.’ And it was in those three or four hours beforehand that these conversations really began. We played this silly word game, which produced the ‘Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’, with a little bit of fiddling.” (Bonzo the dog, incidentally, was the cartoon creation of popular 20s artist George Studdy.)
