Ian Dury

by Will Birch

  For ‘O’Donegal’, Ian returned to the land of his forefathers to sing about his love for the Irish countryside. ‘Our families were from neighbouring villages nearby,’ says co-writer Gallagher. ‘Ian was Protestant, I was Catholic. We felt we had roots there. Ian wanted to put bagpipes on the track. We drove to a hotel and there was a piper doing a wedding, so we thought we’d record him in the woods. We took him up there with a beautiful microphone, but everyone was walking their dogs. They were barking and howling, so we couldn’t get a decent recording. When we eventually managed to capture a perfect take, the piper asked, “Was that all right?” over the last dying note!’

  Despite a couple of childhood holidays in the Finn Valley, Donegal was a long way from home. Ian was in more familiar territory with ‘Poo-Poo in the Prawn’, possibly the first rock song to tackle the subject of sewage, in which Ian informed us that he’d been down to the beach and encountered human excrement in the ocean and that, although the ‘turds were teeny tiny’, they all ‘fucked up the briny’! It was definitely a case of ‘too much information’, but his observations were hilarious.

  Ian’s coarse poetry was still flowing nicely. The album’s title track, ‘Bus Driver’s Prayer’, was an amusing monologue based on the Lord’s Prayer, set to musical backing and seemingly genuine studio laughter, similar to the version to be found on the Apples soundtrack. Ian had been reciting ‘The Prayer’ on stage since his Kilburns days, but its origin is uncertain.14

  Our father who art in Hendon

  Harrow be thy name

  Thy Kingston come

  Thy Wimbledon

  In Erith as it is in Hendon

  Give us this day our Berkhamsted

  And forgive us our Westminsters

  As we forgive those who Westminster against us

  Lead us not into Temple station

  But deliver us from Ealing

  For thine is the Kingston

  The Purley and the Crawley

  For Iver and Iver

  Crouch End

  Listening to the songs on Bus Driver’s Prayer it’s easy to see why stage director Max Stafford-Clark recruited Ian and Mickey Gallagher to write songs for his production of A Joviall Crew (or The Merry Beggars) for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Written c.1641 by the Jacobean dramatist Richard Brome, the play, explained Stafford-Clark, ‘was about a group of beggars . . . Ian came up to Stratford and wrote three or four songs for it – cockney rhyming slang comes from thieves’ talk and beggars’ talk. Ian threw himself into it. He was quite well-read and articulate – the “East End lad” was a cover-up. He came and lived in Stratford, and all these young actors would be hanging out with him. He was the life and soul of the season.’

  That February, the Joviall Crew rehearsals took place in Clapham. They involved vocal coaching sessions for the cast, with Michael Tubbs, musical director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, taking charge. Ian, Mickey and Max were in the stalls, making notes and commenting on the suitability of the various singers, when Tubbs started having problems with his new electronic keyboard. ‘Get your finger out!’ shouted Ian. Tubbs was displeased by Ian’s heckling and threatened to leave the RSC, having never been so insulted in all his life. Ian was persuaded to apologize so that the rehearsals could continue and A Joviall Crew opened at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 13 April.

  Ian’s fiftieth birthday party at Deals restaurant in the Chelsea Harbour was to be a grand affair. Organized by Baxter, it was a chance for family and friends to toast their beloved Ian. Sound engineer Ian ‘Horny’ Horne made an impassioned if slightly off-the-wall speech. There was no shortage of girlfriends in Ian’s life at the time; he was dating television executive Elaine Gallagher, who was unable to attend the bash due to her commitments at the Cannes film festival, but he was also seeing Delphi Newman, whom he brought to the party. After the dinner, Ian invited a number of the revellers back to Digby Mansions, where Sophy Tilson made a surprise appearance. During a long conversation, Ian convinced Sophy that she should try for a place at the Royal College of Art to pursue sculpture. Sophy enrolled that summer.

  Ian had now been living at Digby Mansions for nine years and the flat was sorely in need of redecoration. He had already taken exception to the remarks of a visiting journalist who described the place as ‘dingy’. His friend Jenny Forrest, daughter of his hydro-therapist ‘Dr Kit’, remembers: ‘He liked things clean but not in an organized way. The flat deteriorated around him, but it got more and more character. Over the years, the wallpaper started to come loose. The cobwebs had grown across the carpet, it had changed colour.’

  Unable to face the inevitable disruption, Ian decided to vacate while the decorating work was carried out. On 18 June 1992, he moved into a bungalow at Strawberry Acre Farm in Charvil, near Reading in Berkshire, for the purpose of writing songs with Chaz. He originally intended to rent the property for seven weeks, but would stay there rather longer, despite the fact that the outdoor pool – its principal attraction – was too cold to use most of the time. ‘I’d say, “Take it for a month,”’ recalls Ian’s accountant Ronnie Harris, ‘and he would take it for six months, and before you blink it’s a year. Ian always had to have a pool, he felt it was the best thing for his leg, for the polio, but of course it added to the cost. He felt he needed the place to write, but you suddenly find that planes go over it and that’s no good. There was outflow and we had to balance the books.’

  Despite Ronnie Harris’s fiscal concerns, Ian’s creative juices started to flow once he was away from the distractions of London. He invited Chaz Jankel out to ‘the gravel belt’ and they worked on new songs including ‘Christopher True’, ‘Come and Find Me’ and ‘You Mustn’t’, the latter being a play on Jenny Cotton’s habit of reminding Ian ‘you must!’ Countless hours were spent trying to perfect ‘A Million Grooves in the Naked City’, but it never came up to Ian’s expectations and, like many of the songs written during this period, would never be recorded beyond the demo stage.

  That summer Ian and the Blockheads appeared at ‘Mad-stock’, a music festival in London’s Finsbury Park headlined by Madness. Also on the bill was the former Smiths star Morrissey As he walked on stage that afternoon, Morrissey earned a quick ‘Good luck, mate’ from Ian. ‘It was like the curse of doom,’ says Ingrid Mansfield-Allman. ‘Morrissey was bottled off. What Ian really meant when he said “Good luck, mate”, was “See you in hell”.’

  In September, Chaz and Ian had one of their periodic fallings-out, prompting caustic columnist Julie Burchill to describe them as ‘the Burton and Taylor of the pop world’. Chaz quit Charvil, and Ian immediately called Merlin Rhys-Jones, with whom he went on to compose ‘Age of Steam’, ‘You’re Nasty’, ‘The Ghost of Rock ’n’ Roll’ and the curiously titled ‘Dick the Dancing Durex’. ‘Ian sometimes referred to himself as “Durex”,’ says Merlin. ‘The song unambiguously promoted contraception, so Ian didn’t feel it was right for an album, a view that I think Mariella Frostrup shared when she visited Charvil. Another one we worked on was “Sur le Plage with Marge”, inspired by the Strangler’s mum, whom Ian would phone from time to time.’

  Friends and relatives were summoned out to Charvil, and occasional visitors included Peggy, Smart Mart, Davey Payne and Ian’s then girlfriend, Elaine Gallagher. Fred Rowe also turned up. He recalls: ‘We spoke for eight hours. It was such an interesting conversation. He said it was a shame we’d wasted all those years. I told him I loved him, and he was my best ever pal. It had nothing to do with his fame. He said, “I look on you as my left leg and left arm; the other parts of my body I can’t use.”’

  One of Chaz Jankel’s abiding memories of staying at Charvil was the soup Ian made. ‘It was this amazing vegetable soup, six pounds of cheddar .. . cream . . . great soup. It was the only time I ever saw him prepare anything to eat, but it had so many colours it looked like a Rembrandt.’ Others have made less than complimentary comments about Ian’s culinary skills. ‘His tomato soup,’ recalls Mer
lin, ‘was so concentrated it stuck your tongue to your uvula. He once told me he tried to roast a smoked chicken for Christmas and was surprised when it tasted horrible. “I even made gravy,” he said, still disappointed.’

  After nine months at Charvil, Ian returned to his freshly decorated apartment at Digby Mansions. Within five days he was whisked off to Scotland to film his part as ‘Dr Reid’ in the BBC’s production of Boswell and Johnson’s Tour of the Western Isles. This was swiftly followed by the filming of Skallagrigg, directed by Richard Spence for BBC television. The story told of a legendary, mysterious force that promised protection for the disabled. Skallagrigg mixed professional actors, including Bernard Hill and Richard Briers, with non-professionals, many of whom were disabled themselves. Ian found himself in the middle of the mix and, although he played the part of ‘Rendell’, a sadistic bully who terrorized the inmates in a 1930s asylum, he was fêted on set by the disabled cast members. ‘Ian was very good with them,’ says Mickey, ‘but a lot of them were verging on the “touch me/heal me” vibe. Ian would walk amongst them.’

  When asked how he got so much film work, Ian would say, ‘Because I’ve got a good agent.’ Pippa Markham says, ‘I loved having Ian to work with. There was no manifestation of ego; he was always very grateful for everything one did and he had a sense of humour and a healthy cynicism.’ To add to Ian’s hectic schedule, Max Stafford-Clark had put his name forward to write songs for The Queen and I, a stage show to be based on Sue Townsend’s story of the same name. On 29 April, Ian and Mickey Gallagher met with the authoress at a Chinese restaurant in Leicester to discuss the proposed work and were given the go-ahead. Stafford-Clark was also about to engage Ian and Mickey to write music for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Country Wife, a Restoration comedy written around 1672 by William Wycherley.

  With The Queen and I and The Country Wife in prospect and A Joviall Crew due to open in London, Ian and Mickey were becoming deeply entrenched in Stafford-Clark’s theatrical world and his quest to bring half-forgotten plays from the seventeenth century to a wider audience. Ian missed the rock ’n’ roll life, but in the absence of a proper record deal he would happily settle for hanging out in Stratford-upon-Avon, into which he injected an inevitable craziness. TV and film work continued to pour in, notably the role of De Flores in Marcus Thompson’s film version of Middleton’s Changeling, which started shooting on 7 May. Everything was sailing along nicely, but Ian’s boat was about to be rocked.

  On 14 May 1993, Peggy Dury suffered a severe stroke at her flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue. Ian was shocked to find her unconscious on the bathroom floor when he called to visit later that day. Peggy was taken to the Royal Free Hospital and then transferred to a post-stroke hospital annex nearby. Within days, her empty flat was badly burgled. Ian decided he had to move in so that he could keep an eye on the place and also be close to the hospital, where he visited her daily. On 20 July, he gathered together some clothes and possessions and moved into her flat, simultaneously swapping Richmond Park for Hampstead Heath for his daily constitutionals. Peggy was later taken into Compton Lodge, a nursing home which was close to the flat where she had lived with Bill nearly sixty years earlier.

  Having moved to Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Ian met one of Hampstead’s more eccentric residents, George Weiss, better known as ‘Rainbow George’ of the Rainbow Dream Ticket party. Weiss was an anarchic fringe politician and, as ‘George from Hampstead’, a serial radio phone-in caller who had stood as a parliamentary candidate in countless general elections but had never polled more than a handful of votes. He was a friend and neighbour of the comedian Peter Cook and met Ian at a party to mark the launch of the Derek and Clive Get the Horn, a video showcasing Cook’s lewd routines with Dudley Moore. Ian was one of dozens of celebrities invited to the high-profile bash, where attendees included Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and numerous well-known comedians. After chucking-out time, the party continued until dawn at Cook’s Hampstead home, just yards from Ian’s flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue. Weiss cornered Ian and bent his ear with political theories and his unique vision of Hampstead as ‘the magic mountain’. Ian was nonplussed, but he and Weiss became good friends.

  Throughout the summer of 1993, Ian and Mickey Gallagher refined their songs for Max Stafford-Clark’s production of The Country Wife with the Royal Shakespeare Company. As writers they’d been summoned to Stratford-upon-Avon, where the play opened in August, but Ian was naturally consumed with his mother’s illness. There were frequent trips back to London to visit Peggy and also visits from Sophy Tilson, who had reappeared in Ian’s life that summer after he had attended her first-year show at the Royal College of Art in June.

  As well as being Ian’s consistently loyal co-writer, Mickey Gallagher had also been his right-hand man for some eight years. Although he savoured Ian’s company, Mickey felt a sense of relief when Derek Hussey appeared on the scene. Known to his friends as ‘Derek the Draw’, Hussey was a south London R&B musician who met Ian through a mutual friend and had started visiting him socially at Charvil and Digby Mansions earlier that year, often driving him to Hampstead to see Peggy. ‘Mickey got busy organizing a few more gigs for the band, so we started sharing the duties,’ recalls Derek.

  When Ian asked Derek to go on the road with him, Derek insisted that he wasn’t to go on the payroll. He was a friend who enjoyed Ian’s company and particularly appreciated being included in all of Ian’s conversations with others. ‘We were mates,’ says Derek, ‘and, by not taking any pay, I didn’t come in for any of the canings that his previous employees came in for. If we were sitting around on a Sunday afternoon listening to jazz, Ian would get a “nifty fifty” out and send me round to Oddbins for a couple of bottles of bubbly.’

  Derek would quickly see active service with Ian on sporadic dates with the Blockheads and at Shepperton Studios, where Ian filmed his part as ‘Geiger’ in the Sylvester Stallone movie Judge Dredd. The role, Ian reckoned, was the eighth in which he’d been required to smoke a cigar, unshaven. ‘If you’re smoking a cigar in a film – twelve hours on Judge Dredd – at the end of the day I have thirty-two different cigars going, on a little shelf under the table where I kept them all because they say, “In the next scene it’s got to be shorter”, to keep the continuity going. Then I get shot, and the geezer takes it out of my mouth, and they might not shoot it chronologically, and you do that stuff yourself if you’re a pro. My God . . . they want me to have a cigar!’

  Ian’s bachelor existence at Fitzjohn’s Avenue was brief. In February 1994, Sophy Tilson attended London’s Tate Gallery to view the ‘Picasso: Sculptor/Painter’ exhibition (later to be dubbed ‘Sex and Jugs and Pots and Bowls’ in Scotland’s Sunday Herald !). ‘I took my sketch book, but one of the attendants told me to stop drawing,’ recalls Sophy. ‘I couldn’t believe it. Students are always allowed to draw in art galleries. He didn’t give a reason, he just said, “There’s a new rule.” It escalated. I was shouting my head off and said, ‘‘I’m not leaving until you get [gallery director] Nick Serota. I’m not moving, you cannot say that students can’t draw.” There were all these attendants, and they got someone down. The Independent phoned me and asked me about the incident. It was in the paper the next day, and Ian saw it and got very excited. He called me.’

  Thus Ian and Sophy were reunited after a break of over three years and proceeded to live together at Fitzjohn’s Avenue. ‘I was in love with Ian,’ continues Sophy. ‘My friends told me, “You want to get married and have kids? He’s the last person on earth . . .” I thought, “No, he’s a good guy, the way he treats his children and Betty, you can’t get better than that.” Meeting his mum and seeing what an intelligent base he came from . . . I wanted to rescue him as well. There was a huge physical and mental challenge. He’d had all these dodgy birds, I came back determined.’ By the time of her degree show in June 1994, Sophy was pregnant. She was twenty-nine years old, and Ian, a family man at heart, was fifty-two and delighted.

 
Betty had remained a big part of Ian’s life following their separation and eventual divorce in 1985. Of course, as the parents of Jemima and Baxter, they found much to talk about, and there were numerous occasions when Betty and Ian came into contact over practical matters. This would often result in Betty bumping into Ian’s latest girlfriend, such as the occasion when he was living at Oval Mansions and Betty dropped by to donate some kitchen utensils. Denise Roudette opened the door, and the two women became friends, empathizing with each other over the ups and downs of living with Ian. Years later, when Betty drove Ian and Jemima to the airport for their trip to Japan, she encountered Sophy Tilson at Digby Mansions and once again struck up a friendship.

  There was no jealousy on Betty’s part; she still cared about Ian and he had undying love for her. ‘Mum was quite an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s life,’ remembers Jemima. ‘She was subsumed by everyone else’s larger lives, and I suspect a lot of the time she was quite depressed. She was always trying to better herself, going on little courses to get jobs, but she felt she had learning difficulties. Her whole world was related to painting. She could seem quite downtrodden about things, but at the same time she was so graceful and able to defuse a situation. People adored her.’

  No one adored Betty as much as Ian. He was distraught when she died on 2 October 1994, aged fifty-two. She had been feeling unwell for two years, originally suspecting cystitis. A couple of visits to a doctor in Newport, to where Betty had returned following the death of her father, resulted in only the briefest investigation of the problem. It was not in her nature to push for a second opinion, but by early 1994 the pain had spread to her back and she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Ian and Sophy travelled to Wales to see Betty before she died and found she had not lost her sense of humour; when told that Ian and Sophy were expecting a child, Betty remarked, ‘Blimey, he’s at it again!’