Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Cool Britannia
2. Equestrian Statue
3. Jollity Farm
4. I Left My Heart in San Francisco
5. Look Out, There's a Monster Coming
6. Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold
7. Death Cab for Cutie
8. Narcissus
9. Intro and the Outro
10. Mickey's Son and Daughter
11. Big Shot
12. Music for the Head Ballet
13. Piggy Bank Love
14. I'm Bored
15. Sound of Music
16. We Are Normal
17. Postcard
18. Beautiful Zelda
19. Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?
20. Hello Mabel
21. Kama Sutra
22. Humanoid Boogie
23. Trouser Press
24. My Pink Half of the Drainpipe
25. Rockaliser Baby
26. Rhinocratic Oaths
27. 11 Moustachioed Daughters

Disc 2:

1. Hunting Tigers Out in "Indiah"
2. Shirt
3. Tubas in the Moonlight
4. Dr. Jazz
5. Monster Mash
6. I'm the Urban Spaceman
7. Ali Baba's Camel
8. Laughing Blues
9. By a Waterfall
10. Mr. Apollo
11. Canyons of Your Mind
12. You Done My Brain In
13. Keynsham
14. Quiet Talks and Summer Walks
15. Tent
16. We Were Wrong
17. Joke Shop Man
18. Bride Stripped Bare by "Bachelors"
19. Look at Me, I'm Wonderful
20. What Do You Do?
21. Mr. Slater's Parrot
22. Sport (The Odd Boy)
23. I Want to Be With You
24. Noises for the Leg
25. Busted

Disc 3:

1. My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies
2. I'm Going to Bring a Watermelon to My Girl Tonight
3. Alley-Oop
4. Button up Your Overcoat
5. Mr. Apollo
6. Ready-Mades
7. Strain
8. Turkeys
9. King of Scurf
10. Waiting for the Wardrobe
11. Straight from My Heart
12. Rusty (Champion Thrust)
13. Rawlinson End
14. Don't Get Me Wrong
15. Fresh Wound
16. Bad Blood
17. Slush
18. Labio Dental Fricative
19. Re-Cycled Vinyl Blues: Take Good Care of My Baby/White Christmas/C ...
20. Trouser Freak

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104992 in Music
• Released on: 1993-09-30
• Number of discs: 3
• Formats: Box set, Import

Album Description
Import exclusive compilation for the British psychedelic act that combined elements of rock & comedy to great success. The Intro comprises the groups first two albums, Gorilla and The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse and recounts their history up to 1968. The Outro combines Tadpoles and Keynsham and continues the story to 1970, when the band was dissolved. Dog Ends features their reunion album, Let's Make Up And Be Friendly, as well as several non-album releases, some solo material and a text which brings their adventure up to date. Three standard jewel cases housed in a slipcase.

Customer Reviews

Really wild General - thank you, sir
If you're only going to get one Bonzos collection on CD, this is the one to have. It's the most comprehensive - 72 tracks, including the whole of each of their five albums: Gorilla, The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse, Tadpoles, Keynsham and their 1972 reunion album, Let's Make Up And Be Friendly. And there are some extras, or "Dog Ends" as they are described, including their quite splendid debut single, My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies. The accompanying notes on the Bonzos by Brian Hogg include such delightful details as that their hit single I'm The Urban Spaceman was produced by Paul McCartney under the pseudonym Apollo C Vermouth. Apparently McCartney agreed to do it after Vivian Stanshall met him in a pub. The notes also point out that the Bonzos were part of the new wave of British comedy in the 1960s which led to Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's an interesting parallel - in the Bonzos' whimsical lyrics one can hear prototype Python dialogue, and in the way they borrowed earlier styles and subverted them one could see a musical precursor to Terry Gilliam's animations. But The Bonzo Dog (Doo Dah) Band are best appreciated on their own terms. Here is the work of a group of people of considerable musical ability and rich comic imagination, having a great time taking musical, comic and social conventions and turning them upside down. It's an approach which has stood the test of time. Enjoy.

Bonzo Goes to Collage
All the Bonzo albums (here packaged as a definitive archive) are funny, but calling them comedy albums is like classifying the Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner as a sitcom. The many parodies here have their serious side--typically a lambast of the poverty of pop culture, but Keynsham (tracks 39-52) is a nightmarish descent whose only parallels are Dante's Inferno and Kafka's The Trial (which also have their humorous moments). Keynsham is a concept album about concepts, about the prisons we build for ourselves, only we don't think of them as prisons because we build them ourselves, and we're proud of the little decorative touches, and because we'll take the trite over the beautiful anyday. (In "Sport," "it's an odd boy who doesn't like sport" and who would rather read Mallarme under a tree than play football). In the Gilbert and Sullivanish finale, "Busted," policeman and pothead set out on a jolly chase ("running like a rabbit from a frisky poodle") but the free spirit (who's free because he sleeps on the beach and thinks "it would do more good to try / and understand the other guy") ultimately gets "busted, by the law." Fortunately the next Bonzo album, Let's Make Up and Be Friends (tracks 59-69) returns to parody and pastiche, comic relief from the despair (except there is that final track with the mechanical laughter...). Keynsham is probably the profoundest and darkest work of rock/pop, and civilization should be grateful the Bonzos didn't push the envelope any further.

The intro and the outro and the middletro too!
There is nothing like the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band out there. Nothing at all. Listening to this "cornology" could only lead you to one conclusion - this music could not have been made by human beings. And you'd be half right, really, for Vivien Stanshall, the late driving force of the Bonzos, could definately be described as from another planet.
The album has a quintissentially British sense of wit, of being able to poke fun at ones self. It also contains the most askewed view on life and music you are ever likely to hear. Traditional music hall, put through a rock mangler, washed in a psychedellic washing machine and then dried in a satirical tumble dryer, is the best description of this collection of the bizarre, the brilliant, and the incisive. There are no apt words for these albums, but they take you on a journey from which you may never fully recover but you'll probably enjoy. These are musically gifted people (including future Monty Python collaborator and Rutle Neil Innes) having a whale of a time and masterly subverting genre and perception of class and social structure.
The best of the five albums included is Gorilla, a laugh riot from start to finish, without the pretensiousness that sometimes (though not often) creeps into the later albums. Stand out tracks are the absolute classic "The into and the outro" the spot on jazz spoof "Big shot" the instrumental piece "Music for the head ballet" and the strangely disturbing "Look out there's a monster coming." But there are gems littered throughout, such as "Hunting tigers out in INDIAH", the bouncy "Ali Baba's Camel" and the band's biggest hit "The Urban Spaceman."
All though other members of the band deserve merit, the real star of the show is Stanshall, a talent of which the phrase "a one-off" was coined for. It is his bizarre genius that shines through, as he fronts many of the tracks with his oh-so-British accent. A delight from start to finish. Go on - treat yourself.