Track Listing

1. Cool Brittania
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 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. Rhino Cratic Oaths
27. 11 Mustachioed Daughters
28. Hunting Tigers Out In India
29. Shirt
30. Tubas In The Moonlight
31. Dr Jazz
32. Monster Mash
33. I'm The Urban Spaceman
34. Ali Baba's Camel
35. Laughing Blues
36. By A Waterfall (Footlight Parade)
37. Mr Apollo
38. Canyons Of Your Mind
39. You Done My Brain In
40. Keynsham
41. Quiet Talks And Summer Walks
42. Tent
43. We Were Wrong
44. Joke Shop Man
45. Bride Stripped Bare By Bachelors
46. Look At Me I'm Wonderful
47. What Do You Do
48. Mr Slater's Parrot
49. Sport (The Odd Boy)
50. I Want To Be With You
51. Noises For The Leg
52. Busted
53. My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies
54. I'm Gonna Bring A Watermelon To My Girl Tonight
55. Ally Oop
56. Button Up Your Overcoat
57. Readymades
58. Strain
59. Turkeys
60. King Of Scurf
61. Waiting For The Wardrobe
62. Straight From My Heart
63. Rusty (Champion Thrust)
64. Rawlinson End
65. Don't Get Me Wrong
66. Fresh Wound
67. Bad Blood
68. Slush
69. Labio Dental Fricative
70. Recycled Vinyl Blues
71. Trouser Freak

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32217 in Music
• Released on: 1992-07-13
• Number of discs: 3
• Format: Box set
• Dimensions: .72 pounds

Album Review
Four-CD box including all five of their albums and various non-LP singles, rarities, and solo efforts. Of most interest to anyone who's enough of a Bonzo nut to invest in this, naturally, are the rare items, which comprise about half of the third disc (which also includes the Let's Make Up and Be Friendly album). There are the two 1966 singles for Parlophone, predating their first album, which find them at their most 1920s vaudevillian-influenced (even on the cover of "Alley Oop"). "Mr. Apollo" appears in its German version (which actually isn't German, except for a spoken passage by Vivian Stanshall), and its non-LP B-side, "Ready Mades," is a gentle folky tune that sounds like a Keynsham outtake. There's also one early solo item apiece from Vivian Stanshall (his 1970 single "Labio-Dental Fricative," on which Eric Clapton plays), Neil Innes (his 1974 single "Re-Cycled Vinyl Blues"), and Roger Ruskin Spear's "Trouser Freak" (from his 1971 EP). As an extra incentive, there are also lengthy historical liner notes. For all its length, however, it doesn't have everything by the Bonzos: BBC sessions are on Unpeeled, outtakes and rehearsals on Anthropology, and the 1966 outtake "On Her Doorstep Last Night" is on the By Jingo It's... British Rubbish compilation. --Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide

Customer Reviews

"We'll keep rhinoing through"
If only all collections were as good as this; absolutely everything the group released in their lifetime and a few solo tracks besides. All 5 Bonzos albums are here and, even early on, the diversity and musicianship was impressive; it's little wonder McCartney was a fan. Neil Innes frequently produced material which belied the group's "wacky" status; Ready-Mades in particular is gentle, beautiful and yet somewhat unsettling and it is not alone in the Bonzo catalogue. Meanwhile Viv Stanshall and the others displayed an eccentric and very English humour which mixed vaudeville and surrealism in equal measures ("Rhinocratic Oaths" and the famous "The Intro and The Outro" are good examples of this), resulting in a musical legacy which remains original, genuinely funny and incisive. Who else could have taken on so many musical genres so convincingly whilst still maintaining the firmly "in-cheek" status of their tongues?

Charming, occasionally disturbing and definately unique, the Bonzos work, like that of their close televisual cousins Monty Python, remains a superb document of their era without having aquired a molecule of the rust and tarnishing that usually accompanies the passing of time. Just perfect.

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.

Life affirming brilliance!!!!
If my flat was burning down and I only had time to save one item from my music collection it would be this delirious box set, hands down, without question.
To call the complete works of The Bonzos inspired comic and musical genius is to condemn with faint praise.
This material is capable of reigniting faith in the human race in even the most manic depressive of souls. The songs are brilliant musical compositions first and foremost. Each one a perfectly honed pop gem that The Beatles themselves would have been proud of. In fact songs like Yellow Submarine, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, Octopus's Garden, When I'm Sixty-Four, etc sound amazingly like Bonzos cast-offs (great tunes but not funny enough). The 72 tracks on these three CDs are by turns hilariously funny, whimsically poignant, deeply disturbing and wildly surrealistic (in a way that clearly fired the imaginations of the Monty Python team) while always retaining genuine compassionate insight into the human condition. This is what, for me, elevates them to the level of true art.
Praise be that people like this lived, met, hit it off and created work of this magnificence. Vivian Stanshall, Neil Innes, et al should be knighted, beatified, sanctified, whatever, forthwith and long shall their names echo down the halls of posterity! In some weird and wonderful alternate universe they would have been as big as The Beatles in the 60's and the Fab Four would have become the 'fondly remembered cult band'.