by Will Birch
‘It was like getting the Victoria Cross, being asked,’ Ian told me. ‘I had to go down there and meet this geezer. “Here comes Mr Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Look out!” The press officer was there, and I was trying not to eff and blind and so forth. I asked my mate Steve Nugent, who’s an anthropologist and knows about these things, to give me the low-down on UNICEF. Steve said, “If you’ve got ‘UN’ on the side of your truck, it’s sanctioned.”’
When Ian met with UNICEF’s Robert Smith it was probably the first time in years he’d been in the company of an eminent person who knew absolutely nothing about him. It was a rare opportunity for Ian to shock and surprise. Accompanied by Derek Hussey Ian turned up at UNICEF with ‘a rag tied round his neck and wearing a crumpled jacket’. Jo Bexley nervously showed the ominous-looking duo into the meeting room, its walls festooned with insignia, its atmosphere formal and businesslike. ‘Ian immediately engaged with Robert,’ remembers Jo. ‘He looked like the most unlikely ragbag character, but as soon as they shook hands, Robert was charmed. Ian was a total contradiction. He was totally up for it and humble about himself. He was probably checking us out too. Robert warmed to him. Ian dropped loads of theatrical references and talked about the London Palladium. He blew us all away.’
Ian blew away a different but equally challenging audience that April when he was asked to open an art exhibition at Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, organized by Roy Marsden, an old friend from the Royal College of Art. Roy was teaching painting at H. M. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs, and the exhibition featured works by the inmates, most of them serving life sentences. Ian told the organizers, ‘I can’t possibly open a show without the artists present, they have to be there.’ As this was clearly impossible, it was arranged for Ian to go to Wormwood Scrubs to meet them. He was accompanied by Humphrey Ocean, who recalls, ‘We visited the “middle-class wing”, so named because the prisoners are “just murderers”: they’ve only done one crime – the big one – but they’re “not criminals”. They made a mistake. We spent two hours there. There was one growler who wasn’t very good with members of the public, but really it was just like art school, except you couldn’t go home at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ Roy Marsden recalls Ian being slightly nervous at the prison. ‘He spent a morning there, talking to the lads, looking at their stuff. They loved it. He also popped into the music wing and gave them a little show on the drums. They went mad, he was a hero.’
1997 was proving to be quite a mellow year, punctuated by periodic check-ups at the London Clinic, all of which confirmed that Ian’s cancer had gone into remission. Young Bill Dury was now two years old, and Ian and Sophy were expecting their second child any minute. On 9 May, three days before Ian’s fifty-fifth birthday, baby Albert arrived. ‘It was a special time,’ says Sophy, who recalled Ian’s domestic lifestyle at Fitzjohn’s Avenue after his two sons were born. ‘He read constantly: he would get all the papers on a Sunday and the Evening Standard every day. He would have the radio on non-stop – the World Service or Radio 4, news, sports, he was interested in everything. He didn’t go out much, but had contact with the world. He was always reading – biography, travel books, Graham Greene, he always had a book on the go.’
At Fitzjohn’s Avenue, old friends continued to visit on a regular basis. No matter how often they might have witnessed one of Ian’s tirades, the inner circle stayed loyal: Humphrey, Denise, Merlin, Smart Mart, Ed Speight, Norman – some of whom Derek the Draw would refer to as Ian’s ‘moths’. Mickey Gallagher remembers the period as the best time he’d had working with Ian. ‘The illness had taken the edge off his bitterness. It was a bigger thing. He was through with picking up on people’s weaknesses. It mellowed him out on all fronts. He was relaxing, singing well and easy to work with. We also spent some time putting finishing touches to Digby Mansions, so that it could be rented out. There were lots of visits to the shops to buy door handles, all the proper stuff.’
It was a time for enjoying life and having a laugh with chums. Ian was at his most content on Sunday afternoons, when he usually declared ‘open house’. ‘He was a brilliant deejay,’ recalls Jock Scot. ‘After he’d got the kids to bed, he’d get the weed out, and we’d have a dozen cans, and he’d play records all night – everything: jazz, songs from the shows, Noël Coward. He would mix tapes on his beat box: he’d have sounds of the jungle, rainstorm approaching. You’d hear the thunder coming closer, then it would start pouring rain. Then he’d have tape recordings from the Second World War: Messerschmitts over Buckingham Palace, the radio report. Sophy would be in the other room, flopped down knackered.’
‘It fell into a rhythm’, says Merlin. ‘Takeaways would be consumed, spliffs would be smoked, and diamonds would be exhibited,’ referring to the curious case of Rainbow George’s rose diamond collection, which became mysteriously depleted one hazy afternoon when Ian and Chaz were shown the jewels. ‘The singer Ronnie Carroll, who lived round the corner and was a friend of George’s, would sometimes appear,’ continues Merlin. ‘Ian used to get people to do their party piece, and Sophy would sing a folk song. Ian would play hand drums and tell endless jokes and stories. He would get you to sit next to him in that little back room. You’d be his best friend for a while and he would whisper in your ear.’
Then one morning the postman delivered Ian a reminder of his tortured schooldays. ‘I got a letter from the Royal Grammar School Debating Society,’ said Ian. ‘It read: “Dear Ian, as a former pupil and art lecturer and punk rocker, you would have interesting things to say to the Debating Society.” I was going to write back and say: “As an art lecturer it interests me very much but as a punk you can go fuck yourselves. ” In 1982 they did Top of the Form on Radio 4. “Here we are at High Wycombe Royal Grammar School, whose most famous pupil was Ian Dury” I think Leonard Cheshire VC might have been one of ’em an’ all [old boy] but the only one they mentioned was me! I couldn’t believe it. I was their most famous fucking pupil!’
Ian flew to Johannesburg in July 1997, en route to Zambia for his debut as a UNICEF representative, accompanied by minder Derek Hussey, Jo Bexley and Claire Williams from UNICEF and a sprinkling of journalists. As one might expect, the trip was not without humorous incident. At Lusaka Airport, Ian passed Derek a bank note with which to bribe the immigration officer, in the hope that they might jump the queue. ‘They’re bound to take a drink here,’ said Ian. ‘We won’t be fucking around with that lot over there, we’ll be round the back, bosh!’ It wasn’t that simple, as Derek recalls: ‘The geezer put the money in his pocket and then pressed a button. The airport came to a standstill. Who’s greased the geezer? Me! That caused a two-hour delay. The UNICEF lot had gone straight through with their parcels, but I’d greased the geezer and had to go through this explanation. I told them, “The bloke I’m with is disabled, he wasn’t feeling very well.” They went through my pockets.’
At the United Nations building in Lusaka, Ian was shown round a number of departments dealing with different aspects of UNICEF’s work to prevent the spread of AIDS and other diseases amongst young children. It was a crash course in field medicine, and Ian took great interest. Over the next five days, the party toured the region, putting in eighteen-hour days to see first-hand the scale of the problem and UNICEF’s initiatives to control it.
‘Ian was sussing us out,’ says Jo Bexley ‘He and Derek were being slightly mischievous. They performed when they needed to but, left to their own devices, they could be a bit naughty. I was quite heavily pregnant and making a radio programme, trying to look after these celebrities and get the coverage. I was doing too much and one night I broke down, physically. I thought I was about to give birth. And Ian was trying to get me to run around for him. I walked into the bar and said to Ian: “Look, mate, I’m absolutely knackered!” From that minute his attitude to me and the trip changed. He’d been having a few drinks and being slightly rude to people, seeing how far he could push it with the journalists and not quite delivering. When I reminded hi
m why he was there, he changed immediately. I now realize he wanted me to stand up to him. From that point I had his respect and he had mine.’
I visited Ian shortly after he returned from Zambia, and he gave me his impressions. ‘I was at this airport at six in the morning. I was with the flying doctor, who’s also got polio . . . waving the plane off. They strip out all the heating and the silencers ’cos it makes the plane lighter – fuckin’ great refrigerator and about nine people all with overcoats on, ’cos it’s so cold, and it’s taking the gear off into the middle of nowhere. We went to the place where they make the callipers and wheelchairs, which was started by these young people who realized the only way they’d get their shit together was to make them themselves. They’ve got a little foundry, they make wheelchairs from old bits of pipe, they get a bit of help from Denmark, a big compound and they’re slowly hacking out a life.
‘Zambia’s not a war-torn country by any means,’ continued Ian. ‘The bottom fell out of the copper market because of fibre optics and what-have-you in about 1970, so they’ve slowly gone a bit broke, and they had a fantastic health service and education system but they’ve slowly got poorer and poorer because the copper’s not so valuable, and they’re suffering. You don’t see many people over the age of fifty. We went to one place where they’re advertising the day of immunization and we said, “How do you advertise it?” There’s eight million people and they’re going to immunize two million children, which is basically all the children under four. We said, “Do you put a poster up?” and they said, “No, you put a poster up, it’ll be there twenty minutes and someone will nick it, for the paper.”
‘We were in the UNICEF trucks, and the driver slings his bottle out the window. I said, “Why did you do that, ain’t that a bit ecologically unsound?” He said somebody would run out of the bush and nick that bottle and use it for the next three years. They get overlap from the Zairian border, where there’s a fucking shocking war going on. They encourage them to cross the border from Zaire to get the injections. The aim is in another two or three years to isolate polio specifically to pockets where it can’t jump to another place so they can eradicate it.
‘I can go to Zambia, have a look around, meet a few people. It’s very useful for me to be a disabled person in a disabled kid’s school in Zambia, for instance. They climb all over me and ask me straight questions and compare legs and all that. Those aspects of it are brilliant. I’m out there as an observer, seeing what goes on and come back and use my so-called abilities to be able to talk about it. That’s my job.’
Recalling key events from the Zambia trip, Jo Bexley says, ‘We were in the bush and all these expectant mothers were sitting waiting for the vaccine for their children, flying doctors, boats coming up river, bikes, motorbikes, and the doctor was giving a chat through a translator and he said, “If you don’t take this vaccine, your children might get polio. It even happens to white men. Can anyone see somebody here who might have polio?” A little kid pointed to Ian, who was close to tears, not embarrassed or ashamed or pissed off. He didn’t feel singled out. He was absolutely proud that he had been used in that way. I put the microphone to his mouth and he said, “It’s the most humbling moment of my life.” We both broke down in tears.
‘The flip side of that was when we went to another orphanage for disabled children. The disability thing in Zambia is not quite how it is here, they still call them “handicapped” and put them in homes so they don’t become street children. They are well funded, run by Italian nuns, with a hydro pool. The kids want to become doctors and solicitors. They set up this performance for us, the visiting dignitaries. We were sat at this top table and they brought on the little boys, the middle-size boys and the big boys to perform, all severely disabled. There were kids with huge heads, it was pretty bad. Ian was getting more and more angry. He saw them as performing monkeys. “It’s a fucking freak show,” he said. He was getting so angry I had to hold him down. I told him to just get through it. He did hold it together, but I think it hit a note with Ian. Maybe it brought back memories of Chailey.’
22
Sweetness and Light
Harley Street, London, 29 January 1998. It was a routine 3.30 appointment at the London Clinic, but the outcome was not good. Tests showed that secondary tumours had started to appear on Ian’s liver. The prognosis was harsh: terminal cancer.
‘How long have I got, doc?’ asked Ian.
‘Between eight months and eight years,’ replied the doctor.
‘That’ll do,’ said Ian. ‘Bosh!’
Sophy was slightly less flippant. It was the hardest moment when the doctor told her that the cancer would kill Ian. ‘It was like a storm descending,’ says Sophy. ‘There was nothing the doctors could do, but they could offer Ian something that would prolong his life.’
Oncologist David Gueret-Wardle recommended chemotherapy using a Hickman line – a thin plastic tube that would run between Ian’s body and a small container – to deliver anticancer drugs into his bloodstream. It was a pricey option, but Ian was willing to dig deep. ‘A nozzle is implanted in my chest, straight into the main artery,’ Ian told me, genuinely fascinated by the technology. ‘I plug it in Tuesday morning and take it off Thursday night. It’s exceedingly expensive but exceedingly gentle. The other end is attached to this bottle in a bum-bag round my belt. When I go out for a walk, I’m worried someone’s gonna think it’s a money belt and nick it!’
The liquid was kept in the fridge, and Sophy was taught how to connect the Hickman line, flush it out, disconnect it and clean it, allowing her and Ian to manage the programme and live as normal a life as possible. ‘It doesn’t make you hair fall out, no nausea,’ added Ian. ‘I get a little bit tired the day after I’ve unplugged. When I go to the London Clinic I’m a noisy bastard, telling jokes all the time. I have to try to keep my mouth shut ’cos some people are in a terrible state. My surgeon is a joker. He said he’s on the cutting edge! Not ten feet in front of the cutting edge – they’re the ones who kill you! There’s a lot of humour in the trade. I’ve got a certain equilibrium about it ’cos I’m with good people, but it’s a snaky bastard, cancer. It can become immune, run away, hide, pop up somewhere else. It’s quite an exciting time.’
But, for Ian, time was running out. On 2 March, he and Sophy were married at Camden Town Hall in a modest ceremony. ‘It was all very moving,’ says Sophy. ‘Ian had his chemo bag on, but it was a lovely day. Then we had an Indian takeaway and a nap!’ The chemotherapy forced Ian to take things easy, but his work rate didn’t slow down. At the end of April, he flew to Spain to promote Love Pants with Blockheads Gallagher and Turnbull, playing as an acoustic trio in Madrid and Barcelona. In a reference to the Hickman line and his musical performance, Ian joked, ‘I unplugged on the Thursday night and we were unplugged on the Friday. A double unplugged! The adrenalin keeps you up. My hands go a bit like lobsters. That’s all, though. So far, touch wood, the chemotherapy is keeping it at bay.
‘The secondaries are much diminished from what they were. You can only measure them every three months ’cos they have to scan me, in the big tunnel, at the London Clinic. I’m having a lecture about it next week from the specialist so I can learn about it and not talk bullshit when I’m doing interviews! He came in to see me when I had the line put in and he said he hadn’t decided what to give me yet. He’d have to look on the Internet. He said it sounded frivolous but it’s not, because all around the world there’s thousands of people working on the disease and they post their findings on PubMed. Something might come up tonight.’
Despite his illness, Ian kept in touch with developments in the art world and had visited the ‘Sensation’ exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in which many of the new and controversial young British artists were represented. Ian was not a big fan of conceptual art. ‘I’d rather see “Swans at Play”,’ he said. ‘I’m a great believer in going out and drawing and painting, but there’s room in the world for Andy Warhol.’ That spring
Ian visited the Kapil Jariwala Gallery in Mayfair, where Humphrey Ocean’s and Jock McFadyen’s two-man ‘Urbasuburba’ exhibition was showing. Whilst perusing the works, he unexpectedly encountered Keith Lucas, the guitarist he had forced out of the Kilburns some twenty-three years earlier. Once close friends, they hadn’t spoken since the day that Ian and Spider paid Keith a visit in an attempt to recover some money, following the group’s dissolution.
Ian was still beset with guilt – in fact, he’d told Sophy it was ‘the only time he’d ever been really naughty’. But Keith was prepared to forget the fact he’d once been threatened with having his legs broken. Attempting to break the ice, he approached Ian. ‘I’m very sorry to hear about Betty,’ said Keith. ‘Oh, we’re talking again, are we?’ Ian replied, as if only hours, not decades, had elapsed since their showdown.
Seeking a UK outlet for Mr Love Pants, Ian entered into discussions with East Central One, a record label run by Steve Fernie and Jamie Spencer, who had worked for Stiff Records back in 1981. ‘I was always a fan,’ says Jamie, ‘and when the opportunity arose to work with Ian, it seemed a natural development.’ To discuss their plans for the album, Steve and Jamie met with Ian at a Hampstead restaurant, accompanied by Andrew King and Mickey Gallagher.