In 1990 I had a full-time job in insurance and a weekly music show on BBC Radio Merseyside. I was always looking for guests and some kind soul, probably Neil Innes, gave me Viv Stanshall’s number in Muswell Hill. I called him and told him when I would be in London. He gave me his address and said I could come round at 2pm on October 23. In the morning, dressed in my suit and tie and carrying my briefcase, I went to my insurance meeting and in the afternoon, I took the tube to Kilburn and walked through the Edwardian streets to 21 Hillfield Road, where Viv lived on the top floor. I rang his bell and waited. And waited. I rang again. And waited. I didn’t want a wasted journey so I rang again and after five minutes, he answered. “I was expecting someone from the BBC,” he said, “but you look like a bloody insurance salesman.” “I am from the BBC,” I replied. “Doesn’t matter, come in, I need those eyes,” he said. I wondered why.

Viv led me up the stairs to the chaos of his living room. He showed me a half-completed painting, reminiscent of The Scream by Edvard Munch. The face did not have any eyes. “Yours will be fine,” he said, “just what I want”, although I hardly regarded this as flattery. He asked if he could paint them. I said yes, but could we do the interview first?

We talked for an hour, although most of the time, the conversation veered off the subject. You could not ask Viv a direct question, or rather you could, but he wouldn’t answer it. As a result, I felt that the interview was unsuitable for broadcast. When I put on the tape just now after 16 years, I thought that the machine was playing slow, but as my voice sounds normal, I can only conclude that the slow speech was the result of his medication. At times, he almost nods off and I had probably woken him.

Viv was smoking Spanish cigars and a succession of rolled cigarettes. He was depressed by the loss of his 80-year-old father and he showed me his father’s possessions including his false teeth. “I haven’t the room to do any sculpture so I shall incorporate them in some papier mâché job.” He had an enormous collection of press cuttings such as “Wolfman eats brother in front of taxicab” and he wanted to publish the best in a book.

Despite his depression, he was still witty. He referred to Matt and Luke as “the ghastly Goss Bros” and he told me of Keith Moon’s “Ivor Novello-coloured Rolls-Royce”. He derived most of his income from voiceovers but he had revived No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car for a charity album, The Last Temptation Of Elvis: “a dreadful song which comes from Unfun In Acapulco”. Viv didn’t see Canyons Of My Mind as an Elvis parody: “No, no, dear boy, I was thinking of The Windmills Of Your Mind which was such rotten poetry. I was stuffed to the neck with those rotten poets like Leonard Cohen and Rod McKuen.”

I asked Viv about his influences. “Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Gracie Fields and Noel Coward. I should say Chuck Berry but he was a thoroughly horrible man. I love Little Richard and I love his autobiography. He was a very funny man: just listen to the way he sings Send Me Some Lovin’.”

Many of the 60s musicians, including the entire Bonzo band, went to art college. “Clapton, Townshend and Lennon were art students. This is why English rock’n’roll in the 60s was so multifarious and extraordinary, but I don’t think that any of us thought it would last. Lennon had a revolting psychedelic Cadillac and we used to get pissed together, good man Lennon. His death hurt me more than Kennedy’s, that really hurt. Although he was a very serious man, he was also extremely funny. I think it is to do with courage as John couldn’t give a shit. He did some things that were frankly embarrassing. The bed-in was nonsense, but by god, we made each other laugh.”

When I mentioned I’m The Urban Spaceman, Viv cut me short, “Don’t mention the damn thing. I hate it. It was catchy but I only wanted to do things that were dangerous. As soon as the first bar of that picked up, the audience was with us and that really depressed me. When we did Mr Apollo, the record company said, ‘That doesn’t sound like the last one’ and I said, ‘Of course it doesn’t. That would make us extremely dreary.’ It is one of the best records we made but it sold bugger all. I never wanted to get in the charts in the first place. There are other values and it didn’t make us rich. £42.26 was my whole royalty for all our records. Still, the Pretty Things didn’t make a sausage.”

You could never tell which way Viv was going to jump. I suggested that the Bonzos could have been really big in the way that Dr Hook were by ditching funny songs in favour of ballads. “Of course we weren’t the Beach Boys or the marvellous Roy Orbison, but all our songs are love songs because they celebrate the joy of being with other people.”

After the Bonzos, Viv Stanshall teamed up with Scaffold and the Liverpool poets for Grimms. “I loved Roger McGough, who is quite rightly regarded as a wonderful poet, but I couldn’t stand Brian Patten. He saw himself as a young Byron and I just wanted to punch him. I can’t remember whether I was thrown out of the group or whether I left but it would have ended in a fight.”

When I turned off the cassette, Viv sketched my eyes for his grief-stricken picture and I left about 4pm. “I don’t want to exhibit my paintings,” he said, “I want to leave them to my children, and I don’t mean the children of my loins, I mean my friends. I want to leave them something. They can look at them and say, ‘Well, at least he didn’t crap out, he retained his integrity.’”

Following a fire in his bedroom, Viv Stanshall died in March 1995. I don’t know what happened to his paintings or indeed, whether they survived the fire. If one of his friends has a painting that looks The Scream, he has got my eyes.