WE ARE NORMAL

Put on your gladest gladrags, friends and neighbors, and join me in bellowing exuberant hallelujahs — what to my mind is the second greatest band in rock and roll history has come together again (at least the crucial ingredients thereof) after eighteen months of silence and/or failure, which truly exhilarating news fairly leapt from page three of the February 20 Melody Maker: "Bonzos Reform . . . (temporarily) to be billed as Viv Stanshall, Neil Innes and Freaks . . . I daresay Roger Spear will come along on a few gigs with us . . . we are writing a lot of new stuff."

Rejoice! While Stanshall on his own managed to produce just one curious but scarecely extraordinary single (“Labio-Dental Fricative”) during the months since the group split (during most of which he was reported to have been a self-committed resident of a sanitarium), while Innes’ interim group venture. World, was just shockingly mediocre, together they are capable of producing and perpetrating the most stirring ’50’s-derived classic rock and toll, the most incisive satire, the most magnificent madness, and, yes, the most beautiful love-songs you or I have ever heard, as the four Bonzo albums released to date vividly attest. Truly, if, by some unkind whim of Fate, you’ve not encountered the Bonzo before now you’ve got one of the rock and roll life’s most joyous experiences awaiting you.