"What a sad week," said Jim Treadwell, bass guitarist with Bennett’s band The Crippled Monkeys. "First Ozzy Osbourne, and now dear old Bonkers. A joy has gone out of the world."
Born into the suburban middle classes, Bennett did not thrive at school, partly because of his innate laziness but also because of his precocious use of alcohol. On his report at the end of the fifth form, Bennett’s housemaster wrote, "we have yet to discover what Joseph could do if he applied himself. One has to wonder whether further attempts at education are merited."
Bennett and Treadwell, another early school leaver, formed The Crippled Monkeys on the basis of Treadwell being able to play three chords on the guitar. Bennett, who hadn’t a musical bone in his body, was lead singer.
Their first gig at the Bag of Nails bar drew noise abatement officers from miles around. The drummer had to leave the stage at one point because his ears were bleeding.
It was this that gave Bennett his idea for the band’s signature hit, Very Loud Song, the title of which was also the song’s lyrics, in their entirety.
On the Monkeys’ first venue tour, every one of their concerts was forcibly closed down by police, which brought the band both notoriety and a following. This might have led to greater success had it not been for Bennett’s first of many admissions to the rehab clinic.
Bennett’s appeal throughout his career never altered. He was the kid without talent doing whatever he liked and prospering from it.
By doing so he held the mirror up to wastrel kids who dreamed of doing the same. It was both an act and not an act. Bennett’s was the art of anti-art.
In rehab Bennett met Snotty Salter, a fellow addict and idler, and they went on to form Devils Toejam, a parody satanist band, because, as Snotty put it, "it pisses the bishops off". (When asked by a reporter whether there ought to be an apostrophe in the band’s name, Bennett replied, "what’s one of them when it’s at home?")
It was at a Toejam gig in the ’80s that a fan threw a live lizard on to the stage. Bennett, fuelled by amphetamines and a bottle and a-half of cognac, ripped its legs off, then swallowed the body.
Bennett claimed, plausibly, to have no memory of the event, but this one act brought him global prominence.
The irony is that everyone who knew him said Bennett was a gentle soul. Idle and ignorant though he indisputably was, he was also sentimental about animals and generous to a fault.
"He’d rescue a puppy and wrap it in the shirt off his back," was how Treadwell put it, "if, that is, he actually had a shirt on his back."
After Toejam, Bennett’s career stalled. In and out of rehab and hospital, he made numerous attempts at a comeback, most forgettably with a band called Bonkers and the Lizard Eaters whose only ever gig was described by one of the two reviewers that attended as "indescribable," and by the other as "noise."
There Bennett’s career in the limelight might have finished, as for many a washed-up drug-addled rock star, had it not been for the advent of so-called reality television.
The series In Bed with Bonkers was a global hit, showing Bennett as a stupid but affable oaf suffering the physical and mental decline attendant on years of self-abuse. The fact that, apart from Bonkers’ genuine ill-health, the show was clearly scripted mattered to nobody.
Bennett embodied everyman’s dream of undeserved fame and wealth, and did with it just what everyman would have done.
He indulged his inner slob. He was the kid who heard the voice of temptation and answered with a perpetual "yes please."
The kid without gifts who stumbled on success and was delighted to be ruined by it. Hence his popularity.
So long, Bonkers. We’ll surely see his likes again.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
