by Will Birch
Overseeing Davey’s New York sessions were producer Adam Kidron and, playing bass, one Mike McEvoy, an American multi-instrumentalist barely out of his teens. Davey saw Ian on 11 May and enthused about the ‘child prodigy’ McEvoy. Perhaps this young instrumentalist could be the new Chaz Jankel, thought Ian, having also heard good things about McEvoy from Adam Kidron. Mike McEvoy was a ‘musical guy’ who could write charts and hire horn players. He had never been part of the punk scene, preferring jazz-funk, jazz fusion and Weather Report. He knew music theory and always wanted to challenge his musical chops. ‘Ian was always talking about rock ’n’ roll in the fifties, especially Gene Vincent,’ says McEvoy, ‘but a lot of the Blockheads stuff had an incredible underbelly of funk. There was Ian’s edginess, but the riffs were funk.’
McEvoy, who lived with his parents in London, was summoned to Digby Mansions, where he found Ian surrounded by sheets of A3 covered in meticulously handwritten song fragments. Ian wasn’t giving much away at their initial meeting, but McEvoy presumed his task would be to turn Ian’s lyrical sketches into cohesive, recordable gold. ‘I used to go round and wake him up,’ recalls McEvoy. ‘He told me where I’d find the key, and he’d be in bed with some girl. I’d make them coffee and bring it in. He was having fun. An hour later we were writing, jamming, I was just hanging out.’ Over the next few weeks, the prodigiously talented McEvoy dazzled Ian with his musical skills, to the point where Ian began to refer to his new songwriting partner as ‘Magic Mike McEvoy’. In this upbeat atmosphere, the duo started to write the songs that would fill one half of Ian’s next album. For the remainder, Ian reunited with his former writing partner Russell Hardy, with whom he sought to concoct a more quirky selection. Ian was effectively hedging his bets by imagining an album that would combine a neo-Blockhead jazz-funk groove with an endearing Englishness, more akin to the late Kilburns era. Russell, now a carpenter by trade, was coincidentally building Ian some shelves.
As well as writing with Ian, Mike McEvoy also got a taste of life on the road. In August 1982, Ian was offered a short tour of Greece and reluctantly called on the services of the banished Blockheads, now lured only by money. McEvoy, who was taken along to deputize for the ever-absent Chaz Jankel, recalls, ‘I was a twenty-one-year-old who had never toured, put together with these old road dogs who’d cut their teeth, paid their dues and then some. You had all the interpersonal politics going on, and they might have perceived me as a threat, but the real conflict was between the Blockheads and Ian. Without their vocalist they couldn’t work, thus he was integral to them being able to pay their bills. The vibes weren’t good.’
Blackhill, meanwhile, had gone into receivership. After nearly two decades working together, Peter Jenner and Andrew King were on the verge of parting company, but their dissolution provided a fortuitous outcome for Ian. Blackhill’s contract with Stiff had recently expired, and ownership of Ian’s first three albums had reverted to the doomed company. The official receiver, whose task it was to salvage as much as possible from the situation, recognized that the Dury master tapes were one of Blackhill’s few tangible assets and was prepared to let them go to the highest bidder. Ian got wind of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own his own recordings and put in a bid. For just £5,000 he acquired the copyright to all of his hit records, allowing him to negotiate record distribution deals around the world and enjoy improved royalties for decades to come.
Despite the comings and goings of a few casual girlfriends and the occasional presence of Mike McEvoy, Ian found Digby Mansions cold and unforgiving. Since the sudden departure of his most loyal minder, Fred Rowe, he’d been reluctant to venture out alone for fear of falling over in Hammersmith Broadway, or being recognized and cornered by fans and unable to escape. Imprisoned in the apartment, he yearned for a new driver to ferry him around and a permanent girlfriend who might take on domestic duties. Perhaps he could find someone who was a combination of the two. Ian’s best opportunity of meeting new faces was on promotional outings or at media interviews. He was still considered to be a worthy voice on matters of coping with disability, and this took him to television and radio stations around the country. ‘He would sit next to a girl in the canteen and she’d be on the train with him back to London that evening,’ recalls Andrew King. ‘He could fucking well pull if he put his mind to it.’
One girl whom Ian ‘pulled’ in such circumstances was quickly enrolled as his new live-in assistant in the autumn of 1982, following a discussion about the long, camel-coloured overcoat she was wearing at a provincial TV studio. Ian told her he wanted the coat and repeatedly phoned her on the pretext of seeing if she would part with it, while pleading with her to come to London. The young girl, who has since established a notable career in media and wishes to remain anonymous, became known to Ian’s friends as ‘The Overcoat’. Arriving at Digby Mansions, she was given the keys to his customized blue delivery van to run him to appointments and recording sessions.
‘He was quite a powerful and persuasive person,’ she says. ‘He talked very warmly and respectfully about his ex-wife and children but he didn’t make any effort to contact them at that time. He saw his mum quite a bit and seemed very proud of the fact that she was fairly posh. He would often mention it. Even though I really liked him, he was a sadistic person in terms of mental cruelty. Initially he liked the fact that I was a university-educated person, but it was as if he had to take that on and expose what I didn’t know. He enjoyed making people feel uncomfortable, there’s no doubt about it. His idea of a “nice evening in” was to make you sit in a room and listen to jazz albums while complaining about how crap modern music was. He would drum along to the jazz for hour after hour and, if you tried to leave the room, he would force you to stay. It was like being held hostage.
‘He was also extremely controlling about what I wore. He had an eye for style, but he would say, “You’d look much better if you lost weight or dressed like that person over there.” One night he said we were going out to dinner. I asked what kind of place it would be – girls need to know how to dress – and he said, “It’s just a little caff.” When we got there it was Le Caprice, recently opened, the hottest spot in town. We met Tommy Roberts – Mr Freedom – and I was in Doc Martens and jeans. Why not just say, “We’re going somewhere nice”? It was his idea of fun, to deliberately piss you off. There was a slight element of contempt.’
Throughout the winter Ian persevered with his keep-fit regime and continued to write and record new material. When he and the Blockheads played London’s Lyceum just before Christmas 1982, Chaz Jankel put in a fleeting appearance, having been out of the group for two years. Although the Lyceum was ‘a triumph’, Chaz chose not to join the group on the return trip to Greece that immediately followed, and Mike McEvoy was again called upon to deputize at the two shows in Athens. It was in Greece that Ian and ‘The Overcoat’ parted company. ‘Living with Ian had been a bleak experience from my point of view,’ she says. ‘It ended with a physical fight, which was pretty horrible. I don’t think he knew that I had been injured. I didn’t tell anyone, I was ashamed of the whole business.’
Ian had agreed to take part in a television documentary to be directed by Franco Rosso for Channel 4, then in its infancy. For six weeks, Rosso’s camera crew filmed Ian in various locations, including Digby Mansions, Island Studios at Basing Street and a hydrotherapy pool in Putney, where he exercised his ‘little arm’ under the watchful eye of Doctor Kate Forrest, known to her clients as ‘Dr Kit’. Ian was becoming suspicious of Rosso’s motives and started objecting to various crew members and generally prevaricating. Rosso responded by calling Ian’s bluff. ‘I told him if he didn’t want to do it, that was OK, we would all go home. Then I’d get a phone call and we’d start again. He was very suspicious. I think he thought we were going to stitch him up. He had a naughty streak in him that was great, but you had to front him off the whole time. You also had to be prepared to indulge him, then you’d get something out of it.’
The project picked up when Rosso recruited cameraman Chris Morphet, who had worked on various film projects for Stiff Records. But then Ian wanted to know what Rosso was aiming for . . . what kind of film would it be? How would it be edited? The truth was, the director didn’t know. He was embarking on a journey into the unknown, over which Ian would have equal control. The finished work would be a true reflection of its subject in that period. As soon as the cameras started to roll, Rosso realized that Ian was playing a clever game. Ian seemed to know exactly how much film there was in the camera and how much time remained and measured out his performances accordingly. Even when Rosso covered over the red light that signified recording was in progress Ian was able to sense with some degree of accuracy whether or not the film was rolling. ‘He had a knack for reaching the climax of a scene just as the tape was about to run out,’ remembers Rosso. ‘He held back on the big interview – the one he knew we wanted. He left it until midnight on the last day of filming.’
‘He insisted Jenny Cotton was with him,’ continues Rosso, ‘to hold his hand if you like, then he started, and we let it roll. It was hysterical when he was reading the lyrics, Ian at his naughty best. Before we did the scene, he said, “I’ve got to talk to you.” He took me into the music room, and there was a large box in the corner. He said, “I’m a bit worried . . . do you want me to get the callipers out?” I didn’t know what the hell he was going on about, then he opened the box, and it was full of his old, worn-out leg irons. I think he was trying to embarrass me. “Here they are, is this what you want?” he shouted, waving them around. Then he sat on my knee and put his arm round me and said, “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” I think he thought it might have bothered me. It was an odd moment. Then he started to talk. We started rolling, and he was off. It was just what we’d been waiting for – Ian relaxed, talking about his lyrics.’
Just before midnight on 3 November 1983, Franco Rosso’s fifty-minute documentary was screened on Channel 4. Peggy tuned in to watch the director’s totally disarming portrait of her son and was justly proud. She and thousands of viewers saw various aspects of Ian’s life: the diligent songwriter, thumbing his thesaurus for inspiration; the skilled swimmer, pushing himself to the limit in a hydrotherapy pool; the fitness fanatic, sweating on his exercise bike; and the compassionate role model, demonstrating the joys of percussion to children with special needs at Brookfield House School in Waltham Forest. Most touchingly, viewers saw an ancient photograph of Ian at Chailey, in cape and calliper, the little crippled boy who had gone on to conquer adversity.
But had Ian overcome his childhood tragedy? ‘The Overcoat’, his former live-in lover, thinks not. ‘He was a very angry person, possibly because of the hand he’d been dealt. He was also bitter about having to scrabble around.’ Ian was certainly forced to come to terms with the fact that his hit-making days were over, but his anger was always bubbling below the surface. During one interview in Franco Rosso’s film, he talked about the high incidence of cruelty to children in society – some of whom, he said, were ‘put in spin dryers’. As his story continued he was clearly trying hard to suppress his rage. It was an understandable emotion, but as his nostrils started to flare and the pitch of his voice rose, one could see how easily he might have lost control in private.
Friends remember how he would explode with rage at the slightest irritation. Chaz Jankel: ‘There were many incidents after gigs where what could have been a beautiful evening would change suddenly with Ian screaming at somebody in the dressing room. A nice after-gig atmosphere would turn into hell, everyone scattering to get away from Ian’s mania, his anger.’ Future collaborator Max Stafford-Clark says, ‘His disability did make him angry. I remember him getting drunk one night and saying, “Every morning I wake up and have to put this thing on my leg. You don’t have to fucking do that, but I have to, every morning.” It defined him.’
Others talk of Ian’s tears welling up at the mention of his dad’s death or recalling his nightmare time in Chailey where he was made to masturbate bullies. ‘I wondered if he was acting when he cried,’ says Ingrid Mansfield-Allman. ‘It seemed very clever – the “look at poor me, I’m hideous” routine when he’d done something really awful that he wanted to get away with. If he realized he was bang-to-rights it was one of his strategies, to use this thing that you haven’t got.’
Polio was Ian’s ‘get out of jail free’ card. He was certainly mentally scarred by the experience, but he would turn on the waterworks for dramatic effect. Furthermore, behind the mainly tranquil television image, his life was in turmoil. It had been that way ever since his dream of success had become reality and had got worse since success had deserted him. His sudden outbursts were often attributed to the drink, but when Rosso’s cameras first entered Ian’s life he was still recovering from hepatitis and had hardly touched a drop in months.
Although his recording career was in cruise mode, Ian was still in demand. Recruited by the media as a cultural commentator, he appeared on BBC2 television to review the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, where he picked out a couple of figurative paintings that caught his eye. On ITV’s A Better Read he recited poetry from Hard Lines – New Poetry and Prose – and then produced a pile of books to illustrate his love of words. These included The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs and his well-thumbed copy of The Lawless Decade, New York Post journalist Paul Sann’s account of the American prohibition era of the 1920s that had fired Ian’s imagination and formed the basis of his thesis at the Royal College of Art in 1966.
Although Ian struggled to articulate his love of art and literature, he was very much the verbal gymnast when it came to discussing music. This was especially true in radio interviews, where, relieved of visual concerns, his mind would race faster than a Charlie Parker sax solo, occasionally throwing in some unexpected phrase or cultural reference. When he talked himself into a blind alley, he could improvise his way out. If he tripped over his tongue as some mild untruth was delivered, he would just keep on blowing. If his interrogator was female, he could be quite flirtatious, as was the case in his conversation with Anne Nightingale for Radio 1’s Mailbag in August 1983. Anne, by the way, was a fan, and her admiration became clear.
Anne – Do you need good musical knowledge to write good song lyrics?
Ian – The most important thing is the rhythm of it, not the chords. I don’t know a thing about chords. I don’t know my brass from my oboe!
Anne – How do you set about writing lyrics? Do you think, ‘Right, scribble scribble’ immediately, or do you let it go round your head a bit first?
Ian – I whack it down immediately but I don’t make it into a finished article . . . I started writing a lyric to come and talk to you about. The first thing I wrote is called The Day We Changed the World’. I write the title down first, ’cos that hopefully will get me at it. Therefore I’ve got to describe the horribleness of before this happened. All I’ve got is: ‘I grew more cynical and jaded, expecting nothing but the worst, and my bright potential faded, and my bubble slowly burst.’
Anne [excited] – Oh! I think that’s marvellous!
Polydor had declined to release Ian’s new album, 4,000 Weeks’ Holiday – a reference to the average person’s lifespan – due to the inclusion of a song entitled ‘Noddy Harris’ (aka ‘Fuck Off Noddy’). It wasn’t the offensive language that perturbed the label so much as the threat of an injunction from the Enid Blyton estate. The late children’s authoress would have been horrified by the thought of Noddy – her innocent little creation – associating with Winnie the Pooh, who was ‘having a wank’, watched by ‘Thomas the Tank’. When Ian refused to delete the offending track, the album was taken off the release schedule.
As Ian was squaring up to Polydor, holding out for his artistic credibility as he saw it, his old pal Barney Bubbles, who had been working on the 4,000 Weeks sleeve design, was in a battle of his own. In the depths of depression and aggravated by a crippling tax demand and
the mainstream record industry’s crass demands on his talent, Barney committed suicide on 14 November 1983 at his Islington home. Ian was stunned. Barney’s pre-eminent sponsor, Jake Riviera, remarked to me in Dingwalls later that night: ‘It’s amazing what some people will do to get out of designing a Nick Lowe sleeve!’ On the surface, this seemed to be a callous comment on such a tragic death, but, like many of Riviera’s throwaway lines, it was bang on the money; Bubbles was indeed tired of serving an industry that in the main failed to appreciate or reward his genius. Ian, though, assumed a kinship with the artist, telling me, ‘Barney didn’t have the faults or the ego. He made me feel second class. I wanted his approval in a strange kind of way. I wanted the acceptance. Towards the end of his life he told me a few straighteners. He told me I’d been a horrible piece of work.’
Throughout the prolonged recording sessions for his new album Ian had met and worked with a number of young musicians introduced to him by Mike McEvoy and producer Adam Kidron. He was more than happy with the musicianship of his new line-up, which included Merlin Rhys-Jones (guitar), Tag Lamche (drums), Steve Sidwell (trumpet) and Jamie Talbot (sax). When the dependable Mickey Gallagher was added on keyboards, Ian believed he had come as close as possible to replicating the power of the Blockheads. However, to defuse comparison and pre-empt criticism, he cleverly christened his new combo ‘the Music Students’.
The younger musicians in the band were somewhat in awe of Ian, having been inspired by the funk of ‘Rhythm Stick’, a hit at the time they were learning their craft. They were also enchanted by Ian’s charisma and were prepared to compete for his attention in the general throng. ‘Ian was usually surrounded by an entourage of management types or sycophants,’ says Merlin Rhys-Jones. ‘He once said to me: “You can always judge a man by the quality of his sycophants.” We used to go and see the boat race from his balcony at Hammersmith, and there would always be people around he half knew, all trying to ingratiate themselves with him.’
