Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  When Ian signed his contract for the part of ‘Meat Hook’ in Pirates it was the start of his modest, yet eventful movie career. Filming was delayed while Roman Polanski’s team built the galleon Neptune, which, at over 60 metres in length, would be the most expensive prop in movie history. While he was waiting for Polanski’s call, a number of agreeable roles began to materialize. In the film Number One, in which a small-time snooker hustler, played by Bob Geldof, is encouraged by a crooked promoter to go for bigger stakes in a national contest, Ian would play ‘Teddy Bryant’. Despite an able cast including Mel Smith, Ray Winstone, Alfred Molina and Alison Steadman, it would make little impression at the box office. The sub-Minder script included over thirty instances of ‘you know worrimean?’ and Ian’s first words on the big screen were ‘Oi! ’Arry!’

  Slightly more satisfactory would be King of the Ghetto, a four-part TV serial that placed Ian alongside Tim Roth, also a client of Cotton and Carruthers. Ghetto received good reviews, with Herbert Kretzmer of the Daily Mail describing Ian as ‘a natural actor’, but the renowned critic reserved his greatest praise for Roth, who ‘towered over it all’. Ian was not pleased by Tim Roth’s runaway success, or the fact they shared the same management team. Andrew King recalls Ian bullying Roth at a party: ‘You’d think Tim Roth was tough, but Ian must have found some weakness in his armour and turned on him. He was in like Slim, destroying Tim with the verbal. “D’ya mind? D’ya mind if I say something, you useless cunt!”’

  In the spring of 1985, Ian flew to Tunisia to film his modest part in Pirates, a job that continued for ‘eight fun-packed weeks’. Ian’s girlfriend, Belinda Leith, joined him for ten days in Tunisia and remembers them having a pleasant dinner with Walter Matthau and his wife. But most of the time boredom got the better of Ian. He was often seen chatting up the ladies in the company and on one occasion he unwisely insulted a Polish stuntman, who responded by picking him up under one arm and throwing him into the swimming pool. Protracted shooting by Polanski, combined with lucrative overtime rates, earned Ian nearly £60,000 in fees – good money indeed – but what made film work doubly attractive to Ian was his realization that actors, unlike musicians, shoulder little responsibility for the finished product.

  Ian hadn’t completely given up on music, however. Following a two-and-a-half year break he reunited with the Blockheads. The band were sceptical but knew it was their musicianship that gave Ian his confidence on stage and were keen to prove themselves following the Music Students debacle. ‘If Ian made a mistake by coming in early on the chorus, the Blockheads would go with him,’ says Mickey Gallagher. ‘He didn’t even know he’d made a mistake!’ That summer they headlined the pyramid stage at Glastonbury. Mid-way through the set, a reveller in the audience started throwing mud, and Ian stormed off, only returning for ‘Sex and Drugs’ after a lengthy interval.

  Ian also played Hammersmith Odeon with a set that included ‘We Want the Gold’, a jolly, nautical number said to have been inspired by Ian’s involvement in Pirates. Ian and Chaz were soon writing together again and created the theme song for the TV production of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. ‘Profoundly in Love with Pandora’ would be released as a single and make a modest chart showing that October. Some years later, the ‘Adrian Mole’ connection would lead to Ian and Mickey Gallagher providing music for Sue Townsend’s stage play The Queen and I.

  Following Glastonbury and Hammersmith, there was much pressure for a permanent reunion with the Blockheads, but Ian was reluctant to commit. In a Capital Radio interview that September, he told deejay Roger Scott: ‘Randy Newman stated that he’d only go out with a band when he’s in the top five. Once you’ve got a band and a road crew together, a system whereby you’ve got your gear and your trucks are all ready to go, when you come off the road, then what do you do? If you’re not going to go back on the road until you’ve got a good album together, you get a situation where, by doing nothing, it’s costing you such a lot of bread . . . to keep it going is literally an impossibility.’

  Although Ian had identified the financial and logistical pressures of maintaining a working band, the truth was that he no longer needed to perform live. A few thousand pounds for a mini-tour and all the stress it entailed did not compare with trousering a similar amount for a few hours’ voice-over work in Soho. ‘He wouldn’t leave the house for less than five grand,’ says Mickey Gallagher. ‘He wouldn’t get up for a test for less than £500. If it were a toss-up between a voice-over and a gig, the voice-over would win every time. That’s what the Blockheads were up against.’

  Ian had already adapted ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful’ for a Thomson Holidays ad. A better-known TV commercial – for which he asked to be paid ‘in used five pound notes’ – would quickly follow. An advertising agency had dreamed up a campaign in which a humanoid would expound on the virtues of Toshiba television sets, mouthing the immortal words: ‘Hello Tosh, got a Toshiba?’ The jingle was unashamedly based on Alexei Sayle’s 1984 novelty hit, ‘Hello John, Got a New Motor?’ The public’s flirtation with all things cockney (see Minder) had already peaked, but Ian’s East End tones were a shot-in-the-arm for the Toshiba brand and its ‘flattest, squarest tube’. ‘They ain’t ’alf built well,’ Ian reliably informed viewers.

  Meanwhile, Ian and Betty had quietly agreed that it was time to get divorced. On 21 October 1985, their marriage formally ended in a thirty-second hearing at the London Divorce Court. Betty attended, Ian did not. Two years earlier, Betty had met a fellow artist named Clive Richards in summer school at Falmouth College of Art. Having lived for several years at Orchard Cottage in Tring, Betty, Jemima and Baxter moved to a flat at Sutton Court Mansions in Chiswick. They were joined there by Clive, with whom Ian struck up a cautious friendship. Ian had remained close to Betty during their decade of separation and would often visit his family in their new home, just a mile or so from Digby Mansions, where he was living with Belinda Leith.

  Belinda had been Ian’s partner for two years, but their time together was coming to an end. Belinda felt that she had to ‘get out’, in order to pursue her own goals and escape Ian’s controlling and jealous ways. She reports a generally harmonious time, with only the occasional turbulence. ‘He wanted me to be this person he owned,’ says Belinda. ‘I could see that I wasn’t going to have any freedom. Ian was romantic and very gentle, combined with the ability to be more aggressive. It would be completely out of the blue, and he would just go mad, but only when he was intoxicated by alcohol and, on a couple of occasions, cocaine. Moments later he would be calm, as if nothing had happened. Nine tines out of ten he wouldn’t remember anything. It was almost as if it was another person.’

  Pirates would not see a theatrical release until the summer of 1986, but Ian wasted no time in furthering his acting career. Another, slightly more obscure film made in 1985 was Rocinante, starring John Hurt, in which Ian played ‘The Jester’. Time Out would later describe Rocinante as ‘appalling’. To progress into live drama, Ian needed to join the actors’ union Equity. To demonstrate his commitment to the profession, he went into repertory theatre in February 1986 at the Palace Theatre, Watford, where he played the part of ‘The Devil’ in Mary O’Malley’s Talk of the Devil, alongside T P. McKenna and Annette Crosbie. The Watford Observer called it ‘an inspired stroke of casting’, adding ‘[Dury] exudes just the right air of gleeful menace.’ Peggy proudly watched Ian from the stalls on opening night alongside his agent, Pippa Markham, and the actress Frances Tomelty.

  To be accepted into the acting community appealed to the middle-class, conservative side of Ian’s personality that lurked beneath his otherwise rebellious exterior. He especially enjoyed the backstage banter and camp conceits of ‘the luvvie brigade’, as he later confessed in the BBC documentary On My Life: ‘I remember that we came out into the green room, as we call the bar, after a matinee in Watford and Caroline Langrishe says, “Well I’m afraid I rather busked it this afternoon,” and T P. McKenna, the voice,
says, [adopts Irish accent] “I have never busked a performance in my life!” I went, “Oh, you fibber!” Things like that . . . afterwards, a bloke in a green velvet suit and a cravat comes up and says, “My darling, I laughed ’til I cried,” and I went, “On your bike, mate, you never,” and he was a crestfallen person. I like the congratulation aspect of acting. I like the fact they really do stroke each other’s ego or massage the old neck muscles and there’s all that old caper going on all the time. I love all that. It’s all bollo, but I love it.’

  Ian’s new career was gradually gaining traction. More movie roles were in the pipeline, as he proudly told Terry Wogan in a television interview in May 1986. ‘I always wanted to be an actor,’ he exclaimed, bouncing with life on Wogan’s sofa, fluttering his eyelashes and grinning coyly. To the TV viewers, Ian appeared modest and polite, but away from the camera’s glare he was less humble. Backstage, he bumped into his former girlfriend known as ‘The Overcoat’, now working at Television Centre. Ian proudly introduced her to his latest flame, Delphi Newman, whom he suddenly berated for not wearing the clothes that would, in his opinion, suit her best. ‘Look, you see, that’s the sort of thing you should be wearing,’ he told Delphi, holding up his ‘ex’ as a paragon of style (whereas three years earlier she had been harassed by Ian for failing to please in the punk couture area).

  Delphi Newman was a fan who had come into Ian’s life some months earlier when she turned up one night at Digby Mansions. ‘Delphi found Ian,’ says Ingrid Mansfield-Allman. ‘She freeze-framed the Rosso film and worked out where he lived. She rang his doorbell and threatened to walk into the River Thames if he didn’t let her in. Ian rang Jenny Cotton, saying, “There’s this mad bird outside!”’ Jenny and her friend Cheryl Madley arrived on the scene and escorted Delphi out of the water. Delphi would later return, but the only evidence of her presence that night was a trail of wet footprints leading to the Underground station.

  For Mickey Gallagher, new musical adventures beckoned, having been hired to produce an album by Kiyoshiro Imawano, ‘the Japanese Cliff Richard’. Imawano, a confirmed anglophile, came to London in 1986, craving the involvement of some British ‘new wave’ musicians. Mickey dutifully rounded up the troops and delighted Imawano with a band consisting of various members of the Clash and the Blockheads. A tour followed that September, with Gallagher, Johnny Turnbull, Charley Charles and Davey Payne jetting out to Japan, along with trumpet player Geoff Miller and Mark Bedford of Madness deputizing for Norman on bass. Returning from the tour, Mickey paid Ian a visit, raving about the joys of working with Imawano, suggesting that Ian might like to tour Japan. Ian responded by revealing that he had just signed a contract to appear in a film with Bob Dylan.

  Dylan had first become aware of Ian’s work and that of a number of upcoming British artistes in 1978, when he was in London for a series of concerts at Earls Court. The CBS press office had supplied Dylan with a welcome pack of recent UK albums on various labels, including The Clash, Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model and New Boots and Panties!!. In the ensuing years Dylan had familiarized himself with New Boots and, during filming, greeted Ian in his trailer with: ‘Hi! Sweet Gene Vincent!’ ‘The very same,’ Ian replied. Hearts of Fire, in which Ian had a small part as ‘Bones’, was filmed in the autumn of 1986 and released the following year. It told the story of a reclusive rock star, played by Dylan, on the comeback trail. The movie’s director, Richard Marquand, was to die, aged forty-nine, shortly after filming was completed and just before the diabolical reviews appeared. Channel 4 described the film as ‘a blunt instrument of eighties vacuity’.

  Following Hearts of Fire Ian flew to Greece for his part as ‘The Acrobat’ in Red Ants (also known as Paradise Unlocked). He would humorously recall the part some years later in a Radio 4 interview with Peter White: ‘I got a call from a Greek man called Vassilis Boudouris, who wanted to know if I could ride a horse, and I said, “There’s no way I’m getting on a horse, mate, forget it.” Then I got another phone call saying, “Can you ride a motorbike?” My answer came in the negative again: “Not even if it’s got a sidecar on it.” Then the third phone call, he wants to know if I’ve still got a face . .. so I went to see him. I said, “Well, Mr Boudouris, here I am, there’s me face, what’s the part?”And he said, “Tightrope walker!” I did it. I had somebody on a horse, filling in for me, somebody went up in a balloon for me, somebody rode a motorbike and somebody did the tightrope. He wanted my face to look like I was on a tightrope . . . there was a box about eight feet high on top of which was another box about five feet high on top of which they put me, with an umbrella, shooting it against the sky . . . it looked as if I was eighty feet up in the air . . . I was really scared. Then he said, “Can you go down on one knee?”’

  In November, Ian returned to London and commenced a three-month run at London’s Royal Court Theatre in Road, a play by Jim Cartwright. ‘It’s about a road, innit?’ Ian remarked, explaining his move from music to theatre to Adam Sweeting of Q. ‘All the gigs I’ve done in the last two years have been the kind of gigs that you can’t avoid, either financially or because somebody’s being really nice. I wouldn’t do that for a living, know worrimean?’ In Road, Ian played ‘Scullery’, a central narrator who takes the audience through an evening in a northern town, from the point where the characters are getting ready to go out to pubs and clubs to the moment where they become drunk and despondent. Also in the cast of Road was twenty-two-year-old Jane Horrocks, later to become the star of the movie Little Voice and a revered actress. Ian and Jane hit it off, and she moved into Digby Mansions, staying for twelve months. ‘Jane and Ian had some incredible outings,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘The holiday in Greece – they went to Hydra together – phwoar!’ Interviewed in The Observer, Jane Horrocks recalled: ‘I was in my twenties when I went out with Ian. I have always chosen men who apart from being very bright were also untameable. There’s something a bit wild and unpredictable about them. Ian Dury was the most incredibly unpredictable of them all and that’s why the relationship didn’t last. But it keeps you on your toes. It was a long time after the golden years of “Rhythm Stick”, so it wasn’t like going out with Robbie Williams.’

  A more lasting and satisfactory outcome of Road was that Ian established a working relationship with its producer, Max Stafford-Clark. ‘Ian was really a musicologist,’ says Stafford-Clark. ‘He came from the music-hall tradition too. All of those elements were part of his armoury, what he had to offer. The theatre took advantage of those. He was a wonderful presence but he was quite high-maintenance. One evening, when he was quite drunk, he was very bitter about the whole business . . . the music business. He needed to diversify.’

  Max Stafford-Clark was due to direct Serious Money, a play by Caryl Churchill. ‘Serious Money was about the City,’ says Stafford-Clark, who had asked Ian to come up with some songs. ‘It dramatized an area that hadn’t previously been seen on stage. As the play was being written, Ian was part of the research. We went down to the Futures Exchange,12 which was very much where the action was, and people were signalling each other the whole time – mostly Essex boys and girls making lots of money. Ian was a God to those people. We had guest passes and we went down onto the trading floor. They were so intrigued by Ian that they stopped dealing all together, and he was banned from appearing on the floor.’

  The two songs for Serious Money, written with Mickey Gallagher, enlivened the production and contained Ian’s sharpest words for years, sadly never recorded. ‘Futures Song’ was particularly apposite:

  I’ve dealt the gelt below the belt and I’m jacking up the ackers,

  My front’s gone short, fuck off old sport, you’re standing on my knackers,

  I’ve spilt my guts, long gilt’s gone nuts, and I think I’m going crackers,

  So full of poo, I couldn’t screw, I fucked it with my backers.

  Out! Buy, buy, buy! Leave it!

  No! Yes! Cunt!

  Four! Five! Sell!

&n
bsp; Quick! Prick! Yes! No! Cunt!

  How hard I dredge to earn my wedge, I’m sharper than a knife,

  Don’t fucking cry, get and buy, Chicago’s going rife,

  You’re back to front, come on you cunt, don’t give me any strife,

  You in or out? Don’t hang about, you’re on the floor of LIFFE!

  Serious Money was a big hit at the Royal Court in March 1987 and won the Evening Standard award for best comedy of the year, although it did little to prevent the imminent stock market crash known as ‘Black Monday’. When the play later opened off Broadway at the Public Theater in New York, it received a positive review from Frank Rich, the legendary critic of the New York Times, who wrote: ‘The traders on the floor of LIFFE transform their hand signals and brokerage jargon into a rap number (with lyrics by Ian Dury) that really makes their business seem, as one character describes it, “a cross between roulette and Space Invaders”.’

  But when Serious Money transferred to Broadway’s Royale Theater the following year, the show closed after only fifteen performances, due in part to a language barrier that Ian had experienced some years earlier when he toured the USA with Lou Reed. There was also much use of the dreaded ‘C-word’. Max Stafford-Clark recalls, ‘I heard a woman in the audience say, “Margaret, I couldn’t understand one word of that whole half, and the one word I could understand I couldn’t possibly repeat to you.” And the other song Ian wrote to end the show was not quite as good. The producer, Joe Papp, said to me, “The problem with this show, Max, is you got the eleven o’clock song at nine o’clock – what you gonna do about that?” He was right.’

  Despite the Broadway debacle, Ian had secured a modest foothold as a writer of libretto, with Stafford-Clark at least. Years earlier, at the height of his fame, Ian had apparently turned down an opportunity to work with Andrew Lloyd-Webber on the musical Cats. ‘I said no straight off,’ he would tell Deborah Ross of the Independent. ‘I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. He’s a wanker, isn’t he? Every time I hear “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” I feel sick, it’s so bad. He got Richard Stilgoe to do the lyrics in the end, who’s not as good as me. He made millions out of it. He’s crap, but he did ask the top man first!’