Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  With recording and photography complete, Jake Riviera asked Ian to come up with a shortlist of ten possible titles for the album. Ian had been playing around with various ideas, including 4,000 Weeks’ Holiday (which he would use for a later album), His Hundred Best Tunes, No Hand Signals, Live at Lourdes and The Mad Spastic. ‘I said to Jake, “Stop me when you hear the one you like,”’ recalled Ian. ‘It takes more than one brain to work these things out.’ Riviera gave the thumbs-up when he heard Ian utter the immortal phrase ‘New Boots and Panties’. It was vaguely erotic and neatly complemented Chris Gabrin’s cover shot of Ian and Baxter outside a shop that offered that winning combination of footwear and knickers. It also echoed Ian’s earlier remark that he only ever bought his clothes from second-hand shops, with the exception of his underwear and Dr Marten boots, which, ‘for reasons of hygiene, had to be pristine!’

  Barney Bubbles, Stiff’s in-house graphics genius, designed the packaging. ‘I think Barney had more of a dialogue with Ian,’ says Gabrin. ‘That brush stroke lettering came about after their discussions. They’d both been art students and they could communicate on those levels.’ Ian was in awe of Barney’s creative ability: ‘Speaking as someone who’s spent half his life at art colleges, Barney was easily the most incredible designer I’d ever come across, speaking as a sophisticated or as an unsophisticated observer of these things. His vision was fantastic. It really did impress me. He scared the shit out of me. He was righteous.’

  Released at the end of September 1977 to great critical acclaim, New Boots and Panties!! was a songwriting master class, from the smooth, measured funk of ‘Wake Up and Make Love with Me’ to the frenzied, venomous rock ’n’ roll of ‘Blackmail Man’. Ian had spent many hours honing the words and finding the right ‘voice’ for ‘Wake Up’, a song that would open his concerts for years to come. On the demo he had tried for a soulful and sexy performance with an American accent until former co-manager Gordon Nelki asked, ‘What’s with the Barry White impersonation, Ian?’ Ian reconsidered his approach. ‘That’s when I started singing with an English accent,’ he said. ‘I stripped it down and tried to be funny.’

  Ian poured it all out in ‘My Old Man’, the song that made Elvis Costello’s jaw drop when he heard an advance tape in Blackhill’s listening room. It was a ghostly pen portrait of his late father, of whom he saw little in the latter years. Care had been taken to write the words in a way that would not upset Peggy, but the finished song was tinged with regret. It failed to mask a decade’s worth of guilt, but succinctly captured the drudgery of a chauffeur’s lot as he ‘did the crossword in the Standard, at the airport in the rain’.

  The post-modern music hall of ‘Billericay Dickie’ neatly anticipated the emergence of ‘Essex Man’, a social phenomenon of the 1980s that Ian unwittingly helped to shape. The song’s character, loosely based on art school chum Terry Day, whose pulling power Ian envied, boasted of a string of sexual conquests twixt the Isle of Thanet and Shoeburyness, where he met a ‘lovely old toe rag, obliging and noblesse’. But Dickie was proud; he wanted you to know he ‘ain’t a flaming thicky’, who ever ‘shaped up tricky!’

  ‘Clevor Trever’, by contrast, was a less confident, stammering fellow, who ‘ain’t never had no nothing worth having never ever never, ever . . .’ The song was originally written for Wreckless Eric, whom Ian confessed was the inspiration for ‘Trever’ and ‘would be able to express what it was about’, but he later decided to keep it for himself, because performing it was enjoyable, ‘a bit like playing the bongos’.

  ‘Plaistow Patricia’ was a song Ian had been working on since 1973. Today it would guarantee New Boots a ‘Parental Advisory Explicit Content’ sticker, not only for its coarse opening line, but also its drug-related theme. From here, the record got even darker. ‘Blackmail Man’, with its litany of rhyming slang, some of which appears to have been created by Ian especially for the song, took a dig at racism and prejudice, with its roll call of minority groups and social outcasts, including a ‘paraffin lamp’ (tramp); a ‘buckle my shoe’ (Jew) and, taking a pop at himself, a ‘raspberry ripple’ (cripple).

  ‘Blockheads’ was Ian’s brutal observation of the cricket fans he glimpsed from his window at Oval Mansions, whose ‘shapeless haircuts’ failed to enhance their ‘ghastly patterned shirts’. He later recalled them pouring out of the Cricketers pub, ‘with freckled shoulders and ginger hair, wallowing in lager.’ ‘They’ve got womanly breasts under pale mauve vests,’ Ian observed, and ‘shoes like dead pigs’ noses’.

  New Boots and Panties!! remains Ian’s strongest collection of songs, owing much of its success to extensive preparation and an artistic hunger born out of rejection, failure and a desperate desire to prove himself. All of the songs were first demoed by Ian and Chaz, and then redemoed with engineer Philip Bagenel in a Bermondsey basement with Charley and Norman adding their considerable funk. When it came to cutting time, the pre-production paid huge dividends. Ian always maintained that a surfeit of material was crucial in order to enjoy choice and leeway. For New Boots, only the best songs were selected.

  For the Stiff tour, Ian and Chaz needed to expand the nucleus of musicians that had recorded New Boots. Ian was disinclined to retain Geoff Castle and Ed Speight, neither of whom he felt were suitable for prolonged road work. When he made this known, Norman and Charley were quick to recommend their former Loving Awareness colleagues, keyboardist Mickey Gallagher and guitarist Johnny Turnbull, two cheery Geordies each with over a decade on the clock as stalwart players in bands that had been tipped for success but never made it beyond the second division. Saxophonist Davey Payne would complete this dream team, his inclusion helping to maintain the Kilburns connection. All they needed was a name. ‘Charley Charles had a T-shirt,’ recalled Ian, ‘purple with “Lois” on it and the trousers with the patches that weren’t really patches, sewn-in squares, DPNs – shoes with a big cluster of dead pigs’ noses. He read the lyric to “Blockheads”, checking out where he was gonna come in, and he said, “Ian – he’s dressed just like me!” I said, “You must be a Blockhead, then, Charley!” Norman had the green crushed velvet. We didn’t know what to call the band until Norman said, “I know . . . we’re Blockheads, aren’t we?” I said, “Of course we are.”’

  Many ‘blockheads’, Ian observed, ‘sported the mullet, the Mel Gibson look, the worst haircut you’ve ever seen in your life’. Ian would one day sport a mullet of his own, an unavoidable consequence of his constantly evolving coiffure that changed with the seasons, never dwelling on one look for long. If Ian celebrated spring with a ‘number one’ (severe skinhead cut), he would greet winter with a full head of curls. There would occasionally be visits to fashionable salons such as Smile in Chelsea’s Kings Road, but often Ian would hold do-it-yourself hairdressing sessions at home, creatively snipping the locks of various band members.

  Oozing style, Ian consolidated his image by scouring thrift shops for outfits to match his many moods. Styles varied wildly, from the Edwardian smoking jacket with satin reveres to a labourer’s donkey jacket with imitation leather yoke. Kohl black mascara was applied for special occasions. It was the sartorial style he had been honing for five years. It was now time to take it to the nation.

  12

  Oi Oi!

  ‘The great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life.’

  G. B. Shaw, You Never Can Tell, Act 2

  High Wycombe, October 1977. It was the opening night of the ‘Stiff’s Greatest Stiffs’ tour, featuring quick-fire sets from Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Larry Wallis and Ian Dury, on what was intended to be a revolving bill as the tour progressed. Every act, claimed Stiff, was a potential headliner. Ian was firing up the audience at the Town Hall with his tales from the modern music hall. ‘I’m from Essex in case you couldn’t tell . . . my given name is Dickie, I come from Billericay and I’m doing . . . very well!’ The fans winked and nudged as he regaled them with his tales of a ‘love affair with
Nina’, in the back of his Cortina. They gazed in awe at this East End geezer who had sprung from nowhere to sing about sex and drugs and rock and roll and they scrambled on the floor in an attempt to collect the song’s button badges that publicist B. P. Fallon threw from the stage ‘like heavy confetti’.

  Actually, Ian had two audiences that night – the paying customers out front and his own band on stage. It was the first time that the Blockheads, other then Davey and Chaz, had witnessed him working a crowd. ‘I wasn’t ready for his performance,’ says Mickey Gallagher. ‘It was phenomenal. He couldn’t really sing, but he had the chocolate tones and the great verbal. He put a lot of work into his performance with the coat over the Hawaiian shirt and the striped vest underneath that. We’d never experienced that kind of theatricality before. In an early interview I said, “Ian’s the perfect front man,” thinking I was praising him, but he gave me shit. “How dare you call me a front man!” He was really offended by it.’

  The High Wycombe crowd wasn’t to know that their town was such a resonant setting for Ian; eighteen years earlier he had concluded his secondary education at the nearby Royal Grammar School, where he was repeatedly beaten by prefects and was once knocked out by his headmaster. Now he was back, co-headlining a national rock tour with Stiff’s other not-so-young hopefuls. Elvis Costello, yet to break through on the pop charts, adopted a confrontational stance from the get-go, alienating the audience by refusing to perform his better-known songs. Ian, in contrast, formed an immediate bond with the crowd. A useful sprinkling of original Kilburns fans ‘down the front’ acted as his trusted rabble-rousers. ‘Oi Oi!’9 he rasped, reaching for the microphone. ‘OI OI!’ the Buckinghamshire crowd responded. Two simple syllables, one united room. ‘Dury just slayed ’em,’ recalls Kosmo Vinyl. ‘Wallop! He couldn’t put a foot wrong. It was obvious on the first night that Ian was a force to be reckoned with.’

  Behind the scenes, Ian came up against several strong personalities, notably the powerful alliance of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and their manager, Jake Riviera. All three were verbally adept, but Riviera was a motor-mouth of staggering oral agility. Not only would he yell fearlessly at security men twice his size, he would also incorporate a slick joke for the benefit of onlookers. One night, while haranguing a bearded and blundering student’s union secretary, Riviera let fly with the cruel jibe: ‘Just because you’ve got hair all over your face, it doesn’t give you the right to speak to me like a cunt!’

  At once, Ian recognized that he was not the only wheel on the bus, although New Boots had started to pick up sales. Reluctant to be drawn into backstage rows, he adopted a low profile and conserved his energies for the nightly performance. Carefully avoiding the Costello/Riviera axis, he would spend time with Denise Roudette or, if their relationship was going through a rocky patch, the Blockheads. With their confidence growing, Ian and his band took advantage of any downtime to analyse the previous evening’s set and make small improvements, thus honing their show night by night. At the start of each performance Ian would urge the Blockheads to hit the stage running. ‘Don’t walk – run!’ he would shout from the wing before making his own slow and purposeful entrance. ‘He had the band decked out in football shirts,’ recalls Eric Goulden. ‘I always wanted to get him a referee’s whistle. I thought he’d like that.’

  The Stiff tour would stretch Ian’s manipulative powers to the full. His objective was to emerge as the star, ahead of Costello, which he sought to achieve by contriving to close as many of the shows as possible. This was only possible because Ian was able to exploit a weakness in Stiff’s ‘revolving bill’ concept. Although it was the label’s intention for its ‘stars’ to alternate as headliners, Nick Lowe and Wreckless Eric were reluctant bill-toppers, leaving Costello and Dury to slog it out. Through a succession of shrewd manoeuvres, such as demanding a break after playing the drums in Wreckless Eric’s band – thus pushing his own set later into the running order – Ian would win on points.

  A key incident occurred two weeks into the tour, at the University of East Anglia. ‘Elvis was perturbed,’ recalls Ian’s minder, Fred Rowe. ‘Ian was going down better than him, and Dave Robinson wanted Ian to close the shows. Jake Riviera, who was Elvis’s manager, started on Ian, threatening him with the verbal, but you can’t do that with Ian, he will slaughter you. Jake’s good . . . but Ian! This was winding Jake up even more. I said, “Hold on Jake, leave it out, what you getting all excited about?” Jake says to Ian, “I see, you’re all right ranting when you’ve got your monkey with you,” referring to me. I was getting wound up, so I backed off before it got nasty.’

  Ian later gave me his side of the story. ‘It got really sticky. Jake was screaming at hall porters, bullying people and being obnoxious. I said, “Jake, come outside for a minute, I want a word with you.”And Fred said, “Yeah, come on, Jake.” And Jake started yelling and protesting vehemently. Costello got up and said, “Look out, Jake’s in trouble.” Kosmo said, “Sit down, Elvis! There’s nothing you can do about it if he is!” We went outside, and Jake said, “I know, Ian, you’re gonna fuck my mind with the verbals, then Spider’s gonna beat me up.” I said, “No, Jake, all we were gonna say was that we want to keep it all smashing.”’

  Rowe and Riviera never came to blows, but their showdown was a turning point for Ian, establishing him as a powerful force on the tour and emboldening him for future outings. He could now get away with murder because Fred Rowe would always be there to protect him. ‘He knew he could go a bit further than he normally went,’ says Fred. ‘Ian was a pacifist, but he wanted to be a tough guy, a gangster. He told me, “If I hadn’t have been the way I am, I would have become a hard nut.” I said, “Yes, I suppose you would, Ian.”’

  As the Stiff trek continued, Ian inched his way towards headline status. When ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ was adopted as the tour’s anthem and nightly closing routine, his aims were achieved. Although Costello put up a fight with incendiary performances of new songs such as ‘Watching the Detectives’ and ‘Lipstick Vogue’, it was Ian who emerged as the people’s hero. ‘He was very competitive,’ confirms co-manager Andrew King. ‘He went to endless lengths to ensure that he did better than Elvis and calculated that, if Elvis agreed to alternate the headline, it would be Ian’s turn when the tour hit London! He had it in the bag.’

  The Stiff tour ended at Lancaster University on 5 November 1977, the day on which Stiff released Ian’s next 45, ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’, an up-tempo lament for his late rock ’n’ roll hero. Stiff had every reason to expect a strong chart placing, but sales were sluggish, despite a growing fan base and the song’s pure abstract poetry:

  Black gloves, white frost, black crêpe, white lead,

  White sheet, black knight, jet black, dead white . . . Sweet Gene Vincent!

  The single bombed, but Ian’s career had achieved lift-off, with New Boots and Panties!! nestled comfortably in the Top 10, destined to remain there for months to come. Exhausted by the six-week Stiff slog, Ian and Denise were in need of a break. Nothing less than a three-week sojourn in Barbados would suffice. ‘It was my first visit to the West Indies and it was amazing,’ recalls Denise, but she was beginning to sense that after four years her time with Ian was ticking away. ‘It felt like the end of an era. It was hard to take because our emotions were involved, but the work was done, and it was clear in my mind that Ian had to do what he had to do. He simply told me: “Denise, you’ve got to do it on your own.” This was hard to take, but at the same time there was no arguing. I knew that’s how Ian was with people.’

  Returning from Barbados, Ian threw himself into a quick UK tour to capitalize on recent progress, largely at the behest of Kosmo Vinyl. ‘Ian was hot,’ says Kosmo, ‘and people wanted to see him, although his managers took some convincing. We were all in a twelve-seater van, with Fred driving, when he wasn’t punching people out.’ Davey Payne, now an official Blockhead, was at first reluctant to join the tour, but was ‘kidnapped’ by Fred Rowe and
driven to Leeds. The ‘Dirty Dozen’ tour returned Ian to some of the towns he had conquered on the Stiff outing. The venues were packed, and it was no surprise to see entire audiences singing along to the words from New Boots.

  In the early hours of 17 December, following a show at Bath Pavilion, Charley Charles’ car was stopped by police in Pulteney Street. Ian was in the passenger seat. Upon attempting to breathalyse Charley, police constable Graham McQuillan was allegedly kicked in the leg by Ian. Ian’s solicitor claimed that, due to Ian’s disability, it would not have been possible for him to kick the officer, but Ian was found guilty and fined £50 at Bath Magistrates Court for ‘obstructing the police’. ‘PC: Punk rock star kicked me,’ screamed the headline. ‘My earrings might have frightened the policeman,’ explained Ian.

  When the Dirty Dozen tour climaxed at London’s Roundhouse on 18 December, hundreds without tickets were turned away. Writing in the NME, Monty Smith described Ian as ‘a ragged-arse Robert Newton, festooned with gaudy garters and handkerchiefs and a pair of crotchless unmentionables worn over his trousers . . . his Chaplinesque gesture at the end of the opening number marks him as a man intimate with the intricacies of stage acting and immediately endears him to the audience . . . rock ’n’ roll needs Ian Dury.’

  Heavy touring in the UK had brought Ian to a new record-buying audience and established a dependable fan base, but it nearly bankrupted Stiff. With the departure of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe from the label, Dave Robinson needed to recoup fast and decided to blow his entire marketing budget on a full-out Dury campaign. The odds were favourable; sales of New Boots showed no sign of abating as it became the perfect lewd dinner-party album of the pre-Derek and Clive era.10 It certainly caused embarrassment at family gatherings, where much loud coughing would herald the entry of ‘Plaistow Patricia’. In sitting rooms across the land, parents fumbled with the volume control to mute Ian at his most toxic: ‘Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks, / Aerosol . . . the bricks!’