We have here, in memorium to Neil Innes, Sam Spoons and Viv Stanshall, a lost film starring the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. This was a short film made in 1969 for the British Film Institute, with the intent of being shown before feature films in UK cinemas.  Evidently, The Adventures of the Son of Exploding Sausage was deemed too strange to expose the British moviegoing public, so the film was never shown, and at one point was considered “lost.”

The Bonzo Dog Band, seen here in their rock-iconoclast heyday, take a splendidly surreal trip to the countryside in this endearingly odd, semi-improvised psychedelic music short. Much of the music will be familiar to die-hard fans of the Bonzos.

After a strange-sounding supper with local kids, the Bonzos set up their instruments in a farmyard, where they perform outlandish instrumental versions of their weird theatrical rock songs to an appreciative audience of horses and ponies. The band line-up featured here is Vivian Stanshall, Neil Innes, Rodney Slater, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Roger Ruskin Spear and Dennis Cowan. Unusually, Viv doesn’t sing here. Instead he toys with some radishes, before playing some serious electric guitar, his brow appealingly adorned by a laurel wreath. Meanwhile, Neil expresses himself in clown trousers and Roger attends to his robots.

This video is part of the Orphan Works collection. When the rights-holder for a film cannot be found, that film is classified as an Orphan Work. That means it can be posted to YouTube without any nasty consequences.