Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  Ian and Chaz flew to Nassau in the Bahamas to record at Compass Point studio with famed reggae musicians Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. Some of the songs were patched together at the last minute, and Chaz recalls Ian finishing lyrics on the plane. Crossing the Atlantic for the second time in a year, Ian’s thoughts turned once again to his American muse, Roberta Bayley He flew her down to Nassau from New York but the reunion was short-lived.

  The Compass Point album, entitled Lord Upminster, was a lacklustre work, rescued only by ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ and a startling cover photograph of Ian wearing a white cardigan ‘that belonged to an Italian grandmother’, its sleeves now meticulously frayed. Managers Jenner and King were unable to summon up the courage to tell Ian it was a weak album and persuaded publicist Glen Colson to pay him a visit. ‘I was naive enough to think I could tell Ian it would make a good four-track EP,’ recalls Colson. ‘He responded by throwing an ashtray at me.’

  Despite everybody’s disappointment, Ian managed to stay afloat by securing a publishing contract with Warners Music in which he signed over much of his songwriting catalogue via his agreement with Blackhill. Andrew King recalls Warners managing director Rob Dickins being very keen to sign Ian. ‘He was hopping up and down like a dog on heat. He was frothing for it. He gave us a fantastically good deal, a huge lump of cash.’ The advance of £80,000 – colossal for the time – enabled Ian to invest in more property. Having already bought a flat in Hampstead for Peggy and a house in Tring for Betty, it was time for Ian to look for a place for himself. He had been living in a succession of hotels and service apartments for three years and needed a permanent home, even if it meant he could no longer romantically claim to be ‘homeless’. ‘Ian was going round the bend, living in rented,’ says Humphrey Ocean. ‘What had appeared to be quite glamorous was really very unsettling. He didn’t have an HQ, a secure base. He needed a gaff.’

  Through Humphrey Ian met Monica Kinley a collector of ‘Outsider Art’, who was looking to sell her flat in Digby Mansions, Hammersmith. When Ian viewed his prospective pad, Monica assumed he was ‘some thick rock ’n’ roller’, but was shocked and surprised when he started to recognize some of the paintings on her walls. Ian later boasted, ‘For every picture I named, Monica knocked a thousand pounds off the price of the apartment!’ The second-floor flat overlooked the Thames by Hammersmith Bridge. It didn’t have an elevator, but Ian was OK with the stairs and he would find the balcony ideal for viewing the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race and throwing cans of beer to the fans that would congregate on the riverbank.

  Two months elapsed before Ian could move into his new apartment. He stayed with manager Andrew King and his wife Wendy for several weeks. ‘I remember going out for a Chinese in Richmond with Ian,’ recalls Andrew. ‘There was a couple at the next table, nudging each other . . . “Isn’t that, er, Ian Dury?” One of them came over and said, “Ian, your music has given me so much pleasure, may I have your autograph?” and he said, “Why don’t you fuck off and leave me alone?”’

  As the weeks dragged on, Ian complained that his managers were taking an unduly long time to complete on the purchase of the property and returned briefly to the Montcalm Hotel, the scene of a drunken encounter with Ingrid Mansfield-Allman, whom he affectionately nicknamed ‘Big Ings’. Ingrid had intrigued him ever since they met in the recording studio earlier that year. ‘Ian’s minder, Ray Jordan, lumbered me with Ian,’ recalls Ingrid. ‘We were in the pub, and Ray was trying to get off with Janice from accounts. So he told me, “Take the raspberry [ripple = cripple] back to the Montcalm and here’s twenty quid to get home.” At the hotel, I foolishly went up to the room with Ian. He promptly picked up the phone and ordered club sandwiches and champagne. He was drunk. He said, “Do you know how much a club sandwich costs in ’ere?” He told me, “Ring up Carruthers [Andrew King].” I phoned Andrew and said, “Ian wants to talk to you.” Ian grabbed the phone from me and roared, “I didn’t tell you to fucking talk to him, I just told you to ring him up!”

  ‘I thought, “Fucking hell, who am I locked in a room with here?” I went to get my bag to leave and Ian suddenly became psychotic. He tried to prevent me from getting it and he chucked the bag across the room, then he emptied the contents out of the second-floor window. Everything except my purse and my sunglasses went, then he ground them into the carpet. I locked myself in the bathroom, where there was a phone. I didn’t know who I was going to call, but I picked up the receiver. Ian grabbed the extension phone by the bed, so I thought, if he’s over there he can’t be outside the bathroom door, so maybe I could make a run for it, but he was whizzing about everywhere. The room-service geezer arrived, and I thought Ian was not going to hit me in front of him, but the geezer left, and I was alone with Ian again. He got hold of me and started spitting, so I pushed him and he went over. I got my purse and ran all the way home. I phoned Chaz and said, “You’re not going to believe what’s just happened.” Chaz was like, “Oh yeah?” It was normal. The next day Ian phoned me to say sorry. He was crying. I told him I wished I’d never met him, only heard his records. I never spoke to him again for eighteen months. I used to see him up at Blackhill, but I would look through him like he was a pane of glass.’

  Ian appeared at the Pinkpop festival in Holland that June and came face-to-face with the massively popular Madness, who had drawn much of their early inspiration from Ian during the Kilburns era of the mid-1970s. Madness’s three founder members, Chris Foreman, Lee Thompson and Mike Barson, all saw Kilburn and the High Roads on the pub rock circuit, initially attracted by their unusual name on a poster. Foreman recalls seeing Ian in the car park at the Tally Ho, but was unaware of who he was. ‘A guy with a bow tie came limping along, and I thought he worked at the pub. I asked him what time the band was on and he replied, “No idea mate.” I later realized it was Ian. We started following the Kilburns around and thought they were brilliant, visually and musically.’

  ‘Madness were on Stiff, and Ian had been on Stiff,’ continues Foreman, ‘but we never really met him until that day. Lee Thompson and I had decided not to fly, so we got the ferry and Ian was on the coach. I was sitting next to him, he was my hero but he was threatening me all the way. “You young pups are trying to steal my thunder!” He was going to get Spider to dust us up, but he was just mucking about. When we got to know him better, he became “Uncle Ian”, like a relative of us all.’

  Ian had now moved into Digby Mansions. A string of girls, most of whom he met on the road, waltzed in and out of his life. Friends and colleagues observed that they often had curiously similar physical attributes and were boyish in appearance. ‘They were usually short skinny women with small tits,’ says Fred Rowe. ‘He would put them all in the same gear – black jeans and DMs, short-cropped hair. He used to make them look like boys. I thought he was “the other way”, not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of AC/DC, but he wasn’t [“the other way”], he just liked that look on girls.’

  Ian viewed the girls he met as either a challenge or a pushover, preferring a challenge to an easy conquest. ‘He thought he had to try and get off with women, just to prove to himself that he wasn’t hideous,’ says Ingrid Mansfield-Allman. ‘But I wouldn’t say he was a womanizer. I think he had to reassure himself he was handsome. I think “If I Was with a Woman” is the most honest song Ian ever wrote. “Little things would slowly go askew . . . I’d make quite sure she never understood.” That’s what he was like. If you weren’t on your toes, he would fuck your head, but behind it all there was this really nice guy struggling to get out. He was very good at listening. One time I went round to see him, and he’d run a bath for me, put aromatherapy stuff in it and taught me deep-breathing exercises and I thought, “Wow! Is this the same person who was chucking my stuff out the window a few months earlier?”’

  Despite Fred Rowe’s acceptance of Ian’s foibles during his five-year tenure as his minder, things were about to come to an abrupt end. On a hot and sticky evening in
August 1981, Ian found himself at a party in Oxford Street, where he’d been invited to cut the cake to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the HMV record store. It was a tedious event for Ian, but a networking opportunity nevertheless. He was accompanied, as ever, by Fred, who had brought along Karen, his new girlfriend of just six weeks. Wearing darkened goggles and a crushed bowler hat, Ian circulated. He was on his best behaviour until he bumped into Thin Lizzy main man Phil Lynott, who persuaded Ian to switch from Perrier water to vodka because he should be having ‘a proper drink’. Fred intervened, telling Lynott, ‘Phil, you don’t know what it involves.’

  A couple of fans asked Ian for his autograph, but he told them to ‘fuck off. Fred stepped in, offering profuse apologies for Ian’s behaviour. ‘Is this Tom coming onto the scene now?’ asked Fred, referring to Ian’s drunken state. ‘Allow me to apologize for this pig, he will sign that for you,’ Fred told the autograph hunters. The room was crawling with journalists and photographers, and Fred decided he had to get Ian out before it became sticky. ‘We got to the car,’ recalls Rowe, ‘and, as Karen went to sit in the front seat, Ian shouted at her, “Get out of there you fucking slag! Get in the back where you belong!” I was about to blow. I told Ian to apologize to Karen, but he said, “I ain’t apologizing to nobody!” I drove off and left him standing on the pavement.’

  Ian woke up the next morning with deep regrets for having insulted Karen. He thought that Fred would call round as usual but he would have to wait eight years for that privilege. Losing Fred wasn’t the only setback he had to deal with that year. Things became even bleaker when Lord Upminster stalled at number fifty-three on the UK album chart. Ian now had to face up to the reality that he was no longer the pop star of his dreams. A headline appearance on Michael Parkinson’s TV chat show in November did little to boost sales, but Ian appeared chipper, proud of his billing above the actress Diana Dors and trades union leader Arthur Scargill. In a moment of hilarity, Ian pondered the National Health Service. ‘It didn’t begin until about . . . [Ian looked in Scargill’s direction] . . . 1948, wasn’t it, Arf’?’ Scargill smiled benignly, and Parkinson chuckled.

  Lord Upminster may have flopped, but Ian was still a face on the London music scene. At the press launch for a comeback single by legendary British rocker Billy Fury, Ian worked the room. A photographer named Andy Philips persuaded Ian to pose with Fury. Published in the NME, the Dury/Fury picture showed a bemused Billy, but the look of adulation on Ian’s face left one in no doubt that he was still a fan, drooling in the presence of near-greatness. But he knew that for faded stars like Fury, the chance of an eleventh-hour hit was remote. His time had been and gone.

  With his record sales dwindling, there was no option for Ian but to continue touring. The Blockheads had unofficially disbanded following a ten-day tour of Spain in September and no more work in the pipeline, but an Australian promoter had submitted an astonishing offer. Ian did his sums and quickly calculated he could net £50,000 for a month’s work down under. He immediately signed the contract and made the travel arrangements. Then, almost as an afterthought, he summoned the Blockheads, but hadn’t reckoned on them demanding near parity to partake in the trip. A meeting took place at Blackhill at which Ian was inebriated. Mickey Gallagher spoke on behalf of the group and demanded £5,000 per man for the tour, a not unreasonable fee in the circumstances, but Ian told the Blockheads they could all ‘fuck off, and they did . . . for a while. As the tour loomed, a settlement was reached, and Ian resigned himself to earning rather less than he had originally anticipated.

  On 14 November, Ian and the advance party, which included his cousin, Martin Walker, gathered at Heathrow to board a British Airways flight to Sydney, via Muscat and Singapore. The tour got off to a shaky start as soon as Ian’s plane touched down at Sydney Airport in the early morning of 16 November. The promoter’s tour itinerary advised: ‘Proceed through routine Customs and Immigration check’, but for Ian it was not that easy; imagine his anger when greeted with the command: ‘OK, you! Polio! Over there!’ It may have been the International Year of the Disabled, but, separated from his colleagues and forced to join a special queue (of one), Ian felt as if he had stepped back into the dark ages.

  He was in a black mood when he checked in at Sydney’s elegant Sebel Town House, but was pleased to discover a number of celebrities in residence, including Johnny Mathis, Freddie Starr and Bucks Fizz. Also staying at the hotel was the actor Warren Mitchell, with whom Ian enjoyed a spot of lunch. But he was still fuming when he encountered the microphones and flashbulbs of the Australian press the following day. Patti Mostyn, the promoter’s PR, advised Ian not to overreact, but it was too late. The unfortunate episode at the airport had set the tone for the whole tour.

  Following a sell-out show at the Capitol Theatre later that week, Ian returned to the hotel and, still jet-lagged, headed for the bar. ‘He’d got it into his head how badly the Australians had treated the Aborigines,’ recalls co-manager Andrew King. ‘It was getting late, and there was a group of businessmen in the corner. Ian ranted at them, “You killed the fucking Abbos, you cunts!” and started lobbing gob at them, little realizing that this was a harmless group of Swedish mining experts.’ Jenny Cotton of Blackhill recalls tour manager Ray Jordan getting hold of Ian and putting him in the elevator to take him up to his room. ‘Ian got hold of Ray’s dreadlocks and started pulling them out. The next morning, there were dreadlocks all over the floor. The hotel banned us for life.’

  Ian’s behaviour at the Sebel Town House was so outrageous that the hotel had to placate other guests by offering them a free night’s accommodation. But despite the dramas one had come to expect, the tour of Australia and New Zealand was a hit with audiences. On the flight home, co-manager Peter Jenner started to talk excitedly about the group touring ‘six months out of every year for the next ten years’. It was an idea that, financially, appealed to the Blockheads, but Ian slept throughout the flight, oblivious to Jenner’s optimistic plan. On returning to London, Ian and the Blockheads delivered an inspired performance at London’s Lyceum, but beneath the surface group morale was at an all-time low. The Blockheads no longer trusted Ian as he continued to pick them up and put them down, purely to satisfy his intermittent touring requirements. There would be a few scattered dates in the coming year, but the damage had been done.

  17

  I Want You to Hurt Like I Do

  Hammersmith, London, 1982. Ensconced in Digby Mansions and fast approaching forty, Ian glanced around his L-shaped flat with its panoramic views of the Thames and close proximity to some fine riverside walks, but he felt strangely despondent. The year got off to a bad start when he was diagnosed with hepatitis, thought to have been contracted in Australia. His doctor advised him to lie low and stay off drugs and alcohol, but this was a tall order. He was able to quit drinking, but made up for it with copious amounts of hashish. Unlike some of his associates, he shied away from the harder drugs. Fred Rowe confessed to trying heroin ‘just the once’ and had taken great pride in walking away from what he described to Ian as ‘the greatest feeling in the world’, but Ian was unimpressed by Fred’s dabbling. As for cocaine, a popular drug in music circles, Ian professed complete distaste for ‘nose candy’, claiming that it was ‘elitist’. The main issue, possibly, was its exorbitant cost. ‘When coke’s the same price as sugar, I’ll ’ave it,’ Ian announced.

  On the business front, Blackhill Enterprises was sinking fast and forced to sell its music publishing interests, including much of Ian’s catalogue. He was no longer selling records in quantity, and Polydor was in no hurry to record a follow-up to 1981’s disappointing Lord Upminster, although Ian was already working on his next batch of words. He was also starting to think of the Blockheads as a financial liability he could do without, especially since they had recently asked for £2,000 per man per show. ‘It wasn’t that unrealistic,’ says Andrew King, ‘we were going out for twenty grand a night.’

  The Blockheads may have been
under the impression that they would be hired, on royalties, to play on the next album – this was certainly what everyone else would have liked – but Ian felt it was time to establish his own identity and he began to distance himself from the band. One wondered if he fully appreciated that the Blockheads were integral to his success, or if they truly understood that Ian’s genius as a writer and entertainer was essential to their commercial viability. ‘Ian and his management didn’t quite understand how fucking great the Blockheads were,’ says Wilko Johnson. ‘By the same token, the Blockheads didn’t always appreciate that, in Ian, they had this absolutely unique character. Neither side quite understood what they owed to each other.’ Baxter Dury adds: ‘You take dad away from the Blockheads, and they are a funk band. You take the Blockheads away from dad, and he could have been a monotonous punk poet. Together they were motivated by desperation and need, the very things that make people brilliant.’

  But Ian was now considering recruiting unknown musicians to help him realize his new songs. There was no shortage of young players who held Ian and the Blockheads in high esteem, and, when word got out that he was in the market for a new band, several eager hopefuls materialized. Two such candidates had already worked with Blockhead Davey Payne, who had recently been sent to New York by Stiff Records boss Dave Robinson to record an album of instrumentals. Former Kilburns drummer Terry Day accompanied Davey as ‘chaperone’, and the pair spent their evenings jamming with the locals in the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village.