by Will Birch
Buried in the list of things that made Ian’s life worth living was the Italian pop singer Adrian Celentano. Ian had never actually heard of him, but a Swiss-Italian girl named Zegnia, whom Ian was dating that summer, proposed Celentano for inclusion. The lyricist was happy to oblige.
Saying okey dokey, sing-a-long-a-Smokey,
Coming out of chokey,
John Coltrane’s soprano, Ade Celentano,
Bonar Colleano
Ian was most flattered when he heard the oft-expressed theory that ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful’ was one of the first rap records, even though it came from the wrong side of the Atlantic. His rhythmic phrasing was certainly in the style of the then emerging black music genre, although instrumentally the track owed much of its appeal to the immaculate disco styling of Chic as it did the street poetry of the early rappers. ‘It was three months before “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang,’ said Ian. ‘I thought they’d been listening to my song but then I realized we’d gone to the same source – the Last Poets, James Brown.’
Copies of ‘Reasons’ were exported to the USA and were to be found on display in New York’s hip hop record stores, alongside early rap hits by Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow. By coincidence, Kurtis Blow’s UK agent, Ian Flooks of Wasted Talent, was also Ian Dury’s concert booker. When Blow turned up at Flooks’ London office, Ian happened to be present and was the first person Blow encountered. ‘Hi Ian, I’m Kurtis Blow,’ said the US rapper. ‘And these are the Breaks!’ replied Ian, referring to Blow’s recent hit record. ‘Ian Flooks?’ asked Blow. ‘No, Ian Dury,’ came the reply. ‘He’d never fucking heard of me!’ said Ian. ‘I was gutted. I thought, “You should study up, mate, I was there first.”’
By the middle of August, Ian had been on the road for three months straight. Exhausted, he turned down an offer of £100,000 to open for Led Zeppelin at Knebworth. ‘I don’t want to work in front of 90,000 people,’ he told James Henke in Rolling Stone. ‘That many people just can’t relate to seven musicians onstage.’ Spider was miffed because he and each of the Blockheads could have pocketed ‘five grand’, telling Ian, ‘You’re depriving our children of an education.’ But Kosmo was adamant that Ian should not appear at ‘a hippie festival’. It would not be the first time that Ian would turn down lucrative work, much to the frustration of the Blockheads, who depended on touring for an income whilst Ian and Chaz were earning songwriting royalties while they slept.
Tired but triumphant, Ian luxuriated in his new-found wealth and was not slow to repay Betty for the years of uncertainty he’d put her through. Firstly, he provided his family with a holiday in Barbados, a place he now knew well. Betty, Jemima and Baxter went ahead as ‘the advance party’, and Ian flew out to join them, following his string of sold-out London dates. Betty was reunited with her college friend (and Ian’s former ‘human crutch’ at art college), Alison Armstrong, now living in the Caribbean. Peter Blake also showed up for several weeks of fun and frolics, and Ian was quick to invite members of the Blockheads and their families to join them. ‘He bought them air tickets in the hurricane season,’ says Baxter Dury Alison Armstrong adds: ‘They rented two villas on the west coast and for what they paid for them I could have bought a house.’
Ian’s next stroke of generosity was designed to improve his family’s quality of life. The house in Aylesbury they had occupied for three years was more comfortable than either Wingrave or Long Marston, but nowhere near as nice as Orchard Cottage in Tring, which Betty found after Ian had given her the nod. Conveniently located for Jemima to attend her private dancing lessons, it was ‘the big leap forward’, according to Baxter. ‘Tring was the real sign of wealth,’ adds Jemima. ‘Sterling Moss had a house opposite. I was just thinking how quickly you get used to it, but we were still pretty frugal. We didn’t have the monogrammed gates, but when the money started rolling in, mum and us had some huge spend-ups. There were a few trips to Hamleys toy shop for gratuitous purple aluminium skateboards.’
When Andrew King and Peter Jenner took over management of the Clash in late 1979, the famed punk rock trailblazers were at their commercial peak and set to become Blackhill’s priority act, much to Ian’s annoyance. To exacerbate matters, Blockhead Mickey Gallagher, who had played piano on the Clash’s London Calling LP, joined the group as an auxiliary keyboardist for live shows. Ian hated the Clash and resented their presence on the Blackhill roster. There was no trace of irony in his voice when he accused them of being ‘public school rebels’. Referring to singer Joe Strummer, Ian asked, ‘Why would anyone want to change their name from Mellor [Strummer’s real name]? “Mellors” is the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Joe must be barmy!’
Ian and Joe Strummer were about to share the same stage in a series of charity concerts in aid of emergency relief for the people of Kampuchea, held over four nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. The line-up included the Clash, the Who, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, Robert Plant, Paul McCartney’s Wings and, headlining over all these legendary rock names on 27 December, Ian Dury and the Blockheads. As Ian hobnobbed with the superstars backstage, the thrill in his bones was palpable.
It had been a fabulous year, but Chaz Jankel was once again becoming restless. In the early days of their partnership, Ian had surrendered much of the musical decision-making to him but now, having tasted success, Ian wanted to reclaim some of that territory. Although he wrote his lyrics rhythmically, often with a groove or tempo in mind, Ian had no musical know-how. ‘He didn’t want to be arguing with Chaz about whether it was an F7 instead of an F major,’ says Charlie Hart, who had written with Ian in the Kilburns. ‘He preferred to communicate in riddles and do it all through emotional games and psychological symbols. By not getting involved in the mechanics of the music, he could keep himself in a different realm.’
It was debatable whether Ian’s inability to read or compose music was a pro or a con. History was littered with successful songwriters of limited musical skill, for example Lionel Bart, who played one-finger piano yet composed hit musicals such as Oliver. Even the great Irving Berlin, who wrote ‘White Christmas’, hummed his tunes to an arranger and later wrote on a mechanical piano that allowed him to transpose the key with the aid of a lever. Ian didn’t often come up with a tune, hummed or otherwise, although Baxter says of his father, ‘He had an incredible perspective in his head about how it would work. He considered the rhythm and thought much more melodically then anyone ever gives him credit for.’
Ian loved Chaz Jankel’s contribution to the songwriting process, but even though Chaz had supplied the tunes for their two biggest hits, he was not immune from Ian’s taunts. Chaz, one of the more sensitive Blockheads, was also embarrassed by Ian’s cruel remarks to other members of the band, along the lines of: ‘Your wife is a fucking maggot – I don’t know what you see in her.’ ‘It was classic bully behaviour,’ says close observer Stephen Nugent, ‘provoking someone to the point where they were forced to respond, then telling them: “Now I can see what you’re really made of.”’
Rather than jump through hoops to please his master, Chaz Jankel once again jumped ship. ‘I tried to keep my distance so that Ian didn’t feel like he owned me,’ says Jankel, referring to his departure at the end of 1979. ‘I had to let him know where I stood or he would have taken advantage. When you’re writing with somebody, it isn’t just the business of sitting down and writing songs, it’s an intimate scenario. Your whole life is caught up with that other person and the songs are only one part of the picture. Ian was a perfectionist but he also liked to relax. His idea of a perfect evening would be a bottle of Moët, champagne cocktails and to have Ed Speight sitting next to him, rolling spliffs and telling jokes.’
With ‘Rhythm Stick’ and ‘Reasons’ under his belt, Ian was confident of being able to find a replacement for Chaz to help him create his next album, but those in the immediate vicinity could not compose at Jankel’s level. Ian would have to cross his fingers and hope for the best. Anyway,
fame was not all it was cracked up to be. He enjoyed hearing the occasional ‘Hey, Ian!’ from passing cabbies, but hated being stared at in public, even though it was nothing new. Passers-by had been staring at Ian since he first limped out of hospital in 1951, but now many more were gawping. ‘People would come up to me wherever I went because I was so recognizable,’ said Ian, ‘but I got paranoid about being disabled.’
Ian’s adverse reaction to celebrity can be charted from this point. He used fame as an excuse for not going out alone because, he said, ‘People stop me in the street.’ The situation was exacerbated by his addiction to sleeping pills. He had started taking Mogadon tablets nine years earlier when he was teaching art and was told they were ‘not addictive’, but his dependence had recently come to an abrupt end when a hotel chambermaid in Amsterdam threw his tablets away with the rubbish. Paranoia set in. ‘I had it shocking,’ said Ian, ‘self-loathing . . . it coincided with me giving up Mogadon. I slept all right, but I had these strange symptoms. Then I read that withdrawal from that drug has side-effects. I associated the paranoia with being a pop star, not the withdrawal.’
To make matters worse, celebrity had deprived Ian of one of his greatest pleasures – that of being able to confound those who didn’t know who he was by unexpectedly switching persona mid-conversation. As an unknown, he could toggle between the East End rascal and the connoisseur of arts by dispensing an expletive or a few lines of poetry. Initially, new acquaintances were impressed, but now that Ian’s biographical details were in the public domain, the Dury enigma was threatened with extinction. The shock tactics would no longer work – everybody knew about Ian and his rhythm stick. The game was up.
15
Oh Lonesome Me
‘Before seeking revenge, first dig two graves.’
Confucius
London, 1980. At the start of the new decade, it began to dawn on the Blockheads that there was no pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. All of their touring income had been absorbed by heavy expenses. Recording royalties were paltry after studio costs had been deducted, and the lion’s share of songwriting royalties had gone to Ian and Chaz, creators of the hits. The Blockheads may have stayed in some fancy hotels and been allowed to overdub Do It Yourself to death, but there would be little reward for those musicians unable to muscle in on the song-writing action. Unsure of Ian’s plans, the group set up camp at Milner Sound Studios in Fulham that February, with the intention of working up some original material. To get the ball rolling, Davey Payne cut a roaring version of the Duane Eddy instrumental ‘Peter Gunn’, but the twenty or so group compositions that followed had only shorthand titles such as: ‘Chicken’, ‘Fat-back’ and ‘CC’s Rock’. As songs, they were largely unfinished.
Ian, meanwhile, was on another extended holiday in Barbados, a place he had come to love. ‘Dad liked the laid-back black culture,’ says Jemima Dury, ‘its history, safety and privacy. He hated being famous, but he could be anonymous in Barbados. It was quite exclusive.’ Coming home via the United States on 6 March, he dropped in at the Tower Theatre, Philadelphia, where the Clash were appearing, augmented by Mickey Gallagher. Ian was keen to see New Orleans legend Lee Dorsey who was also on the bill. After two years of accompanying Ian on tour, Blackhill’s style guru Kosmo Vinyl had more or less defected to the Clash camp, but as a loyal friend Kosmo continued to look out for Ian. When the Clash’s rousing set climaxed with ‘Janie Jones’, Ian was hauled up on stage. Introduced by Joe Strummer as ‘a special guest from England’, Ian sang along with the chorus, making whooping noises and intermittently shouting, ‘Fill ’er up, Jacko!’
The next day, Ian accompanied the Clash to New York, where the stunt was repeated at the Palladium. For the first time in two years, Ian ran into his former lover Roberta Bayley now resident in Manhattan’s East Village. ‘I didn’t have any idea he was coming,’ recalls Roberta. ‘He hadn’t said anything to me, but I went backstage, and we hung out a little bit, then we had another huge fight in the hotel lobby, right across the street from Madison Square Garden. He tried to pull the same shit. He’d lock me in the room, and say, “What’s wrong, why don’t you want to have sex with me?”’
On his return to the UK, Ian paid the Blockheads a visit at Milner. Mickey Gallagher recalls, ‘Ian came down to our studio and thought, “Oh this is all right, I’ll make my album here.” We said, “Hang on!” But he offered to pay the studio costs for three months and said, “We’ll make an album.”’ Ian also announced that Wilko Johnson, the former Dr Feelgood guitarist, would be making a single with the group and suggested a cover of the Don Gibson song ‘Oh Lonesome Me’. Ian had recently encountered Wilko at the Rainbow theatre, during a benefit concert for Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers, who had just been imprisoned for drug offences. Before long, Ian invited Wilko to become a Blockhead, much to the surprise of the others. ‘Ian didn’t consult us at all,’ says Mickey. ‘He just casually said, “Wilko’s joining the band.” We all got on well, but everything now had to accommodate that choppy guitar sound.’
Ian may have had more than instrumental accompaniment in mind. Although the Blockheads’ visuals had suffered little from Chaz’s departure, Ian was never averse to enhancing his tableau. Wilko, whose trademark skittering movements would enliven any stage, was also a known quantity as a songwriter, having composed much of the Feelgoods’ early repertoire. With his own solo career in the doldrums, Wilko grabbed the opportunity to become a Blockhead. Although he was a great fan of the group’s superlative rhythm section, he was less familiar with its modus operandi. Curious about Ian’s future plans, Wilko decided to call on him at his flat in Little Portland Street, the latest in a succession of rented West End bolt holes.
Wilko quickly discovered that the Blockheads had been out of action for several months and faced an uncertain future. As the meeting continued, Ian sat nervously scribbling diagrams on sheets of A3, supposedly mapping out the next six months, but feeling ‘a little adrift musically, getting depressed’. Detecting Ian’s insecurity, Wilko bravely remarked, ‘You’re fucking shitting yourself, aren’t you?’ Ian confessed that he was unsure of his next move and terrified of returning to live work. For the moment, however, recording was the priority.
During the new album’s tricky gestation period, tensions between Ian and the group began to develop. Ian cleverly defused the situation by asking the Blockheads to make a heavy metal album with guitarist Ed Speight, his former school friend and occasional member of the Kilburns. Ian would fund the recordings and buy Ed a new Gibson Les Paul guitar to achieve a suitably ‘heavy’ sound. Speight dutifully laid down a number of hard rock classics, including Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ and Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’, with Norman and Charley completing the basic trio and various Blockheads providing the vocals. Ian then wrote a story that he would narrate between the songs. It was entitled The Master. With the deepest, most sinister voice he could summon, Ian announced:
This is the story of the master versus the human condition. It happened that a dread plague came upon the land and the audience dropped like flies. ‘Let the master out of his cage,’ cried the anguished peoples. ‘He will save us!’ But the powers that be were sorely afraid of the master’s strength and from their lofty citadel high above the sufferings of the throng . . .
And so on. The Master was a tedious work, never to see commercial release. When it was completed, Ian and the Blockheads started to prepare songs for the album proper. New material was once again in short supply, but Ian thought he had the answer. He would collaborate with individual members of the Blockheads, his theory being that it would help to dispel any dissent and potentially up their earnings. The Blockheads were certainly excited by the possibility of earning songwriting royalties; provided that Ian retained control over the words, it would be a win-win situation. Consequently, some of the tracks the Blockheads had recorded at Milner would find their way onto Ian’s next album. ‘Chicken’ became ‘(Take Your Elbow out of the Soup) Yo
u’re Sitting on the Chicken’; ‘Public Party’ was transformed into ‘Dance of the Crackpots’ and ‘Pardon’, written with Norman Watt-Roy, echoed the cool funk of ‘Rhythm Stick’. ‘Black and White’ emerged as ‘Yes and No (Paula)’, a sketch rather than a song, rescued by some great improvisation from Davey Payne on wailing tenor sax and jazz legend Don Cherry, who would later tour with the group, on pocket cornet.
During the sessions, Ian unexpectedly revealed the new album’s title – Laughter – but the songs were far from funny. ‘I had it as a working title to cheer myself up,’ said Ian. ‘Well-written misery . . . I was getting depressed. I thought I’d shot my bolt.’ Distanced from real life and ‘the street’, which had provided Ian with so much of his earlier material, he had to get his inspiration from somewhere. He decided to reflect on his early experiences at Chailey The autobiographical slant resulted in a torrent of harrowing lyrics. ‘They were all about institutionalization,’ says Mickey Gallagher, ‘and people born with their legs back to front and all that. Ian had an indomitable spirit. Nobody with a weak spirit could have survived it.’
The first new product to hit the shops, in August 1980, was the single, ‘I Want to Be Straight’, a lolloping shuffle in which Ian announced that he was ‘sick of taking drugs and staying up late’. Instead, he declared, ‘I want to confirm, I want to conform.’ This pedestrian yet amusing ditty made a minor dent on the hit parade, as did its follow-up, ‘Sueperman’s Big Sister’ (‘his superior skin and blister’). Co-written with Wilko, and added to Laughter at the eleventh hour, ‘Sueperman’s’ – intentionally misspelt to avoid copyright infringement – featured MOR-style strings scored by the legendary Ivor Raymonde, co-writer of Dusty Springfield’s early hits. Ivor was also asked to provide orchestration for the glorious ‘Fucking Ada’, but couldn’t believe his ears when he heard Ian and a massed chorus of Blockheads indulge themselves in the art of gratuitous swearing, football terrace style. You could hear the joy in Ian’s voice as he wrapped his larynx around the offending phrase, but radio play was non-existent, and co-writer Johnny Turnbull still had to make do without double-glazing.