Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"We'll keep rhinoing through", 4 Mar 2001
By A Customer
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.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really wild, General - thank you sir, 23 Dec 1999
By A Customer
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.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life affirming brilliance!!!!, 16 Jan 2004
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'.
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