Play it again, Sam

For a start he was the drummer and spoons player in the famous English comic band of the 1960s, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band who influenced the Pythons, television comedy and music for years after they disbanded.

But considering how the band were in the Abbey Road studios making their debut LP while the Beatles were next door making Sgt Pepper (they used to natter with the fab four in the canteen about football. Sam used to help George Harrison work the coffee machine), and how the band became a huge international cult - in spite of only having one hit single - Sam Spoons doesn't take himself seriously at all. In fact he's very jolly indeed with a youthful and infectious giggle.

You may have seen him recently running the London Marathon at the grand old age of 65 - and playing the spoons as he ran.

"A family down the road from me all put in something for me running the marathon. Their daughter said: Celebrity? But Martin does our drains'!"

Sam isn't a plumber by trade - in fact he's a retired lecturer from the Chelsea College of Art - but he's very active and practical: "I've got the longest ladders and drain rods in the street and I sweep my own chimneys," he says.

His interest in music began in Barnstaple in the 1950s: "I used to go to the local dancehall, the Queen's Hall, every Thursday night, and I'd see all the top bands of the day, Billy Fury, Ted Heath, people like that.

"At that time, my dad ran a big branch of Boots and he had these two porters who used to turn up at social functions and play the spoons, boring everyone to death with it - except me.

"It was so ridiculous and so amusing. I remember getting an Acker Bilk record and trying to play the spoons to it."

Soon the teenage Sam had his own act, playing spoons in Plymouth where he attended art college: "Of course, because it was Plymouth you had all these matelots sailors there who had party pieces like standing on their heads eating champagne glasses. Me and a pal who could drink very quickly used to turn up at these huge pubs in the docks and he'd down pints and I'd play the spoons. And these sailors would be amazed at this."

Later he got into the Royal College of Art and became involved with novelty jazzers, The Bonzo Dog Dada Band (named after a cartoon dog and the Dada absurdist art movement). "It was in existence then but in a very disjointed form. Their drummer had had enough and so I got involved - I was always big on participation. I was studying Industrial Design and so we had a really good workshop.

"I could weld things together. I got one or two bed legs and a cast-iron balustrade and hung cymbals off them. Later on I got a big bass drum.

"The music we played was early novelty film music like Felix the Cat. Thin, ricky tick stuff. We'd go down the Portobello Road, buy old 78s, find out what nonsense was on them and see if we could do it. The performances were always manic, getting props involved, developing our ideas.

"All the members of the band were good communicators and, to be perfectly honest, I can't remember a bad gig.

"We concentrated on the visual and communicating with the audience."

Soon their mixture of hundred-miles-an-hour trad jazz and absurdist humour had people queuing round the block at pubs such as The Tiger's Head in Catford and the Bird in Hand in Forest Hill.

The line-up was the legendary eccentric and drunk Vivian Stanshall, Sam, Rodney Slater, Legs' Larry Smith, Vernon Dudley Bohay-Nowell, Neil Innes and Roger Ruskin-Spear.

They toured England and played to huge crowds, but after the band's first, and most famous, album, Gorilla - which contained The Intro and the Outro (featuring "Adolf Hitler on vibes") - in 1967, things began to change.

"Viv and Larry were as thick as thieves. They wanted to be a pop group. I said: We're too old to be pop stars really. I found myself being elbowed out.

"I was pretty cool about it. If these things have to happen then they have to happen. I straight away got another career and carried on playing novelty music. After I'd left, Vernon said to me: Of course you realise how jealous Viv was of you.' "It was because I was at the Royal College of Art and he never actually got there. Isn't that absurd?"

The Bonzos went on to make more albums but split in 1970, after which singer Viv Stanshall began a long decline into alcoholism, dying in a fire in 1995.

"He was always very good company - manic depressives often are. He had every opportunity going, in radio, in film, with Rawlinson End, and with other recordings, and clearly he could never work with anybody else.

"He wasn't prepared to compromise in any way which you always have to do if you're working in a team."

Last year, the surviving members of the band reunited - along with Stephen Fry, Ade Edmondson and Phill Jupitus - for a triumphant reunion tour.

"I just thought: All these people are turning up to see us do what we've always enjoyed doing, that's wonderful. It's a privilege.' We're hoping to do some more gigs at the Shepherd's Bush Empire and maybe some cities up north.

"They also want us to do some new material. Whether or not they'll be staged at Shepherd's Bush, I don't know."

Forty years after he last took his welded bedsteads into Abbey Road, there is even talk of a new Bonzo Dog Band album. "We're each doing a few demos and then putting the ideas to the chaps."

Meanwhile Sam continues to play novelty songs with the Bill Posters Will Be Band once a month at the Bull's Head in Barnes. Once dubbed the ugliest drummer in rock and roll, it's a pretty safe bet he's the happiest.

Bill Posters Will Be Band play the Bull's Head, Barnes on Thursday, June 7.

To donate money to his marathon charity see justgiving.com/sam spoons.