The late archetype Englishman Vivian Stanshall © Melyvn Hatcher
Vivian Stanshall - 1972
"It was delightfully awful. Playing to non-existent audiences. The band used to march along the beach to drum up an audience. There was an organist just like Roy Hudd plays in Potter's Lipstick On Your Collar, dressed in tights who would sing one of those awful Presley songs from GI Blues 'Did You Ever' (Mr. Stanshall cocks a leg onto his cane coffee table) and would point his crutch towards the audience's faces. One night a lady got up and poured a cup of tea over his head.Dougie the brummie (Mr. Stanshall adopts a Birmingham accent) ran the show. His peroxide wife sang 'I'm A Little On The Lonely Side'. There were all the theatrical superstitions, no whistling in the dressing rooms. Apparently the Pier was haunted. In the dressing room you could see right through the cracks in the floor and watch the men in wet suits fishing for lobsters.
I used to take a boat out from the pier with my umbrella, tape recorder and ukulele. I was working on material for Men Opening Umbrellas. There was a cafe on the pier, this funny little man ran it. He displayed a ludicrously unpunctuated sign, Spades Balls Sausages Teas. That became Spades Balls Sausages Trees in Rawlinson End." - Vivian Stanshall
(Shanklin Pier was destroyed by the storms of 1987. Vivian Stanshall died in 1995 during a fire at his Highgate home)