Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll... and Ian Dury
Ian Dury emerged during the punk era, with a superb debut album, New Boots and Panties.
The Kilmeaden Bikers Festival, June bank holiday, 1996. The bikers are out in force and their reputation precedes them. They could invent a vaccine for Covid 19 but you’d still be advised to lock up your daughters. Something Happens are due to play. We haven’t been this nervous since we played a Unionist metal club in West Belfast at the height of the Troubles.
We needn’t worry. We are accepted into their huge, hairy, tattooed arms like brothers from a much smaller mother. We are so relaxed, in fact, that after the show, one of our number - semi naked and drying himself with abandon – quips “Are you the bitches we ordered?” when two ogres pop their heads into the dressing room.
And yet here I am, alive, writing this. We have signed up to play this festival due to the presence on the bill of Ian Dury and The Blockheads. He is a god in my world and when they arrive backstage I gawp in awe. Everything I have heard is true: They look more like pirates than a band! Their crew, also pirates, take full control. A little bit of Waterford is suddenly the East End.
A hush descends on the now thronged Marquee as the band just seem to materialise on stage. But where is the main man? I see him: walking with a stick, frail but with devilish intent he looks, for all the world, like an angry Dot Cotton. At the stage he is lifted, gently and lovingly by a roadie, into the midst of the action.
Onstage the infirmity seems to just evaporate. He is in his realm, the master of all he surveys, spiky, witty, dangerous, hilarious: the punk rock Poet Laurate. “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,” he sings, “is very good indeed.” A tent of wildly enthused bikers go mad. Side stage, so close I could pick up his dropped joint , I am on cloud nine.
He shouldn’t have been part of punk. He was 35 when New Boots and Panties was released. But the issues that hobbled his old band – they were deemed too threatening and chaotic to succeed – were exactly what punk was looking for. It was a marriage made in Heaven.
He’d been helped is his assault on the charts by the arrival in his dressing room one night of a musical genius called Chaz Jankel. Ian had initially told Chaz to “F**k off”, because that was Ian, but Chaz had stayed and with Ian had forged a partnership that would produce era-defining hits.
He was helped too by the arrival on the scene of the legendary record company, Stiff Records. They were creating a home for mavericks and misfits: Lene Lovich, Wreckless Eric, Elvis Costello. And here was the ultimate maverick. If Bowie had opened the door to ‘outsiders’ then here was the ‘outsider’ poster boy.
Crippled with polio from the age of seven he had spent six weeks in a cast followed by almost two years in hospital. It left him with a withered left leg, arm and shoulder. It also left him with one serious survival instinct and one serious attitude.
I still recall seeing him on Top of The Pops, in May 1978: a Dickensian figure with a walking stick, stick thin, wirey, but utterly alive. “This is what punk is about,” I thought, “difference! People who are a little more like normal humanity, with its frailties and failings.”
The debut, New Boots and Panties, came out of the traps like a rocket. It had almost been called Live from Lourdes, a nod in the direction of his physical infirmities. I so wish it had. It would have put him so wonderfully at odds with conservative Ireland. Punk rockers lapped him up.
The lyrics were the key: Witty, razor sharp, clever beyond belief and delivered with zero self-pity. He had a fearsome reputation, even his own son describes him as “extraordinarily difficult.” But when I interviewed him, in a hotel room in 1997, three years before his death, he was anything but.
We talked mostly that day of his lyrics and a love of language he had inherited from his beloved mum. He was even more frail than he had seemed on stage. I saw none of that famed ornery character until I was about to leave. I produced a CD for an autograph. “Tom! You Tit!” he wrote on it. I will treasure it until my dying day.
