When Vivian Stanshall was found dead on the morning of 6 March 1995, after a fire in his top-floor flat in Muswell Hill, north London, he left behind a grand creative legacy and a whole heap of chaos. At just 51 years of age, yet with the disorderly, mythic bearing of someone many thousands of years older, this orotund, ginger-locked behemoth departed the world having refashioned the postwar vision of the English eccentric and irreversibly altered the path of British culture.
While his florid, stentorian contributions to Dadaist 60s trad-jazz mutilators the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band influenced everyone from the Beatles to Monty Python, a peripatetic path through the 70s saw him appear as the Master of Ceremonies on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and as a regular lyricist for Steve Winwood, before his 1978 solo LP, the grandiloquent, gothic spoken-word masterpiece Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, found lifelong fans in both Jarvis Cocker and Stephen Fry, who declared Stanshall “one of the most talented and magnificent Englishmen ever to have drawn breath”.
