by Will Birch
6
The Death of Gene Vincent
Marylebone Station, London, 1970. As Ed Speight approached the ticket hall, he spotted the little chap leaning into the window, shouting: ‘I wanna get to Aylesbury!’ Speight immediately recognized him as the fellow pupil he’d befriended at the Royal Grammar School but hadn’t seen for more than a decade. Speight, now living in Aylesbury and working in London, greeted Ian, and they reminisced about the Black Cat Combo before swapping addresses. It was a chance meeting that brought Ian one step closer to his rock ’n’ roll dream, Ed little suspecting that he would be called upon to bail Ian out at every dodgy musical juncture in the years that lay ahead.
Ian was on his way to Buckinghamshire to view an unusual property that was to let. It was Aunt Molly who had found the vast, sprawling vicarage in the village of Wingrave and suggested it might make a good home for the young Dury family. Its previous incumbent, an alcoholic parson, had left hundreds of empty sherry bottles that Ian discovered when he dug over the garden. ‘I was very broke ’cos I wasn’t teaching that much then,’ said Ian. ‘You can live extremely cheaply if you want to. A vicarage for a fiver a week! Two acres of ground and eight bloody big rooms – the condition was I had to decorate it, which took six months.’
Fired up by his enthusiasm for music, Ian would often make the arduous journey from Wingrave to Eastern Avenue, Dagenham, where Russell Hardy was lodging with Alan Ritchie, who had been part of the Elgin Avenue set back in 1966. They were all mad about jazz and rock ’n’ roll and would spend hours spinning and discussing the latest records. One evening Ian told Alan and Russell about his recent reunion with Ed Speight and suggested they had the makings of a group. ‘Ted’s a good guitarist,’ proclaimed Ian, ‘he can sight-read.’ Russell was immediately despatched to Chappell Music in Bond Street to get some sheet music and returned with ‘The Cat Came Back’, which he picked out on his Kembal Minx,4 while Ian added a few of his 1950s favourites, including ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’.
‘The three of us used to rehearse with a Baldwin Burns amp and a Reslo microphone,’ recalled Ian. ‘We had loads of songs to give us confidence. We had a repertoire.’ Ed Speight remembers, ‘I would always wind Ian up at those sessions. I would shout, “Union break! Time for a pint!” Ian was very anti-drink at that point. He’d go through these phases. He could be quite moral, almost holier than thou. He had this work ethic and maintained that you shouldn’t go to the pub when you’re at work, but actually he didn’t fancy the walk.’
Before long, Russell was invited to stay at Wingrave, and it was there that Ian’s earliest attempts at songwriting occurred. ‘I knocked out a couple of tunes with Russell,’ said Ian, ‘with my words – not lyrics – words, and Speight said, “You’re quite good at that.” It’s a facility I’d always had, to knock out something that rhymed, but Speight gave me the encouragement. He said, “You should do more of that; a couple of people have read these and they think they’re very funny.”’
While Ian was sporadically teaching at Luton, his erstwhile companion Geoff Rigden had secured a part-time post at Canterbury College of Art. The college’s head of painting, Thomas Watt, had asked Rigden to help him find new teaching talent. ‘I suggested Ian,’ says Geoff. ‘You want your mates in, don’t you?’ Mr Watt made the journey to Wingrave to meet Ian and was immediately impressed with the portraits adorning the walls, most of which were Betty’s paintings. ‘Ian got the job at the rate of £30 a day plus travelling expenses,’ continues Geoff. ‘We took it terribly seriously. We got up early and did the job.’
In September 1970, Ian commenced teaching at Canterbury, initially working two days a week and staying in Kent overnight with either Geoff Rigden or another fellow teacher, John Williams. Thomas Watt had told the students that the college was getting a new tutor from London, who was ‘a bit rum-looking, crippled with polio but forthright . . . spoke his mind, a bit of a cockney.’ But ‘one shouldn’t worry because he’d been to the Royal College of Art’ and was therefore OK. ‘We’d been forewarned,’ says student Keith Lucas, ‘but when Ian came in we got on with him straight away.’
On the first day in his new role, Ian greeted his students wearing a multi-coloured Fair Isle cardigan that had been made for him by a Mrs Kelly, the mother of one of his Luton pupils. He also wore an earring – bold for the time – and his hair was combed into a Teddy Boy quiff, with long ringlets hanging over his collar. It was an image that made an immediate impression on first-year student Humphrey Anthony Erdeswick Butler-Bowdon (or ‘Humphrey Ocean’, as he would later become). ‘Ian came limping in, his fantastic cardigan like a coat of many colours,’ recalls Humphrey. ‘His body became part of the room, and the dynamics changed. He made me see that painting the things I liked was the most modern activity that I could possibly be involved with. We got on very well and socialized beyond the art class, talking about Gene Vincent. He was this intriguing kind of cockney, who was not only very bright but veered giddily between middle class and working class.’
At Canterbury, Ian sought to emulate Peter Blake’s teaching methods by aligning himself with the students, as opposed to his staff colleagues. He was determined to get the most out of his pupils, not wishing to be mistaken for a figure of authority. He started by extending the standard one-day life class to four days, hammering home his Protestant work ethic and begging the students not to cop out. The lessons were extreme, as Humphrey recalls: ‘It was like an outward-bound course. There were twelve of us in Ian’s life class, but only seven survived the four days. All of us were in tears at some point. Ian got us together and said, “Look! You’re not looking! You’re just being art students, you’re just producing drawings! You’re making that bit up between her crutch and her big toe. The proportion isn’t right, it’s full of lies!” Ian was right, it was full of lies.’
Ian’s teaching style was impassioned, but it paled beside the intensity of his social behaviour. His spare time in Canterbury was spent hanging out with students of both sexes, and he often pestered the girls with light-hearted sexual innuendo, but none would succumb. Ian found it hard to take ‘no’ for an answer and on one occasion, when shunned by a female student, simply unzipped his jeans, pulled out his penis and pleaded, ‘Look, there’s nothing wrong with it!’ Germaine Dolan, then a student in Ian’s class, recalls, ‘He was always trying to get us girls involved in stuff, and I frequently found myself backing off. He would send me letters, always written in pencil, with lots of rubbing out. The first line of one letter talked about “opening a nice little space and finding out a whale wants to come in”. He was quite a heavy guy.’
Ian had fantasized about becoming an entertainer ever since his childhood friend Barry Anderson had recounted his experience of performing a song at Saturday-morning pictures. ‘I did always want to be a pop st. . . in a band!’ said Ian, quickly correcting himself. He had already made several attempts to join ‘a band’; at the Royal Grammar School he had been the unwelcome washboard player in the skiffle group and later, drummer in the Black Cat Combo; at Walthamstow he was the failed singer turned bongo player in assorted amateur groups. Earlier in the year, he’d practised a few novelty songs with his mates and started to dabble in songwriting with Russell Hardy. It was now time to get serious.
In 1970, the progressive rock era was at its height. In the UK the leading practitioners were the groups Yes and King Crimson, whose technically proficient musicians concocted complex arrangements designed to dazzle their young audiences. In the USA, brass-driven bands such as Blood, Sweat and Tears and Chicago would insert light jazzy interludes into their bluesy songs, giving their players an opportunity to ‘stretch out’. Consequently, younger jazz musicians on both sides of the Atlantic spotted a new commercial opportunity and started rubbing shoulders with rockers and chasing record deals. Ian had little interest in these developments, preferring pure jazz or 1950s rock ’n’ roll, but he did know a number of proficient players who might be persuaded to ‘rock out’.
At the 100 Club in Oxford Street, the ‘musos’ would gather to hear jazz saxophonist George Khan, whom Ian had known since the mid-1960s. Slightly drunk and in awe of Khan’s go-ahead improvisation, Ian mingled with the audience one evening and bumped into multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hart. Ian talked excitedly about his plans to form a new band, telling Hart he was going to ask George Khan to help, knowing that Khan ran a rehearsal room at Jubilee Studios in Covent Garden. Hart related the plan to Khan, who was sceptical about Ian’s talents, but he soon relented. ‘I suppose we’ll have to do it,’ Khan told Hart. The two musicians recognized that Ian was ‘a heavy-duty music fan’ and decided to give it a go.
In November, Ian assembled a rehearsal group at Jubilee. Most of the musicians were pleased to accommodate him, perhaps hoping that a distinctive front man might help to bring their far-out music to a wider audience. It certainly looked good on paper: George Khan was a well-connected jazz face, whilst guitarist Ed Speight and pianist Russell Hardy were excellent musicians who were both aware of Ian’s foibles. Multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hart and drummer Terry Day, who was Ian’s closest friend from college, both came from the People Band, a loose assemblage of ‘free jazz’ musicians whose 1968 album had been produced by Charlie Watts.
They all recognized that Ian had something to offer: drive and ambition, creative talent and an indefinable uniqueness. There was no one else like him on the music scene, and, even though he was a ‘crap singer’, it was impossible to write him off. Russell enjoyed the line-up more than anyone, describing the mix of players as ‘fantastic, mind-blowing’, but he knew that Ian was out of his depth. ‘There were too many cooks and not enough bottle washers,’ he says. The group failed to get beyond a few practice sessions, but the exercise was an invaluable experience for Ian, who now realized that, if he was to succeed in the music world, he needed to develop a personal vocal style and make himself indispensable.
He started by incorporating elements he knew and understood – a broad knowledge of cockney humour and rhyming slang, an appreciation of sartorial excess and wide-boy imagery in general. Building on his Teddy Boy alter ego, he fashioned a unique and compelling character that audiences would find hard to ignore. Most importantly, he discovered a latent talent – the ability to write words for songs. ‘Ian was making up words all the time,’ says Humphrey Ocean. ‘He was very good at arguing, and it became increasingly apparent to him that words were his strong point. His terms of reference kept one constantly on one’s toes. I know that, bitterly, from experience. When everything was going your way, Ian would come in from behind and question you. He had an intellectual ability to move round a subject and look at it from different viewpoints, whereas in his art he’d been trying to paint like Peter Blake or Betty, who was a supremely wonderful painter. He felt he wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t as good as Betty; he could see that, but when he started doing words, it got out of hand.’
One of Ian’s earliest opening lines – ‘I consummated Linda, on a bench in Tufnell Park’ – encapsulated the best of his writing, containing, as it did, a reference to sexual conquest, an everyday object and a bit of local geography. ‘They were nuttyish words, cathartic,’ said Ian. ‘“She’s sweeter than a horsefly on an arm, her tender smile secretes a rancid charm”; “I need you like a bandage needs a cut”. I wrote one called “The Flasher Express”, about a trainload of perverts hurtling down the track. “The ticket inspector with a secret smile drops his Y-fronts on the track.”’
His early attempts at songwriting were based on little scenarios or whimsical phrases he found amusing. Often obscure and bordering on the surreal, they revealed a broad range of influences, from the humour of the Goons and Edward Lear, through John Lennon and William Burroughs, via the American beat poets whose London recital Ian had attended in 1965. He had soaked it all up during his college years and now had the facility to roll it out at will. His early efforts offered a foretaste of the dazzling lyrical skills that would one day emerge, but one early song was far too sinister for broad public scrutiny. The disturbing ‘I Made Mary Cry’ described sexual, physical assault in graphic detail. He would later perform it brandishing a knife to act out the terror.
I made Mary cry in a lonely bus shelter
By putting my flick-knife in the back of her leg,
Severed a hamstring in the lonely bus shelter,
I paid no attention but I made Mary beg . . .
Sleep for tonight in a white dormitory,
I’ll dream my dreams in a cold iron bed,
Fourteen more days in a white dormitory,
I’ll catch up with Mary, I’ll chop off her head
As well as developing his songwriting, Ian began dabbling in photography, under the alias ‘Duncan Poundcake’. He tried out his photographic skills on a much-needed holiday with his family in Devon. Russell Hardy drove them down to Higher Brockham, where they stayed with Peggy. ‘Aunt Molly and Aunt Elisabeth were there and they waited on us hand and foot,’ recalls Russell, ‘but Ian was so off and rude to his mum.’ Ian had often shown off by being abrupt with Peggy or his aunts when his mates were around. Back in Upminster in the 1960s, it could have been put down to teenage tantrums, but Ian was now twenty-eight. Possibly embarrassed by the Walker sister’s genteel ways, he felt obliged to rebel, as if to demonstrate that his background wasn’t all about nice china and Oxbridge accents; people needed to know there was also a tough side that came from his dad’s branch of the family tree.
But Ian wasn’t so mouthy when he was out of his comfort zone. During the stay in Devon he had wanted to take some photographs near the sea. Russell got the map out, and they set off in the car, eventually driving through an open gate and along a track that led to the cliff edge, where Ian spent two hours taking his photos. When they got back to the gate it was shut and locked with heavy chains. Russell offered to drive through it, but Ian wasn’t keen on the idea. ‘I don’t mind,’ said Russell, ‘I’ll just crash through it, it’ll be quite easy.’ Suddenly three burly farmers appeared in the distance. ‘We walked over to them for help,’ recalls Russell, ‘but they wanted us to buy our way out. It took them half an hour to unlock the gate. Ian was quite frightened.’
When college broke up in the summer of 1971, Ian was able to spend more time at Wingrave, where he had been exercising his DIY skills. In anticipation of bringing musicians there for practice sessions, he soundproofed what was to become the rehearsal room by nailing egg boxes to the walls and installed a secondary door to keep the noise in. On the weekends he would invite his musical chums up for a jam session, or to simply hang out. They were usually ferried around by art student Colin Thomas, whom Ian dubbed ‘Larry Lilacs’, owner of a gleaming Rover 90. ‘He was like Ian’s chauffeur,’ says Paul Tonkin, a friend and student at Canterbury. ‘Ian had an amazing gift for recruiting people to help him.’
Jemima’s earliest childhood memory is of ‘bearded men walking round the garden all the time’. It was, according to Humphrey, an idyllic period. ‘We were living a sort of flat-cap, Brideshead life. We’d do some painting then go out for a drink with Russell in the baby Austin. It wasn’t going to last for long, it had to move on, but it was very much to do with painting and I got on well with Betty. It moved in a natural way, and Ian pulled me over towards rock ’n’ roll. When I came up, it wasn’t like there was suddenly a load of long-haired rockers around, it was more like a family, and the shift was gradual. It evolved. People came in and went out.’
Humphrey acknowledges Russell’s unique mix of musical reference points that Ian would enjoy. ‘When Russell started playing he made it sound like Erik Satie, it was a beautiful thing, utterly different. . . he’s like Snooks Eaglin, who was blind and learnt music from the radio . . . he would listen to the Mike Sammes Singers – “Sing Something Simple” – and start playing around it. Nothing was beyond his ken. Russell hated performing in public, but he looked so good – like some kind of Victorian sailor, or a genie we’d picked up on
our way from the docks.’
Humphrey took some LPs to Wingrave – Taj Mahal’s A Giant Step; Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells a Story and James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James. Ian wasn’t at all into James Taylor, but he hummed along to ‘Fire and Rain’ and sang fragments of it as he walked down the lane with Humphrey. ‘Despite himself, he’d just come out with it,’ recalls Humphrey. ‘One moment he slagged it off, but the next moment, with that democratic quality in music, he wasn’t worrying about class. It was either good or bad. He would never admit it, but his heart told him it was good music. He might have found himself singing ‘Fire and Rain’, but Ian would never say he liked James Taylor.’
By 1971, Gene Vincent was no longer the magnificent string-bean that Ian had idolized back in ’56. Since his rock ’n’ roll heyday, Vincent had been made to suffer all sorts of indignities, including one famous occasion when TV producer Jack Good ordered him to exaggerate his disability with the immortal command: ‘Limp, you bugger, limp!’ Vincent had also been a passenger in the motor accident that killed fellow legend Eddie Cochran. Gene was now a damaged, broken man. Living and working in England, he had become alcoholic, overweight and tetchy. Following a brief period signed to John Peel’s Dandelion record label and a disastrous European tour backed by the House Shakers, his career was in ruins. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver, he went home to California and drank so much liquor that his stomach exploded and he collapsed in a pool of blood. Lying in his mother’s arms on 12 October, Vincent reportedly whispered, ‘Mama, you can phone the ambulance now.’ He was dead at thirty-six.