Vivian Stanshall - Later Work

Later Work

Stanshall collaborated on numerous musical projects including Robert Calvert's 1974 concept album Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters, and Mike Oldfield's 1973 Tubular Bells where he played the Master of Ceremonies, breathily announcing the buildup of instruments in the finale of the first side of the album. Stanshall performed with Grimms and The Rutles, as well as occasionally working with The Alberts and The Temperance Seven.

While living on the Searchlight, Stanshall wrote and recorded Sir Henry at Rawlinson End and also the script for the film of the same name, later produced for Tony Stratton-Smith's Charisma Records company. Following this, he would write his third album Teddy Boys Don't Knit, contribute a lyric to Steve Winwood's Arc of a Diver and write some of the songs he later used for Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera (the musical comedy he wrote with his second wife Ki Longfellow).

After the Searchlight, the Stanshall family lived and worked on The Thekla, a Baltic Trader, which was sailed 732 nautical miles (1,356 km) from the east coast of England to be moored in the Bristol docks. Ki had bought the Thekla in Sunderland, and converted her into a floating theatre called The Old Profanity Showboat. Vivian joined her when the doors opened to the public for the first time in May 1983.

In December 1985, the ship saw the debut of their production, Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera. Stanshall wrote 27 original songs for the opera, sharing book and lyric writing with his wife. The show involved bizarre characters that they imagined living under a seaside pier as well as characters taken from Longfellow's early tale for children called Stinkfoot. It proved popular and was revived in London some years later with Peter Moss as musical director, and again in a reduced form in Bristol in 2010.

A 1975 film for the BBC, One Man's Week, looked at a week in Stanshall's life and includes footage of him at The Manor Studio recording studio playing music with Gaspar Lawal, Mongezi Feza, Anthony White and Derek Quinn. This film also shows him talking about his turtles and playing his 'Phonofiddle'.

He was married twice: in 1968 to fellow art student Monica Peiser (they had a son, Rupert, that year, and were divorced in 1975); and on 9 September 1980, to novelist Pamela "Ki" Longfellow. They had a daughter, Silky, born on 16 August 1979, named after a racehorse called Silky Sullivan, her mother's childhood favourite. (Stanshall was seriously considering Dorothy. "Just think," he was reported as saying by Ki, "We could call her Dot!") His marriage was celebrated in the song, Bewildebeeste, as was Silky's birth in The Tube, on his second solo album Teddy Boys Don't Knit (1981).

In 1982, Vivian provided a spoken word segment on Lovely Money, a single by The Damned.

In 1991, Stanshall made a 15-minute autobiographical piece called Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, aka Crank, for BBC2's The Late Show, in which he confessed to having been terrified of his father, who had always disapproved of him.

A later programme for BBC Radio 4, Vivian Stanshall: Essex Teenager to Renaissance Man (1994) included an interview with his mother in which she insisted that his father had loved him, but Stanshall was mortified that his father had never shown it, not even on his deathbed.