Radio Gonzo

I think I have mentioned my friend Jane Bradley before in these pages. She was a gifted cartoonist, the mother of a young son, and a raving alcoholic who died stumbling - pissed as a rat - across the M5 one evening in early 1995. She inspired one of my better songs (The Day we Buried Jane on my most recent album which came out about two and a half years ago) and twenty one years after her death she turns up in my dreams on occasion, stinking of vodka and still refusing to sleep with me. And it was Jane who first told me about Viv Stanshall. Well, in fact that is a long way from being true. I knew intellectually who Viv Stanshall was. I had read enough rock music books to know all about the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, and to know that Stanshall was best friends with the equally insane Keith Moon, and that together they had carried out various performance art practical jokes across Olde London Towne. But, until Jane I never actually grokked him. Jane was an enormous fan of Stanshall's surreal worldview, particu