Friday, April 25, 2008
My status as a serious researcher of weighty topics has just led me to look up the 1970s Yorkshire TV children's show Animal Kwackers on Wikipedia. What I found knocked me sideways. The original Bongo was, believe it or not, Geoff Nicholls, the lugubrious Northern drum tutor on Rockschool. Now, I watched the whole run of Rockschool on BBC2 back in the day, and my main memory is of lusting after Nicholls' rather lovely green Yamaha 9000 kit. At no point do I remember him explaining the whys and wherefores of providing a solid backbeat while wearing an outsize dog suit. Nor do I recall Deidre Cartwright explaining how to grip a tremolo arm firmly while wearing a nylon lion's paw, or Henry Thomas showing how to play slap bass without opposable thumbs. The producers missed a trick there, I reckon.
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4 comments:
Wow! That's fantastic! Especially as the Animal Kwackers were something of an obsession when I was at school. Like the equally scary Residents, their real identities were a matter of some debate. One friend swore blind they were The Grumbleweeds, and I can see the Maurice-Rory link. But Rock School... it all makes sense.
Speaking of which, is the MIDI/SynthAxe edition of RS as good as I recall?
One of them was (gasp) a girl called Atalanta, I think. Surname unknown but it probably wasn't Shore.
Of course, this might be the famed Wikipedia playfulness at work, but I like to think this one's too obscure to be faked. Nicholls was later replaced by Atalanta Harmsworth, whom I assume to be some kind of 'Daily Mail' heiress. Stranger things have happened. I once had a pint with Tiny Rowland's daughter, who was working as a scene-shifter in the west end.
I'm almost sure that in one show Bongo enthused about the delights of the triple paradiddle, but I could be mistaken.
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