Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  Behind Ian’s stance was the influence of Kosmo Vinyl. ‘Kosmo would tip Ian off on what was hip,’ says Glen Colson, ‘a bit of obscure reggae, then some Max Miller.’ Managers Jenner and King welcomed Vinyl’s youthful input but didn’t necessarily agree with his strategy. ‘It was Kosmo who stopped us putting the singles on the albums,’ says Andrew King, ‘because the Small Faces never did it.’ In Kosmo’s mind, the Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake was the model album, a prime example of how to make a record (although, ironically, Ogdens’ did contain the Small Faces’ then hit single, ‘Lazy Sunday’). ‘We never put our singles on albums,’ said Ian. ‘I had a vision that one day we could put out a singles album. Asking people to buy something twice was not on, in my opinion. In those days me and Kosmo were trying to . .. he had a thing . . . if I got asked to go on the Wogan show, Kosmo would say “Would Johnny Rotten do it? No, so we ain’t doing it.” That was one of our yardsticks.’

  Ian didn’t need any advice when it came to his image, but the rather less sartorially inclined Blockheads definitely benefited from having Vinyl on hand as their informal stylist. ‘On the Stiff tour they were wearing snakeskin boots and cowboy jackets,’ recalls Davey Payne. ‘They were vegetarians, into the Loving Awareness thing, that pseudo cosmic vibe. When they met Ian they changed overnight . . . they started wearing Dr Martens and eating sausages. Norman shrunk about a foot when he stopped wearing the cowboy boots.’ Mickey Gallagher admits, ‘We had long hair and beards at the start. Kosmo took us all out, one a time, and got us togged up, haircuts, the lot. He was invaluable. He created the look of the band.’ Chaz Jankel adds, ‘Kosmo was Ian’s ear on the street. He was a sharp, Clash-loving, soul-loving wide boy – very lippy and hugely entertaining. Ian found him irritating, but fun. He wore loud zoot suits and dyed his hair – like an East End Elvis. He would wind up the press and get Ian noticed.’ Vinyl’s promotional stunts included walking into the offices of Sounds with a chain-saw and threatening to cut the desk in half if they didn’t listen to Do It Yourself. At Record Mirror he’d ripped a Jimi Hendrix poster off the wall, shouting, ‘Never mind about dead people! What about New Boots and Panties!!!’

  Just as Ian refused to put his hit singles on Do It Yourself, he also forbade singles to be sourced from it. ‘We didn’t particularly have a problem with this, although it did affect sales,’ says Stiff’s Dave Robinson. ‘But Ian wanted to be a legendary artiste, and in Ian’s mind, legendary artistes like the Beatles and the Stones usually kept their singles off albums.’ Stiff ‘did what they were told,’ says Andrew King. ‘I came across some of the letters we wrote to Stiff and they are fucking ferocious: “Dear Paul, unless by five o’clock tomorrow afternoon we receive x thousand pounds, we will have no option but to . . .” No one writes a letter like that nowadays.’

  Professionally, Ian was surrounded by the finest team he could wish for: the Blockheads, quite simply one of the world’s greatest musical units, with the considerable funk of Charley and Norman underpinning every groove; Chaz Jankel, back on board and ready to set Ian’s lyrical gems to music; a loyal and hard-working crew, with Ian Horne at the helm balancing front-of-house sound; Stiff Records, now in essence the fearless Dave Robinson, ready to throw money in any direction that would further Ian’s career and general manager Paul Conroy, already a marketing wizard; Andrew King and Peter Jenner of Blackhill, a solid, honest management team; graphics genius Barney Bubbles, packaging Ian’s records as works of art; right-hand-man and bodyguard Fred ‘Spider’ Rowe, who loved and protected Ian like a brother, and media consultant Kosmo Vinyl, whose energy would help propel the Clash to world domination. It was an unbeatable team, but Ian would systematically piss them all off, or as Dave Robinson quips, ‘Ian burnt his bridges whilst we were all standing on them.’

  14

  Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part 1)

  Zurich, Switzerland, 1979. Barry Anderson hadn’t seen his childhood chum for sixteen years. As he drove through town on a warm spring day he turned on his radio and heard the strains of ‘Rhythm Stick’ and the deejay back-announce ‘the latest hit from Ian Dury!’ Barry was stunned. He had no idea that the crippled art student he had last seen at South West Essex College during the height of Beatlemania was now an international hit recording artiste. When he reached his office, where he worked as a marketing consultant, he mentioned that the pop star Ian Dury was ‘an old mate’. Quick to pounce on an opportunity, Barry’s colleagues immediately suggested that Ian should be involved in their next advertising campaign for Swiss Air!

  Barry was asked to make contact with Ian and persuade him to endorse Switzerland’s national airline. It would be a worthwhile exercise. Ian asked Barry to meet him at his hotel in Paris, where he would put him up. Barry took the train from Bern and when he arrived was amazed by the number of photographers present, all waiting for his old pal. Journalists were asking Ian about music, and Barry was surprised when he heard him say, ‘Jazz is my real true love. You can ask me any question about jazz you like and I’ll answer it.’ ‘I thought, “You conceited bastard!”’ says Barry. ‘In the old days it was all Chris Barber and Terry Lightfoot. Later, I asked Ian if he was really up on the jazz business. He said, “I love it.” I went to the concert that evening and was backstage before the show. What surprised me was how seriously Ian was taking the whole thing.’

  The Blockheads liked to have a drink and a smoke, but Barry noticed that Ian was forbidding it, telling his musicians, ‘We’re going on in a minute; we’ve got to concentrate.’ Barry loved the show and remembers, ‘When Ian came out of the theatre, there was a row of girls lined up. He picked out the three prettiest ones by pointing at them and saying, “You, you and you.” He took them to the restaurant, then back to the hotel. I was in an adjoining room, drinking, and they were all next door. Fucking hell! When we were having dinner Ian said, “We’d better have our chat now because we’re all going to be pissed in an hour’s time.” We got talking, and I raised the subject of the Swiss Air promotion, and Ian said, “Barry, I’m not going to endorse any commercial enterprises.” I said, “All you’ve got to do is let them take a picture of you coming down the stairs. It’s all lined up, the money’s there.” Ian said, “No, I’m a socialist.” It was bloody news to me. He never used to be. I saw a total change in him. I couldn’t persuade him, so we got pissed and had a chat about the old days.’

  Ian might have insisted on abstention before show time, but he found other ways to pump up the adrenalin during the long hours of travel between venues. An element of drama often surrounds the touring rock ’n’ roll musician, be he a Rolling Stone, armed to the teeth and carrying Class A drugs across international borders, or one of the Clash, arrested for shooting pigeons with an air pistol. Ian was somewhere in the middle and always made sure there were a few petty criminals on the team to keep everyone ‘on the edge’. He considered it fatal if a colleague slipped into his comfort zone. Tension was the order of the day. He was also something of an agent provocateur who liked to light the blue touch paper then stand well clear when things started to kick off. Although he didn’t condone violence, ‘Knock him out, Fred’ was an oft-heard command. His son Baxter, who was taken on tour at an early age, recalls, ‘Dad was brilliant at creating a dramatic environment that you suddenly found yourself in. He completely and utterly thrived on it. He thought that, by surrounding himself with people like Spider and Strangler, he had found real people who could fill it out. You gotta meet Little Chris, a lively spiv character from Brixton who liked fighting. He was about sixteen and worked as Spider’s junior security assistant.’

  I bumped into ‘Little’ Chris Brown in Hoxton. A former child boxer, he was a film company runner when he happened upon Ian and the Blockheads on the 1977 Stiff tour. Although Brown was asked to join the road crew, he didn’t much care for Ian at first. ‘When Ian asked me if I would work for him, I said, “I don’t wanna work for you, you one-legged cunt, you’re fuckin’ ’orrible.” I thought he was a gen
ius, but I didn’t agree with the way he behaved towards people. He was knocked back by my remark and fell in love with me. If you stood up to him, he would respect you, but if you buckled under the pressure, he would rip you to pieces. It was like a machine gun – his tongue lashings sounded like an Uzi going off.’

  The European tour of May 1979 was a non-stop rock ’n’ roll riot, visiting eight countries in five weeks. ‘The workload was heavy,’ recalls Brown. ‘A different country every day, bed at four, up at seven to get on the coach to the next town . . . sound-check, hotel, bath, back to the gig, show, party . . . if there were drugs on top of that, it would take its toll. They did burn the candle.’

  As the tour crossed various borders, with Ian picking up gold and silver discs for sales of New Boots, Fred Rowe became impressed by Ian’s ability to communicate in the local language. ‘He’d hardly been out of the country until he became a singer but he could speak French, German, Italian . . . I asked a cab driver in Rome if Ian was really speaking Italian. The cabbie said, “He’s very good, not in complete command of the language, but he’s saying the right words in the right order.” I was amazed. He’d only been over there a few days, first time in Italy. Same in Germany, same in France . . . I asked Ian how he did it, and he said, “All you’ve got to do is listen to them and you can pick it up.” He had such an incredible brain.’

  Do It Yourself reached number two on the UK album chart in June 1979 and remained a bestseller for several months, sustained by the success of Ian’s next single, which was written and recorded on tour when an electrical fault at a venue resulted in cancelled shows and unexpected time off in Rome. Chaz Jankel was in his hotel room, bashing out a rhythm on the back of the sofa, when he called Ian and told him he had a great idea for a song. The next day Ian showed Chaz a lyric he’d written called ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful (Part Three)’. ‘I’d never seen it before,’ says Chaz. ‘I started playing a little guitar motif and the song came together.’ With the song finished, Ian summoned the Blockheads to a local recording studio.

  Some of Buddy Holly, the working folly,

  Good Golly Miss Molly and boats,

  Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet,

  Jump back in the alley, add nanny goats

  Praise and admiration for such a wide array of things: buildings, animals, a ballet company and old rock ’n’ roll, saw Ian at his most charitable, but Davey Payne had for some time been extremely critical of the financial disparity between songwriters Ian and Chaz on the one hand and the rest of the Blockheads on the other. ‘I wanna make enough money so I can give up rock ’n’ roll,’ Davey told the NME’s Declan Lynch. ‘It’s horrible. I think it stinks.’ Davey would frequently mention ‘money’ until one day Ian got the message. In order to placate Davey, he would give him a lucrative share of his next record by manipulating the songwriting credits. He instructed Chaz to incorporate a ‘pretty bit’ in the middle of ‘Reasons’, over which Davey could improvise a sax solo and thus earn a share in the song. But as Ian always insisted on a 50 per cent cut, on the basis that he had written all of the words, the remaining half had to be split between Chaz and Davey.

  ‘He wanted to give Davey a squirt – a piece of the action,’ says Chaz, ‘so what had started out with me going to Ian with this idea for a song, ended up as just a 25 per cent share. Ian would never compromise on his 50 per cent for the lyric. I can understand why he wanted to put Davey in the frame, because he’d been with Ian for a long time and wasn’t getting money for writing. The Blockheads’ income came from touring, and maybe that was part of Ian’s reason for wanting to keep the band together and play gigs, because that was how they made their money. But expenses were high. We would hire limos, anything excessive. It was a way of letting off steam.’

  Health service glasses, gigolos and brasses,

  Round or skinny bottoms,

  Taking Mum to Paris, lighting up the chalice,

  Wee Willie Harris

  On 24 June, Ian commenced a six-week UK tour. He was at the height of his fame, yet still found time for his fans. A post-show dressing room party would occur every night, occasionally spilling out into the front row of the stalls, where Ian would hold court as the equipment was being packed away. Spider was always around to ensure that fans formed an orderly queue, but if anyone outstayed their welcome Ian would summon his minder with a coded message. A seemingly innocent remark from Ian such as ‘Spider, do you have a cigarette?’ translated into a request to eject a particularly irksome person.

  ‘We had other code words,’ says Fred. ‘Ian might say the word “Rhinoceros”, which meant “This bloke is asking me questions I don’t want to answer.” So I would say, “Ian we’ve got to leave now, you’ve got another appointment to go to.” It was designed to make Ian look like a reasonable guy and I was the baddie who made sure he kept to his schedule.’ Spider’s usual technique, so as not to offend, was to put his arm around the interloper, start a conversation – which might have been interpreted as an affectionate gesture – then slowly walk him towards the exit, and he would be on the street before he realized what had happened.

  Ian’s meet and greet sessions were not always peaceful affairs. On one occasion, in a dressing room packed with fans, Davey Payne switched all the lights off ‘for a laugh’. When the lights came back on, everyone could see him attempting to grope a female fan. ‘Ian was fucking furious,’ says Jock Scot, ‘because he felt it reflected on him. Ian made a comment, and Davey retaliated.’ Payne was the fiery Blockhead, whose behaviour was sometimes unpredictable. Wreckless Eric, who once roomed with Davey on tour, recalls him placing the ubiquitous glass ashtray within arm’s reach on his bedside table and in the morning, at the sound of the alarm clock, blindly reaching for the receptacle and hurling it at the opposite wall, showering the room with glass shards.

  Payne’s relationship with Ian was equally strange and quite unique within the group. Davey was no stooge; as Ian’s longest-standing sideman he would frequently challenge his authority without fear of intimidation. Consequently, Ian was wary of Davey and knew better than to tangle with him if he wanted to avoid trouble. Ian had once confided in Denise, telling her that Davey was the only person he’d ever been afraid of. ‘Having survived the Kilburns, it surprised me that Davey lived to see another day,’ says Denise. ‘They had a love/hate relationship. They very rarely had altercations, but when they did, it was serious, so they left each other alone. You got the impression they’d made a pact. It wasn’t very cosy.’

  ‘We let Ian throw his moodies,’ says Davey, ‘we were all a bit mumsy with him, apart from me, who would snap every now and then and smack him. I didn’t do it because I couldn’t verbalize with him, I simply couldn’t be bothered to verbalize with him. It was better to give him a smack, but he had his good points. He had a lot of compassion. He was intelligent and he could talk about a lot of things. When we were on tour we used to walk around second-hand shops and discuss paintings. He was one of the nicest people to be with, but he could also be annoying.’

  Fred Rowe, who saw his job as ‘trying to guide Ian through the shark-infested seas of rock ’n’ roll’, also remembers the two sides of his personality: ‘Overall he was quite a nice bloke, complex but all right and then, like a schizophrenic, he’d go off on one. We had these enormous rows where he would say, “I’m a pop star,” and I would say, “No you ain’t, you’re fuck-all, and you should keep your feet on the ground.” He would start shouting and screaming at me like a maniac, then he would go on stage and do the best gig ever. All that energy and rage came out in the performance. Peter Jenner used to say to me, “Fred, you’ve got to upset him more.”’

  As ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful’ entered the singles chart, where it would reach number three, Ian played an astonishing seven-night stand at Hammersmith Odeon. A number of celebrities came to pay their respects, and each night promoter John Curd would knock on Ian’s dressing room door to announce a surprise visitor. ‘Guess who’s outside now?’
asked Curd one night, exasperated by the constant stream of well-wishers. It was none other than the flamboyant Wee Willie Harris, accompanied by his wife, Sheila. Ian insisted a path be cleared for the pioneering British rocker, one of the first to write his own songs. Ian first saw him perform in 1958. ‘I thought he was a brilliant singer,’ said Ian. ‘I had “Rocking at the 2 I’s”. Wee Willie Harrris could imitate Johnnie Ray. At the Ritz Romford they said: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a surprise item on the menu for you tonight . . . Johnnie Ray!” In the wings was Wee Willie . . . “When your sweetheart . . .” We all went, “Johnnie!” Then Wee Willie came on in his drape – brilliant!’

  As Wee Willie Harris sat down and poured himself a light ale, Ian began to croon the words that were etched on his memory. On hearing Ian’s heartfelt rendition of ‘Rocking at the 2 I’s’, the ageing star shed a tear and confessed, ‘I’ve been in the business for thirty-five years and it’s the first time anyone’s sung one of my songs,’ to which Ian replied, ‘You’re in my song, son, for a reason.’

  ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful’ was another of Ian’s song titles that would appear as a newspaper headline on a daily basis. Ian noted: ‘The two songs they use are “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” – it’s part of the language now, and I don’t get any credit for it, which pisses me right off – and “Reasons to Be Cheerful” – they use it as a phrase like “Seasons to Be Cheerful”, which I love. “Part Three” means there’s loads of reasons to be cheerful. I can never remember the words when we do a gig, I have a cheat sheet. It’s like a Peter Blake painting, lots of detail, a huge load of gear.’