Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  A contemporary of Ian’s at the Royal Grammar School was Ed Speight, later to become a dependable sideman in various musical ventures. One episode that stuck in Speight’s mind was when he and Ian broke into the Officers’ Training Corps signals hut to steal a long-wave radio set. ‘I would never nick anything like a thief,’ said Ian, ‘it was more like nicking a radio for the weekend, so I could listen to [Radio] Luxembourg.’ A longwave set also enabled Ian and Ed to listen to Voice of America Jazz Hour and introduced them to New Orleans jazz and the music of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. ‘In that closed society of boarding school,’ observed Ian, ‘you get people, complete nutters, who are interested in one narrow little area of music. I got the bug for music.’

  One record that made a big impact on Ian and a few other boys at the Royal Grammar School was Lonnie Donegan’s frantic recording of ‘Rock Island Line’, which topped the UK hit parade in January 1956. Donegan, who was famously crowned ‘The King of Skiffle’, played the kind of music that offered Ian and musical lightweights everywhere a viable alternative to more demanding styles. Skiffle music placed its emphasis on the rhythmic and vocal elements of the song, the only ‘real’ instrument deployed being a lightly strummed guitar. Ian went skiffle-crazy and fancied himself as a singer. School House already boasted a couple of budding musicians, so what could be simpler?

  Envisaging a future in showbiz, Ian engineered a school skiffle group but was quickly relegated to washboard, which he scraped rhythmically alongside guitarists Warwick ‘Rocky’ Prior and John ‘Jack’ Dawes. Robin Sackett plucked the ubiquitous tea-chest bass. ‘Dury had rhythm, no question,’ says Warwick Prior. ‘He could drum his fingers on the billiard table cover in a way that I quite admired, but he could not sing in tune. He was lucky to be in.’ Considering Ian’s love of wordplay, it is surprising that this incarnation of the skiffle group never acquired an official name. Perhaps they couldn’t agree on one, but the group became quite popular around the school, performing such songs as ‘It Takes a Worried Man (To Sing a Worried Song)’ and their ‘tour de force’, ‘Jesse James’.

  By May 1956, when the traditional school photograph was taken, Ian, just fourteen, was sporting a full ‘Tony Curtis’ hairstyle and a defiant expression. It is quite possible that he had just glimpsed a photograph of Elvis Presley, who was electrifying the hit parade that week with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. With the advent of Elvis, Lonnie Donegan had a serious rival and the music-obsessed boys of School House a new hero. If Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ lit the touch-paper for Ian and his closest chums, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ would create an explosion. ‘The others didn’t all get it – they were busy playing football,’ says Prior, ‘but Dury and I did. It threw us together in a weird way because we weren’t particularly fond of each other.’

  Ian was a huge fan of Presley’s early records, but in order to establish an identity he needed to find his own Elvis – someone who was not quite as famous, not quite as handsome and not quite as good. That summer, when a skinny American underdog named Gene Vincent struck gold with ‘Be Bop a Lula’, Ian discovered his personal rock ’n’ roll idol and future role model. Gene Vincent became Ian’s crusade, and he championed Vincent’s music with evangelical zeal. The twenty-one-year-old Vincent had all the credentials that appealed to Ian: his hair was a mess of black curls, he had a light mournful voice and, co-incidentally, a gammy left leg, although Ian claimed to be unaware of this crucial detail at the time.

  ‘I bought all his singles until he got a saxophone,’ said Ian. ‘I went off him after “Say Mama”. Same as when Elvis Presley got a saxophone. “King Creole?” Funny how you know when you’re that young. Elvis Presley and the saxophone didn’t go together, nor with Gene. I loved saxophones with Little Richard, but not with Elvis and Gene. Maybe it’s something to do with rockabilly purity. It sounded like a moody addition, the wrong instrument. Later I got into rockabilly music, and you very rarely hear a saxophone, not with that Norfolk Virginia vibe.’

  The merits of various rock ’n’ roll singers were frequently debated by Ian and his cohorts. ‘I remember arguing with Dury about Gene Vincent,’ says Warwick Prior. ‘I thought he was OK, but a bit empty and leftfield. I was more turned on to Elvis and Little Richard. Only a few of us had discovered records in 1956: me, Ian and a boy called Robert Trick. It was a minority thing.’ Ian spent his free time going through the racks at Percy Prior’s record shop in High Wycombe. Short of cash, he had to be selective about his purchases, but it was quite possible for the obsessive fan to build a collection in other ways in the days before record shops separated sleeves and discs, storing the latter behind the counter to deter theft. Enlisting day boy C. D. ‘Seedy’ Leach to purloin for him only the choicest rock ’n’ roll platters, Ian increased his collection. When he returned to school with the latest Gene Vincent LP under his arm, the music master was only too pleased to grant Ian access to the school record player so he could ‘listen to music’.

  Rock ’n’ roll provided Ian with an outlet. In the school summer holiday of 1956, he went home to Upminster with the sound of ‘Be Bop a Lula’ ringing in his ears, planning to form yet another skiffle group. This time, he would recruit his Upminster friends and personally alternate between washboard and tea-chest bass. Long-term buddy Barry Anderson, whose credentials included entertaining the kids at Saturday-morning pictures, would play guitar and sing lead vocals. A friend named Martin played second guitar, and Jo Dobson, who was head girl at the local Gaynes Secondary School, was called in to sing the popular ‘Freight Train’. The entire group, again nameless, cruised around Upminster in a lilac Austin 7 that belonged to a friend and made their debut in a church hall by the Wantz Bridge in Cranham. It was Ian’s first public performance.

  Flash clothes, fast cars and all things American obsessed Ian, but nothing sparked his adolescent imagination quite as effectively as the Teddy Boy scene. Resplendent in their Edwardian-style draped jackets and drainpipe trousers, ‘Teds’ ushered in the first significant youth uprising of post-war Britain, and the public were duly warned about these ‘juvenile delinquents’ who carried bicycle chains and flick-knives and would cut you up as soon as look at you. When their rebellious antics made the news, Ian was impressed. Much to his delight, his corner of Essex boasted a sizeable Teddy Boy population. One can only imagine his emotions as he gazed in awe at the youthful arrogance of these young, strutting peacocks commanding attention in Romford’s market square. He hero-worshipped them and quickly attempted to ape their stance and echo their rhyming slang, much to the embarrassment of his pal Barry, who still remains pissed off for being thrown out of the local cinema because Ian, aged fourteen, was making too much noise during Rock Around the Clock. Or perhaps, as Ian would later claim, releasing pigeons from underneath his overcoat and ‘disrupting the performance’.

  To have been ejected from the cinema, especially during a rock ’n’ roll movie, was hard currency for Ian. He traded on it for weeks. Many years later, in a book entitled Cool Cats – 25 Years of Rock ’n’ Roll Style, in a chapter entitled ‘Razors Out at Rock Riot’, Ian would write:

  The sideburns are coming on: less bum fluff, more little black ones. Anzora white preparation for the haircut. Water on first – sides only if the grapes look healthy. Dreadful Randolphs [Randolph Scott(s) = spots] round the corners of the mouth . . . grey worsted trousers with 12” bottoms done on my mum’s hand-drive Singer, yellow and black check shirt and horrible one button jacket bought by mistake in Romford market when the geezer put his arm across the door and convinced me the pale green cardboard was just as smart as grey Donegal tweed . . .

  Returning to the corridors of School House with a bootlace tie secreted in his kitbag, Ian creatively embellished his holiday experiences, including the story of being ‘barred from the Ritz, Romford’! No one doubted him when he described his first, furtive sexual experiences in Upminster Park with a girl named Susan Herrick who refused to let him ‘go all the way’, but his tales of bein
g accepted into a local Teddy Boy gang were taken with a pinch of salt. ‘He had a “Tony Curtis” with a DA [‘duck’s arse’], an outrageous haircut in Great Britain at that time,’ recalls Ed Speight. ‘The headmaster, Mr Tucker, could never pronounce Ian’s name properly; he would roar, “Doer-reee, you wretched boy!”’

  With his hair combed into a greasy quiff, Ian persisted with the image, maintaining he was now a fully fledged ‘Ted’, a claim made plausible by his density of beard. Even at fourteen, Ian was able to cultivate a convincing pair of ‘sideboards’, and belittled those of a fairer complexion. When he encountered Warwick Prior and a friend in the gym changing rooms, Ian exclaimed, ‘Ah! Pat Coates and Rocky Prior! I could hear your highfaluting conversation from around the corner. It’s a shame your voices haven’t broken! No pubic hair yet?’

  Despite his often tiresome behaviour, Ian did exert a certain influence over his contemporaries. He told them about the little tailor’s shop in High Wycombe where they could get their trousers tapered; the cinema at the back of town that showed the sleazy movies and the precise location of the dirty bookshop. ‘Here was clearly a chap who recognized style,’ says Prior. ‘He once returned to school in what he called a “denim rock suit”. It was a pair of jeans and a short jeans jacket, which were very rare in those days. He’d slip it on occasionally, if he got the opportunity. I grew my hair quite long, significantly under his influence. I learnt about it all from Dury.’

  When Prior introduced Ian to an Aylesbury friend by the name of Tim Francis, who had an old drum kit he wanted to offload, Ian scraped up the money and set about practising the rhythms of his beloved rock ’n’ roll records. With Ed Speight and John Owen Smith on guitars and Ian on drums – one of which, he told the others, was ‘made from human skin’ – the school skiffle group of the previous year evolved into the Black Cat Combo. Brimming with pride, Ian had momentarily become bigger than the polio that had dogged his childhood, but his accomplishment would be supplanted by a new strain of torture – the relentless punishment meted out by the school prefects.

  The dormitory after dark provided Ian with a captive audience for his saucy tales and inspired narrations. These were usually stories from a book called Ghostly Tales to Be Told, which contained the scary story of ‘The Wendigo’, a favourite of Ian’s. He had now found his forte as a narrator and raconteur, ‘brilliant, without parallel in School House,’ says Warwick Prior. But when the prefects burst in and disturbed Ian’s midnight court, he was in trouble. Summoned to a prefects’ meeting, Ian was made to stand on the stairs while they deliberated. ‘The main reason for it all was so they could beat the shit out of him,’ adds Prior. ‘It wasn’t uncommon for a strapping rugby player to run across the room with a leaded slipper to beat you on the arse six times. Life is different today but back then you could be liberally slippered without any kind of regulation. Dury did garner some kind of sympathy for his situation, but he got beaten with the rest of us, even though he had a calliper up to his bum, which they had to avoid.’

  To be ritually beaten by boys not much older than himself was an affront to Ian’s dignity. To be asked to ‘bend over’ at the age of sixteen was incredibly humiliating and it had an enormous emotional impact on him. Possibly the prefects had been waiting for years to exact their revenge, and it was not until Ian was out of short trousers – and his calliper was no longer on display to serve as a reminder of his disability – that they felt they could let fly with the slipper. But the more Ian was bullied and abused by the prefects, the more he became unperturbed by physical violence. Compared with the trauma of polio and those early years at Chailey, being beaten was relatively tolerable. When his tormentors realized this, they turned to psychological torture. Ian cracked. ‘The prefects decided that hitting me didn’t hurt me,’ recalled Ian, ‘although I found it mentally pretty mind-fucking. I had a strange time with them. 800 boys, I was the only disabled one. Every Wednesday night they had a thing called the prefects’ meeting, which is seventeen-year-olds sitting round in their study. They’d give you a trial and sentence you to the slipper, the size-eleven gym shoe. You’d bend over an armchair, and they’d whack the fuck out of you. Well, it hurt like fuck, but nothing hurts that much that you’d give up the ghost for it, or cry. Pain of that kind wasn’t particularly frightening to me, although it was still frightening. That went on and then they went to the headmaster and they said, “Look, he doesn’t feel pain, he’s got polio. We can’t beat it out of him, so can we mind-fuck him instead please?”’

  According to Ian, the prefects now punished him with impositions, such as being forced to learn and recite long pieces of poetry. Any slip on Ian’s part would result in the punishment being extended, and he would have to start reciting the poem all over again. ‘Basically what they said was, “Can we give him essays and learning tasks rather than hitting him all the time? Like sentencing him to a week of sitting in the box room learning poetry, and if he gets it wrong, he adds that on to the end of his sentence.” So they sentenced me to seven days of learning the poem . . . “Seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend to the maturing sun . . .” The other one was: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . .” They’re the only two fucking poems I know! I got it wrong after fourteen lines, and they added it on to the end of the sentence. This went on for days. I was thinking I had a life stretch ahead of me. They’d got me. I felt fucking bad.’

  One night, after a particularly distressing detention, sitting amongst the suitcases and packing trunks in the box room, a tearful Ian encountered Alan ‘Taffy’ Davis, housemaster of Uplyme. ‘I went over to the main school,’ recalled Ian. ‘I had a key to get in . . . and I was walking down the corridor while everyone was sleeping, crying my eyes out. The bastards had got me. They’d fried my head. I thought it was going to be going on and on and on, and these cunts were sitting there going: “Go on, what’s the next bit?” With the headmaster’s sanction . . . a teacher found me. Nice chap, family man, totally unperverted, always wore a red tweedy jacket, he didn’t always wear his gown, bit of an item. He came out of a room and saw me crying. He said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “They’ve got me.” He put his arm round me and hugged me. Then he put a stop to it.’ Ed Speight believes that the prefects’ message to Ian was: ‘Don’t open your big mouth so much.’ Taffy Davis was reckoned to be ‘quite a nice bloke’, and shortly afterwards the word went round: ‘Lay off.’

  The prefects’ punishments had become too much for Ian, and at the age of fifteen he ran away from school. Peggy and her sister Molly were astonished when he arrived on the doorstep one afternoon, having made the rail and bus journey from High Wycombe to Upminster unaided. After welcoming him home, they told him he should phone the headmaster to explain his whereabouts. Molly Walker offered to drive Ian back to school the following Monday. ‘The head didn’t dare to say anything to me,’ says Molly. ‘I wasn’t exactly formidable but I happened to work in the local education office, and he didn’t quite know what position I held.’

  Ian’s relationship with the headmaster was further soured by an incident that occurred in the dining hall one Friday. Fish, which Ian hated, was being served, and the headmaster’s wife, who assisted with lunch, handed Ian his plate of food. When he pushed it away, Mrs Tucker chose to imagine that he had thrown the fish at her and immediately called for her husband. Edmund Tucker had already had more of Ian than he could stand. Fuming, he entered the dining hall, roaring ‘Doer-reee!’ As Ian looked up, Tucker hit him hard, sending him flying across the room. Fellow pupils looked on in disbelief as the school’s high-profile cripple lay writhing on the floor. When Peggy and Molly heard about the incident, they resolved to make an official complaint against Tucker, but Ian asked that the matter be dropped. ‘I want him to live with it,’ was Ian’s rationale.

  Coming on top of the harsh treatment he had received from the prefects, the fish episode crowned the unhappiest period of Ian’s life, but it gave him something to hate and strengthened hi
s resolve for the difficult times that lay ahead. ‘I hate those bastards, those guys,’ said Ian. ‘I can still remember some of their names. I was fifteen, it was horrendous, it really did my head in. They were seventeen-year-old proto-fascists, guardians of Thatcherism, before it began. But I beat ’em. I saw them as the enemy. I knew they were wrong. I was seen as the figure-head of some imaginary gang.’ In his mind, though, Ian was the leader of a juvenile gang. It was the image he promoted, and any sympathy he might have merited due to his disability was wiped out by his obstreperous behaviour. Although his knowledge of rock ’n’ roll did earn him a smidgen of credibility, nobody believed his wild tales of running with the Upminster crew. He was generally regarded as pathetic, but the more others dismissed him, the more resourceful he became.

  Ian’s final, harrowing year at the Royal Grammar School was relieved by isolated moments of pleasure, particularly when Bill Dury created a stir by showing up in the Rolls-Royce. Ian was so proud of his dad. In 1958, at the time of one of his visits to the school, he was looking after the car driven by Danny Kaye in the movie Me and the Colonel. This enabled Ian to obtain Kaye’s autograph, which he proudly displayed in his wallet. Bill’s involvement with film industry work would culminate in a driving role in the 1964 movie The Yellow Rolls-Royce, but for now the Kaye association was enough to fuel Ian’s dreams.

  Ian kept a mental note of the famous lives that had fleetingly or indirectly touched his family. George Bernard Shaw . . . Noël Coward . . . Danny Kaye . . . the list grew. Of course, Ian never met any of these legends, but he imagined they had somehow played a part in his own destiny. Any tenuous association with celebrity would be exploited whenever the opportunity arose. He never forgot the time he saw Richard Burton in Othello from the front row of the Old Vic at the age of fifteen. Many would get to hear of it. It was as if Burton had entered Ian’s life.