A few years back, I started posting lists of suitably creepy songs for Halloween. Oddly enough, these posts continue to garner more hits than almost anything I've ever put up here on Flaming Pablum. This year, I thought I'd mix it up a bit and devote a bit more space to the individual songs themselves. As the week progresses, I hope to highlight at least three or four tracks that, to my mind, capture the suitably sinister flavor of Halloween. This particular entry is dedicated to a strange track by the Bonzo Dog Band off their album, Urban Spaceman.
Generally speaking, the Bonzo Dog Band didn't usually indulge in purposefully scary music. A giggly troop of Dadaist musicians steeped in surrealist humor, the Bonzo Dog Band (led by one Vivian Stanshall) was a profound influence on the nascent Monty Python (Bonzo mainstay Neil Innes was actually a frequent Python collaborator). Initially, I didn't know much about them beyond their characteristically bizarre cameo in the Beatles' equally weird cinematic opus, "Magical Mystery Tour" (wherein the Bonzos provide the musical accompaniment for a stripper show in the form of a little ditty called "Death Cab for Cutie" -- a title later swiped by a currently-popular-if-somewhat-yawnsome indie rock band). A co-worker in the earlyl 90s named Leslie, however, forcibly insisted that I know more about this bizarre ensemble and I dutifully sought out a compilation of theirs called The Bestiality of the Bonzo Dog Band.
Some years after that, however, I read about a Bonzos track on the ILX music discussion boards that really piqued my curiosity, prompting a long search to finally hear the song in question. "11 Mustachioed Daughters," the final track on the band's second album from 1969, retained the band's penchant for goofball whimsy, but came lyrically steeped in some creepily specific references to the occult, replete with allusions to Mandrakes, sacrifice, witchcraft and lycanthropy . The music lists and creeps in an ominous succession of murmurs and cacophony, flecked with creepy background snippets of percussion and impenetrable conversation. The lyrics, while still a bit silly, do emit the faint whiff of brimstone.
To my ears, it conjures that same feeling of that which should not be disturbed as mined in b-movie horror flicks. Silly, but still with a disquieting air of menace. Hit play below and see if you agree.
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