Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  Young Ian came through the polio but didn’t come out of hospital for two years. By that time the right side of his body had developed normally while his left had to be supported by calipers. His mother, knowing her way around the world of healthcare, did her best for him but in the 1950s anyone with a handicap was expected to be content with whatever they were given. His education, first at a special school for children with disabilities, then as the odd man out at a boys’ boarding school, was testing. He was bullied, which planted within him a talent for bullying others. He went to art college first as a student and then did some teaching. He affected a walking stick long before he actually needed it. He made himself into a bit of a character.

  In the early seventies he emerged as the singer of Kilburn and the High Roads, an unlikely-looking and -sounding group that was part of London’s so-called ‘pub rock’ movement, which was trying to make music that was more idiosyncratic and human-scaled. By 1977 he was part of the independent label Stiff’s stable of mavericks, which also included Elvis Costello. The two were put on tour together, along with Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric and Larry Wallis. The idea was that the headliner would rotate from night to night. In the end it was a direct contest between Dury and Costello, both of whom had the killer instincts of rock stars awaiting the moment of their coronation. By the end of the tour Dury and his experienced backing band the Blockheads were justifiably regarded as the best live attraction in the country. When their first album New Boots And Panties!! came out in the latter part of the year it didn’t do what celebrated ‘new wave’ albums did, which was fall out of contention after a couple of weeks in the limelight. It kept on selling by word of mouth. Given the nature of the music on it, New Boots And Panties!! could justifiably claim to be the most radical best-seller in British music-business history.

  Dury couldn’t sing in the conventional sense but he could sell a song like few others and he knew how to capture and hold the attention. His disability meant he couldn’t traverse the stage as well as some but nobody else in the entire history of rock and roll has known half as well how to work that notional square between the top of the head and the waist. He would deliberately position the microphone above him so that when he sang the song was projected upwards as if to a higher power. He produced brightly coloured scarves from his sleeves like an end-of-the-pier magician. His facial features blinked, twitched and gurned as though in the power of an indecisive illustrator. He drew invisible threads through the air. His face would be lit from below so that he looked as threatening as Bill Sikes, his features flickering between child-like wonder and glittering malice. On stage or off there was nothing about him that wasn’t fascinating. He was a genuine performance artist.

  Dury’s father had been a humble bus driver. His mother was educated. They broke up before he was born. Like fellow English geniuses Vivian Stanshall, Peter Sellers and Noël Coward, the axis Dury moved along was that constantly modulating, never far from mocking tone that passes for speech in England. Much as Stanshall played the aristo, Dury gave us a geezer. Whereas Coward had given himself the airs of a duke in order to distance himself from his suburban roots and become the vessel that could carry his songs, Dury found his character by going downmarket, turning himself into a vernacular philosopher from whom songs like ‘Billericay Dickie’ seemed to flow naturally. It was an act, of course. A brilliant act, but an act nonetheless. ‘I’m a Mockney,’ he told his biographer Will Birch, ‘in the sense that my mum spoke so beautifully and my dad didn’t.’ His act chimed with the punk moment, which was all about aspiring to move down the social scale.

  By the middle of 1978 the whole nation knew all the words of his first album New Boots And Panties!!, a record as dense with allusions as a book of comic poetry and as full of catchy business as a record by the Isley Brothers. This was the album in every living room in 1978, the unlikely inheritor of the mantle of general acceptance which had previously fallen on Carole King’s Tapestry. This was despite the fact that its language was considerably more than frank. It contained one song in praise of an early-morning erection, another about how his father graduated from driving buses to chauffeuring for foreign gents, a further ode to ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’ (Dury was born in 1942, hence his heroes were greasers, jazzers and music-hall comics), and hidden away uncredited the song that became his battle cry, ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’.

  The Dury character was the perfect vehicle for using his key quality, which was a remarkable power to make people love him. This was often in spite of the way he had treated those people. He left his first wife to bring up two children on her own. He wrote a sentimental song about his father but didn’t go to see him in his final years when he was dying alone. Within his professional sphere he exhibited the talent that Kenneth Tynan referred to as ‘s’imposer’, which is the ability to make those in his immediate circle uncertain whether their next remark would be met with a smile or a vicious put-down. Once he became the centre of attention, which had always been his overpowering need, he liked to surround himself with retainers who, justified or not, gave off the distinct whiff of villainy. This was catnip for university-educated journalists who loved to talk to Dury because he had the hinterland most rock stars only pretended to have. He could go from referring to himself as ‘a raspberry’ (from the rhyming slang ‘raspberry ripple – cripple’) to unusual gentleness and lyricism in the way he expressed himself. On one famous occasion he reduced a journalist to tears of sympathy. Dury could do that.

  As a boss he brooked no contradiction. He demanded that people involved with him drop everything to be at his beck and call. He had managers but he did the manipulation himself. He saw a group as a tableau as well as a collection of musicians. Every gesture he made, every item of clothing he wore, every shape he struck had been thought about beforehand. He missed no opportunity. He was a human billboard. When the record company paid for him to get his teeth fixed prior to a tour of America with Lou Reed he made sure they painted a Union Jack on the incisors at the front.

  There was a strong streak of Little Englander in punk. The Clash had a song called ‘I’m So Bored With The USA’. ‘I don’t like America,’ said Dury in a TV interview. ‘I think it’s a pig sty.’ Such statements didn’t reflect anyone’s true feelings. Like many Englishmen he found the place enthralling but wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction of hearing him say so. Furthermore he resented having to leave a country where he was feted to go somewhere else where he had to start again at the bottom. When Dury and his band the Blockheads were supporting Lou Reed in Los Angeles in 1979 Rod Stewart and Ron Wood popped in to lend support to their compatriots, sabotaging Reed’s guitars in a confused gesture of support. But no matter how much touring he did, Dury was never going to mean anything in America.

  Many of the people in this book became rock stars because they had the special zeal that comes from only being good at one thing. Dury wasn’t like that. Dury had a number of talents. He could draw, he could teach, he could act and he could write. But had he achieved top status in any of those fields it would still have been a poor substitute for the validating thrill he got from turning himself into a rock star. A rock star is what he most wanted to be. He burned with the longing. In his key song ‘What A Waste’ he recites, with pathos worthy of Buster Keaton, all the occupations he could have followed if he hadn’t done what he did. He could have been the driver of an articulated lorry. He could have been a poet, he wouldn’t have to worry. But he chose to play the fool in a six-piece band and face first-night nerves on every one-night stand. You know what? He was glad to have turned his back on all the other options. Call that a waste? Ian Dury didn’t.

  The success of New Boots And Panties!! transformed his life. In 1979 he moved out of his modest flat near the Oval cricket ground and went straight into the Montcalm, the five-star hotel favoured by the music business, then to the Dorchester, then to an enormous house out in the Kent countryside. The Christmas period of 1978 was his pinnacle. In November Ian Dury
and the Blockheads released their single ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, which was their finest moment. It was a dance craze record but it was a dance craze record that had been to college, with words that were clever and worthy of rolling round the tongue; it was conveyed on a churning groove that was as breezy as a day out in Margate and as hard and clever as anything Nile Rodgers ever did. In the middle it had a sax break from Davey Payne that sounded as deranged as Davey looked and belatedly introduced the spirit of Rahsaan Roland Kirk to the final Top of the Pops editions of the year. This cult single from a cult act on a cult label sold over one million copies in the UK. Never again was he quite so in sync with an entire nation. The raspberry was on top. It was glorious while it lasted.

  1978 PLAYLIST

  Ian Dury and the Blockheads, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’

  Blondie, Parallel Lines

  The Bee Gees, ‘Night Fever’

  Kate Bush, The Kick Inside

  Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge Of Town

  Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings And Food

  Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

  Dire Straits, Dire Straits

  Marvin Gaye, Here, My Dear

  The Boomtown Rats, A Tonic For The Troops

  8 AUGUST 1979

  KNEBWORTH HOUSE, HERTFORDSHIRE

  Twilight of the gods

  IT SAYS MUCH about the lifestyles adopted by the handful of rock stars who had made fortunes in the seventies that after they scattered to enjoy the fruits of their labours they communicated in such unexpected ways. In 1978 Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin only knew his group were considering going back into action for the first time in over a year through the pages of Farmers Weekly.

  Farmers Weekly was an obligatory read for anyone involved in British agriculture, among whom were suddenly a smattering of rock stars living out new lives as landed gentry. Plant had bought a significant spread near his home town of Kidderminster, as befitted a star of his magnitude. However, even jobbing troubadour and occasional Led Zeppelin opening act Roy Harper had somehow managed to acquire a smallholding in Herefordshire. Hence he gave an interview to Farmers Weekly in order to enthuse about his sheep. In the course of this interview he mentioned he had been writing the odd song with Jimmy Page.

  This caused Plant to pick up the phone and for the first time in months make contact with the guitarist, the person with whom he had written such tunes as ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Trampled Under Foot’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’. The idea that his songwriting partner might be cheating on him with another put Plant’s nose slightly out of joint. Page reassured him that Harper had been talking up his part somewhat. The good news was that this was a sign the singer was finally interested in getting back into circulation for the first time since 1977.

  In the middle of an American tour that year Plant had been given the shattering news that his five-year-old son Karac had contracted a stomach virus and died. He and drummer John Bonham, both of whom had been recruited into Led Zeppelin at the same time, flew directly home. The other two, the guitarist Page and bassist John Paul Jones, remained in the United States. When the boy’s funeral took place they didn’t attend.

  This tour had already been blighted by an incident at a gig in Oakland, California. Their manager, the mountainous former wrestler Peter Grant, and one of his charmless semi-criminal associates had almost killed one of the promoter’s staff after a misunderstanding over who was entitled to take away a sign from backstage. The Led Zeppelin operation had long been inclined to treat the outside world as the enemy. This tendency had recently been exacerbated by over-indulgence in cocaine and access to the financial muscle it takes to settle even the ugliest debt.

  Like most rock stars the members of Led Zeppelin didn’t know what to do with their time when they weren’t working and were incapable of getting organized enough to do anything to fill that time. In the course of this enforced hiatus, which had no agreed ending, each slid off into his private world. Page resumed his hobbies, which were heroin and the occult. Bonham’s main interest was drinking but he was also using heroin. John Paul Jones had his own farm in Sussex. Plant was rebuilding his family life, which had been shattered not only by the loss of his child but also by an article his wife had read in an American music magazine which suggested that once on the road her husband was not faithful.

  In those days before the death of distance it was possible for even world-famous musicians to be accompanied on tour by a species of ‘road wife’ without their actual wives getting to hear about it. The tabloids weren’t particularly interested in these people, the specialist press knew discretion was the price they paid for access, and the mobile phone and the internet were still the stuff of science fiction. Furthermore the dictionary of disapproval had not yet been developed. Drug users weren’t said to have substance issues. Heavy drinkers weren’t yet alcoholics. Rock stars who expected unfettered access to the bodies of any young women in their orbit weren’t yet deemed to have a problem with male entitlement. The line ‘no head, no backstage pass’ wasn’t a sexist outrage. It was just one of those many things that were only rock and roll and therefore to take it seriously would have been considered a drag.

  This was also the peak of Led Zeppelin’s dark imperium. Their followers had always loved them. Most other people shuddered at the mention of their name. The band’s reputation went before them, darkening the perception of their music. Peter Grant was thought of as a real thug, his familiar John Bindon a violent criminal, their American lawyer Steve Weiss did nothing to discourage the idea that he was a connected guy, the band’s tour manager Richard Cole, who took even more drugs than the musicians, was unpolished in securing the payments in what was still overwhelmingly a cash business, John Bonham could always be kept amused by violence, and all of them sought to please Jimmy Page, who increasingly presented as a dissatisfied princeling at whose feet these various myrmidons would drop tribute. Whether Led Zeppelin actually directed the unpleasantness themselves or whether it was merely power wielded by others on their behalf, they took no steps to correct the impression and therefore it seems probable that at some level the idea of being frightening rather appealed to them. Many rock stars pay others to perform unpleasant services on their behalf. Most of these people perform these services as pleasantly as they can. Led Zeppelin’s people felt licensed not to bother.

  The call Plant made to Page on the back of the Farmers Weekly item instigated a series of meetings and jams that would eventually lead to a 1979 album, In Through The Out Door. This was recorded in a very businesslike fashion at ABBA’s Polar Studios in Stockholm. The band would fly out on Monday morning and, like executive commuters, return on Friday night. The record didn’t have Page’s full concentration since his main priority was heroin. The heavy lifting was done by Plant and Jones. Since Plant was the one who had suffered the appalling tragedy of losing a child the other three were simply relieved that he was back and weren’t going to stand in the way when he arrived with material which was not in their traditional wheelhouse. When the record came out it went straight to number one in the USA but soon fell away. In the career of any recording artist there are a handful of classics and then there are the others that, despite the best efforts of all concerned, don’t quite spark. In Through The Out Door was one of the latter.

  But it didn’t deserve the critical mauling it got. Like all people who say that the press doesn’t matter, Led Zeppelin were inclined to overestimate how much the press did matter. Journalists spending time with them in the USA were given strict rules about how they were to behave in their presence, and one thing they could be assured of was that whatever they wrote would be read by the band. They were desperate for critical acclaim but the best they ever got in their lifetime was grudging respect. To make matters worse they were now stranded on the wrong side of what seemed like a cultural chasm. The paper I was working for at the time had published a disobliging review of In Through The Out Door that featured
the word ‘dinosaurs’.

  It was four years since they had played in the UK. This was a lifetime in seventies terms. Any group with an appropriate sense of modesty would have been advised to break themselves back in slowly by playing small theatre shows. Instead Grant, in whom cocaine had conspired with misplaced confidence to produce inevitable hubris, decided that they should make their comeback by playing a massive open-air show in the park of a stately home in Hertfordshire. Furthermore, because other acts like Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones had already proved it was possible to sell a hundred thousand tickets to one Knebworth show, the penis-measuring contest in which all major rock stars are involved demanded Led Zeppelin overshadow them by playing two consecutive Saturdays. The promoter, who was less confident that they would be able to sell that number of tickets, wanted to do the standard thing, which is announce one show and then add another later ‘in response to unprecedented demand’. Because Peter Grant had already assured the band that they would sell out two shows without any trouble he couldn’t do this. Nothing could be seen to puncture either his prestige or the band’s confidence.

  As the band prepared for the show with rehearsals at Bray Studios, which were largely devoted to the solo showcase Page was slated to play from within a pyramid of lasers, and two anonymous shows in Denmark, they had worries. The one unarguable achievement of the punk rock generation was the way its rhetoric got under the skin of the slightly older generation of musicians, the ones being loudly written off as dinosaurs. Paul Simonon of the Clash said he didn’t need to hear Led Zeppelin; he simply had to look at their album covers to feel like throwing up. In fact the one thing that was certain about the new breed of name callers, who wrote short songs, wore straight-legged jeans and had alarming haircuts, was that most of them were the kind of rock purists who knew every note of the music of the bands they were so gleefully writing off. Not since the 1950s, when Frank Sinatra described rock and roll as music ‘played by cretinous goons’, had one generation dismissed another in this way. Led Zeppelin claimed not to be bothered, but they were.