Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  Chaz tells it differently: ‘Ian presented his lyrics to me on foolscap paper. Quite regularly I’d see “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” appear at the top of the pile. I’d heard the expression before, but I couldn’t get a handle on it as a song. One day Ian said, “how about [hums the riff]” – I thought it was very good – he didn’t generally come up with musical ideas – but I later discovered the tune was a Charlie Haden bass solo from Ornette Coleman’s “Change of the Century”!’ Davey Payne adds, ‘It’s “Old Joe Clark”, an old-time Virginian folk song. In America, kids are taught it in school. Charlie Haden would have played it on the fiddle as a child.’

  Sex and drugs and rock and roll

  Are all my brain and body need,

  Sex and drugs and rock and roll

  Are very good indeed . . .

  Like a number of Ian’s titles, ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ would work its way into the English language and appear in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Variations of the phrase had shown up in the counterculture press of the early 1970s (see John Sinclair’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll, Dope and Fucking in the Streets’), and in 1972, Australian band Daddy Cool had released an album entitled Sex, Dope, Rock and Roll: Teenage Heaven, but it was Ian who seized on the words to create a song. The middle eight was particularly insightful:

  Keep your silly ways; throw them out the window,

  The wisdom of your ways; I’ve been there and I know,

  Lots of other ways; what a jolly bad show

  If all you ever do . . . is business you don’t like

  Ian’s spirits picked up in the autumn of 1976, despite his first quarrel with Chaz over collaboration on an advertising jingle, which, although it was potentially lucrative, Ian saw as a distraction – ‘business you don’t like’ perhaps. But after a blazing row in which Chaz accused Ian of being a ‘shitty singer’ and Ian told Chaz he wouldn’t recognize a good lyric if it bit him on the arse, they made up and commenced work on ‘a song for Gene Vincent’.

  ‘Is this the place where any old cunt can bring a tape and get a record deal?’ asked Eric Goulden, a twenty-two-year-old singer/ songwriter who showed up at Stiff Records in September 1976, brandishing a demo cassette. Goulden, who had catchy songs and youth on his side, was perfect. He was quickly signed up and told that he would be known professionally as ‘Wreckless Eric’. Within days, Goulden was despatched to Pathway Studios to cut his song ‘Go the Whole Wide World’ with producer Nick Lowe, who was also busy producing Stiff act the Damned, the first UK ‘punk’ group to appear on vinyl.

  Slightly bemused by the speed at which his career was gaining pace, Goulden found himself thrown into the gigging-and-ligging world of all things Stiff. On 26 October, he attended a concert by Graham Parker and the Rumour at the Victoria Palace and later that evening met Ian. ‘Nick introduced us,’ recalls Eric. ‘It was at some hideous after-show party. Ian was at quite a low point then, but he was there with Denise, who was beautiful, with gold chains on her leather mini skirt. Ian was wearing an old raincoat. I was a big Kilburns fan, and I told Ian I thought he was great. He thought I was taking the piss and started calling for Fred, but Denise told Ian, “He’s serious, he means it.”’

  Ian recognized in Eric Goulden a kindred spirit and took him under his wing, but despite Goulden’s talent, Ian was clutching at straws. He was desperate for anything that might sway his fortunes in the music business, including mentoring Eric, whom he summoned to Oval Mansions. Eric arrived on 1 December to find Ian and Chaz finishing up a new song entitled ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’, with its reference to ‘Thunderbird wine’, a drink Ian had first encountered when he met two black GIs on a Cambridge-bound train back in 1963.

  ‘Ian and I became friends,’ says Eric. ‘We’d both been to art school and we talked about rock ’n’ roll, but there was something a bit sad about him. He was looking for something, playing the waiting game. He had to keep reminding everyone that he was the greatest lyric writer in the country to shore up his confidence. He used to say to me, “Eric, you should never forget that you are the second-greatest lyric writer in the country.” So I would ask him, “OK Ian, who do you reckon then is the number one lyric writer?” He would get really cross.’

  Expecting that his first single would soon be released by Stiff, Wreckless Eric looked around for musicians for his backing group, to be known as the New Rockets. Knowing that Denise was learning to play bass, he asked Ian about her. ‘Oh, she won’t want to play with you,’ said Ian. By the end of the year, however, Denise had become Eric’s lodger after Ian had suddenly declared, ‘Me and Denise are having a difficult time at the moment, would you mind if she came and stayed at your place for a while?’ Ian wondered if Eric had a spare room he could put Denise in. The next day, she turned up on his doorstep with a bag of clothes and a bass guitar. ‘I still had a job and I’d come home from work and she would have been playing the bass all day,’ says Eric. ‘We were both very shy, but I said to her, “We could play together if you like,” so we started playing my songs. It was like a secret society, a lot of nervous giggling. Eventually she went back to Ian but she carried on coming over to go through songs.’

  At Humphrey Ocean’s behest, Eric and Denise were joined by Davey Payne on sax. Davey was amused to discover that Eric lived at ‘number one Melody Road’. ‘When I told the musician’s union my address,’ says Eric, ‘they thought I was taking the piss. Anyway, Ian decided he was coming over to hear what Denise and I were doing. I think he thought we were having an affair. We started to play the songs and he said, “What you need is a drummer.” He went out in the back yard, got an old enamel bowl and started hitting it with a couple of pens. Suddenly I had a band, but Ian was in charge. He had a fire-damaged Olympic drum kit, which was delivered to my house by Spider Rowe whilst I was out. I don’t know how he got in, but I came home one evening and there was Ian’s drum kit, set up, with a note from Fred that read: “You can never keep the spider out.”’

  In his next letter to Roberta, Ian once again begged her to come to London and laid his soul bare. ‘I want to join a swimming club. Get a new leg. Get even more beautiful. My next band and my next songs are going to allow me to build the castle. I only have one ambition and that is to work without hindrance till I die . . . my time will come.’ Despite his confident prediction, Ian was still pondering the advice of Tommy Roberts, who two years earlier had suggested that Ian might consider getting ‘a real job’. Maybe it really was time to retract his bid for stardom and seek gainful employment, or what musicians apologetically refer to as a ‘day job’. Any kind of backroom occupation was out of the question for Ian. His ideal role would be in the public eye, yet menial in nature. When he saw a newspaper advertisement for a ‘lift attendant’ at Harrods, he imagined a uniform with red velvet trim, brass buttons and a pillbox hat. He was seriously tempted and on 6 December attended an interview at the Knightsbridge department store, but the job had been taken.

  Instead of charming or possibly horrifying customers at Harrods, Ian spent much of the early months of 1977 in Aylesbury with Betty and the children, commuting into London to visit Blackhill or write and record with Chaz. Jemima remembers, ‘It was a big deal when dad came home. He was developing his fame persona, his mystique. He became “Ian Dury” a bit more and started to believe in himself.’ Occasionally Jemima and Baxter would stay at Oval Mansions. Jemima remembers that her ‘official job’ was sorting out her father’s records and putting them back in their sleeves. ‘He wasn’t a dad that came and did things with you,’ remembers Baxter. ‘You did things with dad, whatever he was doing, which was more or less how it always was.’

  In January, Ian heard that sixty-eight-year-old music hall veteran Max Wall was about to record a version of ‘England’s Glory’ for Stiff, with Dave Edmunds producing and Humphrey Ocean drawing the picture sleeve. Things were looking up. In his spare time, Ian grilled Fred Rowe about his prison experiences and recorded three hours of Fred’s stories on casset
te. He also taped discussions with roadie Pete Rush, who would provide him with tales for a proposed ‘roadies musical’. Ian fantasized about ways in which he would present his new songs, envisaging ‘a one-off violent gig at the Roundhouse with a tough band of slick pros . . . fifteen heavy-duty songs written in two weeks, played by Alan Spenner on bass, Bryan Spring on drums, both from Hackney and Pete Townshend on “gtr chunks” and Davey Payne on sax. Maybe call it “The Hard 10 Men”, roadies recruited by Fred.’

  Ian needn’t have worried. With a batch of great new songs to demo, he and Chaz booked a month of Tuesdays in February at Alvic Studios in Wimbledon. After four weeks they emerged with eight promising demos. There was also an unexpected bonus. Alvic studio was owned by Al James, a bass player at the Talk of the Town and Vic Sweeney, a drummer at the Park Lane Hilton. Actually, Al and Vic had played slightly hipper gigs in their time but were too modest to put themselves forward when Ian mentioned that he was looking for a hot rhythm section. But Al and Vic did know just the guys – Norman and Charley, who ‘played so loud they broke all the VU meters’. Ian had to have them in his band.

  Bassist Norman Watt-Roy was born in Bombay, India in 1951 and had come to England at the age of four. The veteran of numerous UK bands, including ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’, Norman was blessed with that rock ’n’ roll ‘just-got-out-of-bed’ look and authentic dark circles under his eyes. An extremely physical bass player, he neatly dovetailed with Guyana-born drummer Hugh ‘Charley’ Charles, who could lay down a groove like no other percussionist in London. They had played together in the Radio Caroline-sponsored group Loving Awareness and were the UK’s greatest undiscovered rhythm section. Making contact with them was Ian’s next piece of good fortune and the turning point in his quest for musical perfection. ‘It took off like a rocket,’ remembers Peter Jenner. ‘As soon as he found Norman and Charley, Ian went up five gears.’ Excited by his discovery, Ian wrote Roberta on 28 March: ‘I’m tooled-up to steam into any one of a lot of record companies. I’m the best wordsmith and performer and I’m learning how to sing. I’ll be on the road by the autumn with a hand-picked band and nothing is going to top it.’ It was a bold claim given past disappointments but, amazingly, it would all come true.

  As well as his collaborations with Chaz, Ian was also writing a number of songs with Stephen Nugent, the American anthropologist and writer who had been responsible for one of the earliest press articles about the Kilburns. Upon returning from a two-year trip to Brazil, Nugent was asked by Ian to provide music for what Ian described as ‘the heavy duty songs’. Denise would give Ian a lift over to Nugent’s home in Highgate, or Ian would sometimes take a bus. ‘The bus was a bit of a struggle for Ian,’ recalls Nugent. ‘He came with the lyrics, and I would work out a tune. He would sometimes stay over, or I would put him on a bus and send him back south. Some people say that it was odd that he was working with an American, but it turned out that the ones I wrote were the more Englishy songs whilst Chaz was more fixated on American funk.’

  The Dury/Nugent compositions included: ‘My Old Man’, ‘Billericay Dickie’, ‘Blackmail Man’ and ‘Plaistow Patricia’. When combined with the Jankel co-writes, Ian had the basis of a winning album with which to relaunch his career, but he was still worried about the amount of debt he was incurring through the Blackhill arrangement. Writing to solicitor David Gentle on 4 May, he expressed concern that he was ‘labouring under the weight of his advance’, which now stood at ‘fourteen Gs’. He was also anxious about his impending birthday. ‘By this time I was nearly thirty-five,’ recalled Ian. ‘I remembered reading that Bruce Forsyth was at the end of Woolacombe Pier a week before getting Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Arse pretty much hanging out, about thirty-odd when he got the call. He said the reason it went well for him was because he wasn’t bitter. I always rated Bruce Forsyth. He was still in love with his craft. I’ve been at the end of the pier a few times since then.’

  On 20 May, Ian found himself back at Alvic Studios, overseeing the recording of ‘Semaphore Signals’ for Wreckless Eric. It was to be the b-side of ‘Go the Whole Wide World’, which had been recorded six months earlier, but kept on the back burner while Stiff sought a distribution outlet. Ian also produced Eric’s four-song EP entitled The Swan and Edgar Suite,7 named after the Piccadilly department store where Eric had worked. ‘We recorded it in Pathway Studio,’ recalls Eric, ‘but Ian couldn’t get on with the place. I didn’t want to put it out. Ian’s attitude was, “We are making art,” but his strength was not the recording studio – I think he’d had too many bad experiences.’

  But Ian was about to have a good experience when he entered the Workhouse studio in the Old Kent Road in July 1977. Co-owned by Blackhill and pop pragmatist Manfred Mann, the twenty-four-track facility was ideal for Ian in all but one respect – its steep and narrow staircase leading up to the control room. Under the watchful eye of Peter Jenner, in his role as producer or, to quote Chaz, ‘spliff-maker, adjudicator and foil for Ian’, and engineer Laurie Latham, Ian kept a chart that plotted out the songs and who would play the various solos. The band consisted of Chaz (keyboards and guitar) and Norman and Charley (bass and drums), augmented by Ed Speight (guitar) and Geoff Castle (Moog synthesizer). Former Kilburn Davey Payne was called in to overdub sax. Before each song was recorded, Ian would play the musicians the demo version and urge them to replicate their parts with only minor adjustments to the arrangement.

  With a limited budget and no firm outlet for the record it was crucial that the recording schedule was adhered to. The album was completed in just three weeks, but once again there was no major record company interest. There was, however, one obvious solution. ‘Andrew had taken it to every record company in the country and got a blank,’ said Ian. ‘We spoke to Jake and we couldn’t lose by putting it out on Stiff, because, if they’d have gone up the wall, ownership would have reverted to us. It was a lease deal. Blackhill didn’t really want Stiff to have it. I didn’t care. I thought we’d have more chance with Stiff. Jake and Dave together were hot property.’

  Thirty-two Alexander Street was the right place and the right time for all concerned. Blackhill owned the building and managed Ian’s career from their offices on the first floor. They rented the ground floor and basement to Stiff Records, the perfect refuge for left-of-centre artistes like Ian. Everyone was within shouting distance of each other. On 12 July 1977, Blackhill licensed Ian’s album to Stiff, who were enjoying unprecedented publicity for their then humble status. Ian was a journalist’s dream – a human quote machine whose image neatly complemented Stiff’s marketing flair, then the province of Jake Riviera. To make matters even more exciting, Jake and Dave Robinson were planning a UK tour for their leading ‘stars’, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Larry Wallis and Wreckless Eric. Ian slotted in nicely. ‘Yeah, I’ll ’ave some of that,’ he said.

  At the end of August, Stiff released Ian’s first solo single, ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’. Not surprisingly, it received scant radio play and failed to sell in great quantity, but in the eyes of the music press it was an instant classic, signalling Ian’s long overdue change of fortune. Amongst ear-to-the-ground music writers, he enjoyed a groundswell of support going all the way back to the Kilburns. Less enlightened journalists were having their ears bent by Stiff’s latest staffer, Kosmo Vinyl, serving under the label’s publicity guru, Glen Colson. ‘I had been retained to hype “Sex and Drugs”,’ says Kosmo, who had originally joined Stiff as an office boy and general factotum. Twenty-year-old carrot-haired Kosmo Vinyl (born Mark Charles Dunk) had ingratiated himself at Stiff simply by hanging around Alexander Street and turning up at Graham Parker shows, offering to help the roadies. ‘I pestered Dave Robinson for a job although I didn’t know what the jobs were,’ he says. ‘The first thing I had to do at Stiff was fix a door. Then Dave and Jake had me fly-posting. You’d just turn up and be told what to do. It evolved. My big mouth put me in a certain direction.’ Within twelve months Vinyl’s big m
outh would earn him a place as Ian’s press officer and media consultant.

  For the cover shot of his debut LP, Ian called upon the services of photographer Chris Gabrin, whom he knew from his pub rock days. ‘Ian already had a title in mind,’ says Gabrin. ‘I think he’d seen the outfitter’s shop in Victoria8 when he was waiting for a bus, and it had given him the trigger. He specifically wanted to do the shot there and have his son, Baxter, with him. The shopkeeper was delighted; he let us get on with it and when the album came out, he stuck a sign in the window saying: “We sell to the stars”. In the reflection in the shop window you can actually see my old mini van, but I managed to position Ian and Baxter so as to obscure my own reflection. Baxter was shy, and I remember Ian trying to encourage him.’

  ‘I don’t think I was there on the premise that I might be featured,’ says Baxter Dury. ‘I was six years old and I think I was just hanging out with dad because I was staying with him for the week. Dad always romantically maintained that I just strolled into the shot, which I don’t think was quite right, I think it was slightly more orchestrated than that, but I’m wearing a pair of football boots, so I must have been just mucking about. I don’t really think dad thought I was going to be in it.’

  Chris Gabrin took twenty-four shots of Ian that afternoon. Immediately after the session, he rushed off to get the film processed so he could show them to him without delay. ‘He came up to my darkroom to look at the results,’ recalls Gabrin. ‘We both instantly went for the same shot, but I remember Ian bollocking me because my darkroom was on the fifth floor and he didn’t like the stairs. The banisters were against the wall, and he couldn’t grip the handrail properly. I got paid a very small amount for my work, but Ian did my telephone answering machine message as part payment. It got ridiculous; people would call just to hear Ian’s voice. They’d phone and tell me not to answer their next call so they could listen to it.’