The Illustrated Vivian Stanshall: A Fairytale of Grimm Art Paperback – 26 Jan. 2018

It is one of my regrets in life that I did not discover the work of Vivian Stanshall until I heard about his death on the radio and they played Hunting Tigers as a tribute. I was only 18 and he seemed to personify everything I was already looking for in the music and art that I wanted to immerse myself in. But to be honest, I cannot say that I really had a full understanding of The Man. How on earth could I?Ki Longfellow’s wonderful book, already being referred to by those in the know as ‘The Book’, is just a privilege to own. Sure, it’s expensive. And I had to wait a while before I could muster the bunce with which to purchase it. But money well spent, and time well worth waiting.There are some stories told that I have read elsewhere but delight in reading from a different perspective. There are many more tales told that I did not know which show a different side to the man, and some long-standing myths either confirmed or debunked.This is not a biography. This is a slice from Ki and Vivian’s life, and I feel it a privilege that Ki Longfellow has seen fit to share it with us. This is a very personal and beautiful account. It is written in such an enchanting and engaging way. These are not formulaic words written in a bog-standard sequence. These are words that you can climb around and inhabit as you read them.The elephant in the room is the price. The big question is “can they really justify almost sixty quid for a paperback? If you want my opinion (and if you don’t, tough ‘cos you’re gonna get it) is YES. Here’s why:1. The pages are bigger than the average book.2. The pages are made of really good quality paper.3. The pages SMELL good. Even as a kid, I always loved sniffing books. I can tell a quality production a mile off by its smell.4. The quality of the print is really good. The colours are vibrant. Except the black and white ones, but even they are of great quality - none of that grainy greyscale that one usually associates with cheaper publications.5. There are 321 of these wonderful pages, plus index, and they are bound very well, with a good quality glossy cover.That’s five reasons why the book is worth the money before we even get to the actual content. Besides the touching, surprising, funny, sad and mesmerising text which I have already spoken of, Ki Longfellow has seen fit to share with us many letters, photos and examples of the actual Vivian Stanshall’s actual art. Actually. It is just wonderfully generous of Ki to share private photos of her life with Vivian. Pictures of their home, Vivian with Silky being a magic father. Pictures of Vivian’s stuff. I never set out reading this book with a particular desire to see a photo of Vivian’s bare backside mooning away from Searchlight, but I somehow feel my life is a little richer for having seen it. And, with the exception of album covers and little thumbnails on ebay, it is rare to see Vivian’s paintings. But they’re here. Do you remember me talking about the print quality and vibrant colour reproduction? When it comes to Vivian’s paintings, this is not just a nice little bonus. It is ESSENTIAL!And then there are Ben Wickey’s fabulous, engaging and witty illustrations. A perfect fit.I had read a long time ago that Vivian loathed to be called Viv, so I was not surprised to read this in the book (although I have, for some time, been baffled as to why so many people still refer to him as Viv). I was more surprised to learn that he detested the phrase “worst case scenario”. I use this phrase rather a lot. It is easy to assume that if we were to meet our heroes, they would automatically like us and enjoy our company. Reading this book, I suddenly realised (although, deep down, I probably already knew) that I would bore Vivian Stanshall immensely. But that doesn’t really matter. If I can just touch the hem of his robe (metaphorically speaking) and delight in the things he brought to this world, I wouldn’t need him to like my company anyway. And am I any closer to understanding The Man for having read this book? Of course not. How could I? But I have learned some rather wonderful things from someone who does, which is the best that most of us could ever hope for.Is this book worth fifty-nine quid? Well, if you have never heard of Vivian Stanshall, or simply just don’t care (there are an alarming amount of such people out there) then perhaps you’d say ‘no’. To which I would reply “go out, find some of Stanshall’s works, immerse yourself and be enriched”. But if you ever loved, liked or showed a passing interest in this wonderful man, then you need this book. I mean you REALLY need it. And if, like me, you have to wait a bit, and badger your loved ones for Amazon vouchers for Christmas like I did, then so be it. Like I said earlier, well worth the money and well worth the wait.I love this book, and my heartfelt thanks must go to Ki Longfellow for bringing it into this world.

Where to start? Ah, there you are dear reader! This is the real McCoy by one who knew him best. If, like me, you've been transfixed and inspired by the genius of Vivian Stanshall with that voice (to be aspired to) and exquisite word play then you can be beguiled and drawn in to the intensity of his world. Ki Longfellow needs a medal on two counts: firstly for her strength, loyalty and fierce individuality to Stanshall that his faults were for so long outweighed by her love for him; and secondly for her courage in writing this genuinely great book. The wealth of detail is staggering. The raw emotion will make you want to cry too. You will feel this book. You get what you pay for and this is worth the asking price. The book overflows with fine illustrations by Ben Wickey accompanied by Vivian's own neglected art and crammed with photos and quotes from... well, apparently everyone. Priceless anecdotes abound. There are the fair weather friends and the real ones who stood by Vivian even when that proved nearly impossible. I won't rehash the basic facts. You're reading this because you are already hooked. Stanshall's words still hold you in thrall. That rich, fruity voice.... often imitated but unsurpassed. From the gamut of Bonzo humour and his Lennon/McCartney pairing with Neil Innes through the desperately funny tragic MOUA (If you don't know - then find out!) and to his finest Rawlinson exploits and much else that you previously knew less of - here are all the answers as far as possible. Buy now. This is the one.

Just exploring "The Illustrated VS.." Love it. ALL. Heart rending, heart warming, heart felt, heart string pulling, no pulled punches - it pulls me in and keeps me churning all night with Stanshallian dreaming and Stinkfoot ear worms and wonder at Ki and her wondrous words and all the madful wonderness of it all...It is a very special book. Deeply personal and revealing, a wide open glimpse into their relationship, the troubles, the fun, the japes, the near miss disasters - but truly an extraordinary portrait of the man, his creative mayhem and his straight as an arrow artistic energy. What a ride ! Ki makes it all come alive in a comically chronologically challenged series of episodes that lurches from highs to lows and fun and frolics to utter craziness. She writes with confident aplomb and a cheery wit - 'it would be that way wouldn't it' - and never loses sight of the man she loved, for his art, his vulnerability, his bottle, banjolele and all. Brilliant. A book to treasure.Now I will definitely have to go and read all the rest of her prodigious literary output.

A beautiful book with a certain home made look. It is the most expensive book I have ever bought at nearly GBP70 (both in UK and Brazil). The biography 'Ginger Geezer', his recordings, and interviews are all worthwhile. Why does such a gifted and self destructive person enthrall us so?Perhaps 'Ginger Geezer's dedication says it all:' He was one of those men in whom nature runs riot; she endows him with not one or two but twenty talents, all of them far beyond the average and then withholds the one ingredient that might have brought them to perfection - a sense of balance and direction'.(Alan Moorehead on Sir Richard Burton in 'The White Nile')Thank you, Vivian Stanshall.

“Hello, and how did you find yourself this morning? / Well, I just rolled back the sheets, and there I was.”Wow, “The Illustrated Vivian Stanshall A Fairytale of Grimm Art” by Ki Longfellow gives us a rare insight into the life of a very talented artist with very many flaws. It is not so much a biography as it is a love story written, as a promise fulfilled, by Ki Longfellow Stanshall the widow of the late Vivian Stanshall. In her book she ”pulls back the sheets” to reveal many stories from her shared life with the great man who brought so much joy and laughter but wanted to be known as a serious artist and “Big Boy”.Ki met Vivian on a blind date (no, they did not meet at Waterloo) in 1977. So, since she came along long after the halcyon days of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, there is less emphasis on this part of his career. But as she tells us, Vivian Stanshall was not so interested in the past as he was in the present. “I’m still looking forward to what used to be. No time like the future.”She paints a vivid picture of the last 18 years of Vivian’s life. This portrait is drawn from her memories and the many letters posted between them.Ki readily admits her memories are subject to the Rashomon effect but by including the letters we feel we are living the story in real time. The tales she tells are totally unvarnished and “the cracks are showing”. There is no whitewashing, only white knuckles. This not a romanticized telling of a life although there is plenty of romance. This is the tragic/comic rock opera of the portrait of an artist as a young man and aforementioned “Big Boy”.It is a lament to the lost. Not only of the loss of the great man himself, but of so much of his lost art. We learn about lost songs such as one about the stranded South Pole explorer, Shackleton, playing his gramophone to an audience of penguins.In telling us their story, Ki takes us down the rabbit hole from Vivian’s house boat, to their shared life on a ship turned into a performing arts “showboat”, and to his final solitary days in a death trap of a flat on Muswell Hill.In this love story we learn Ki tried everything possible to keep Vivian Stanshall alive even though he was hell -bent on self destruction with alcohol and prescription meds. There is a certain irony in that his personal stationary was embossed with the phrase: “VIVIAN STANSHALL PRESERVATION SOCIETY”Ki Longfellow is not just Vivian Stanshall’s Boswill. She was also his muse, partner, and even sometimes rival for much of his later work and their joint projects.The book points out many of Vivian’s flaws and shortcomings. He could be insecure, greedy, jealous, a thief, and a liar. Yet none of this diminishes his greatness. It instead shows us that geniuses are human too.In thinking of Vivian Stanshall’s brief life, one is reminded of Brian Wilson and his song “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”. But Linda Thompson states it better when she says; “The World was too small to contain him”.The book is well written with sly references to Vivian and his influences such as; “The letters riding off the page like cowboys” and “plenty of room to swing a lobster”. Ki also deserves the Simile of the Year Award for describing someone to be “as beautiful as the Horse Head Nebula and as spirited as an Arabian mare”.Some have mentioned the high cost of the book as a deterrent. However, it is wonderfully put together, chock full of rare photos and examples of Vivian’s art work making it well worth the price.The inclusion of the great illustrations by artist Ben Wickey lift up the book in the way that E.H. Shepard added to A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” and John Tenniel added to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories. I especially like the one on the cover. Vivian is depicted taking off his octagonal eye glasses while holding his paint brushes and long lost ukulele and, as he stares out to the sea, the Thekla Showboat cuts through troubled waters. It is only much later that I noticed the photo of Vivian’s eye (from the Tadpoles album) staring out at us from the top much like the eye on the top of the pyramid depicted on the back of a U.S. dollar bill.In one of their many letters Ki predicts Vivian’s death and foreshadows this book when she writes; “Your death ought to be epic. I hope I don’t have to write it”. But written it she has and we are thankful she has shared this writing with us.Ki also writes: “We failed at being together and we failed at being apart (but) our love was work of art. “ I found the book to be a work of art AND a success. 23 years after his death, the arc of this diver still produces ripples on both sides of the pond. I say: Long live the art of Vivian Stanshall and with “The Illustrated Vivian Stanshall” I know it will.

Filth Hounds of Hades, this much-anticipated Coffee Table Book to Rule Them All is a feast for the Stanshallian stalwart and casual fan alike – if it is indeed possible to be a mere casual fan of the immortal Vivian Stanshall.Meticulously crafted over eons... well, a number of years, at the very least, by The Geezer's impossibly talented wife, Ki, this is an Art book in the truest sense, drenched with priceless photographs and illustrations. Aided and abetted by the insanely talented New England artist Ben Wickey, Ki has produced a disturbingly honest account of her life with one of the most iconic British geniuses of the modern age. I last saw the old codger on the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band farewell tour, and somewhere in my collection of memorabilia and general rubbish, I still have an envelope containing some feathers that had spewed out of the head of one of Roger Ruskin's Spear's many wacky stage robots. Very silly. For some reason I remembered Vivian's hair as being more blonde than ginger, so I was surprised to see it clearly depicted in the book as ginger - like a red kipper, nailed to his bonce.I found Ki's writing to be enchanting and evocative, to the extent that I could fully visualize every scene in great detail, including her Emma Peel-style black catsuit (steady on, old chap) and her first 'blind date' meeting with a green-clad Vivian of the Forest. Her Tales from The Riverbank descriptive writing fully captures the English as tuppence rurality of life on their first floating home, 'The Searchlight' and her new life as a stranger in a strange land. She writes beautifully.Musical genius and artist aside, Lord Stanshall was famous for his legendary sense of humor, and it is reassuring to note that his brilliant and exotic wife of eighteen years has a remarkable and edgy sense of humor in her own right – she had me at the showers of Fortean frogs. Yet Ki’s jovial banter still poignantly unfolds a starkly beautiful and crushingly honest tale of a Vivian that I never knew, inevitably, and a creative supernova who was far more tortured and fragile that I could ever have imagined. He clearly exhibited some of the tragic, self-destructive traits of a Standard Alcoholic, coupled with what may have been bipolar swings; and given his edge-of-destruction genius, possibly the same involuntary quasi Kundalini experiences that racked some of the legendary poets.The sheer enormity of Ki’s achievement in putting together this mistresspiece – I can only describe it as, ‘precious’ - makes it overwhelming when it comes to the idea of writing a truly representative review that in any way does it justice. It simply cannot be done. If you were to merely flip through the book from cover to cover, you would immediately gain a sense of the absurd level of detail and the richly-illustrated panoramic content. Vivian lived a big life, and the tribute quotes that the book opens with are a who’s who of Rock Culture. He was loved, admired and revered by many people who also had more than their share of talent, and it would be an impossible task to capture the importance of every tiny vignette, and yet it remains strangely organic.As for Ki Longfellow Stanshall; if you will permit me the impertinence ma’am, let me say this… By God madam, you have done The Ginger Geezer proud in attempting the impossible, and bringing us this utterly unique insight into the life and mind of the mighty Vivian Stanshall; and in doing so, you have bared enough of your beautiful soul to make us fall in love with you, the way that “Stan” did all those years ago. Nobody else in the galaxy could have created what you have now gifted us with; for you were his lady, his Muse, his confidante in good times and in bad, and the love of his wondrously crazy life. Namaste, dear one.

Ein Meisterwerk und ein Muss für jeden Bonzo-Fan. Deutlich besser als Ginger Geezer.Vivian der Maler, der Bonzo, die Rampensau, der Trinker, der Clown, das Wichtigste aber: Vivian der Mensch.

This is an essential and fantastic book detailing (primarily) Vivian Stanshall's post-1977 life, via fascinating text from Viv's wife Ki Longfellow, and gorgeous art throughout (mostly Vivian's and the marvelous Ben Wickey). Consideration is given to the Bonzos and to Viv's pre-1977, post-Bonzos artistic endeavors, but the heart of the material is devoted to 1977 and after, when many would argue that Viv's true artistic genius was most manifest (when not corrupted by alcohol and/or pharmaceuticals). The overall gist of the text is a love story for the ages, but the book is constructed as a wonderful visual feast as well. I would recommend this book whole-heartedly to those who are in any way interested in Viv's life during these years, and his relationship with Ki and their daughter. I would also recommend this to ANYONE who is at all interested in biographies of bona fide artistic geniuses, which Vivian Stanshall so obviously was. An absolute must own, easily worth double the current Amazon price.