“I always felt that ‘Inbetweenies’ should have been a single and that would have turned Do It Yourself into a real hit. But it was on the album and therefore it couldn’t be a single. Once Ian had said it, it was a point of pride, and I have nothing against pride, but it was being proud of being completely bonkers as far as I was concerned.”
– Andrew King
The importance of Ian Dury to Stiff Records cannot be overstated. ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ was only its third Top 40 entry out of 38 singles and its first number one hit. Not only that, it had sold more than one million copies in the UK, while New Boots had gone platinum and remained in the UK album charts for a staggering 90 weeks, peaking at number five. With Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe gone, the 30-something pub rocker whom Stiff had brought in from the cold was now its beacon of hope. Those who had forecast gloom when Dave and Jake had parted company had been proved wrong as Stiff celebrated one of the then 100 best-selling singles of all time. And there was more good news to come as a clutch of new artists were about to find their niche as the New Wave.
Stiff was at the vanguard of this movement and included in its publicity slogans ‘Surfing On The New Wave’. Artists like Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe had loads of front and a powerful battery of songs, but they didn’t fit the punk stereotype. Soon these and other artists on independent labels like Chiswick were being herded together under a new banner, along with singers and bands like Joe Jackson, Squeeze, The Pretenders and The Boomtown Rats. The overblown guitar solos and pretentious antics of Progressive Rock groups like Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, which had been in vogue in the early to mid-Seventies had proved too much. The British music scene was being shaken up whether it liked it or not. Stiff, having played a major role in pop music’s very own gunpowder plot, was determined to champion yet more unsung heroes.
In October 1978, in a sequel to the previous year’s Stiff Live Stiffs Tour, five singers boarded a train and set off on a meandering journey around Britain, taking in colleges, town halls and other venues near rail stations. Wreckless Eric was the only survivor from the original coach party; the ‘Be Stiff tour introduced audiences to four other artists; Lene Lovich, Jona Lewie, Mickey Jupp and Rachel Sweet. Each was as different from the other as could be imagined, but all bore the Stiff hallmark of originality.
Lene Lovich, a deeply intriguing figure with long plaited pig-tails, had first surfaced in the mid-Seventies, singing and playing sax in a group called The Diversions, along with her partner Les Chappell. They had a minor hit in 1975 with the novelty reggae song ‘Fattie Bum Bum’ but were destined to be a one hit wonder and they disbanded shortly afterwards. Lene’s first solo venture was a Shirley Temple-style version of the cheesy Christmas song ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’, released by Poly dor in December 1976. It took Oval (run by former Kilburns’ managers Charlie Gillett and Gordon Nelki), however, to spot her real potential and direct her towards Alexander Street.
Stiff pressed only 5,000 copies of her debut single, a haunting cover of the Tommy James Sixties hit ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’, with an original composition on the B-side, ‘Lucky Number’. This weird and wonderful song was also featured on her first album Stateless, the release of which was timed to coincide with the beginning of the train tour. When Stiff decided to issue the song as a single in its own right the following spring, they hit pay dirt. She fascinated Top Of The Pops viewers with her outlandish make-up, head bands, scarves and eerie voice, and ‘Lucky Number’ soared to number three, becoming the label’s second biggest hit. In May 1979, she followed up her success with a second hit ‘Say When’, which reached number 19.
Jona Lewie, in direct contrast, looked like a department store floorwalker. Although he had only just emerged on Stiff, he was a seasoned performer, having served his time in blues bands in the late Sixties, and had scored a number two hit in 1972 with ‘Seaside Shuffle’, glorying under the name of Terry Dactyl & The Dinosaurs. He re-emerged with The Jive Bombers in 1976 and the following year he was picked up by Stiff. His debut album, On The Other Hand There’s A Fist, came out in time for the tour. The accompanying single ‘The Baby She’s On The Street’ flopped, but Jona would more than repay Stiff in 1980. ‘You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties’ made number 16 and his Salvation Army tinged anti-war song ‘Stop The Cavalry’ went to number three that Christmas, a seasonal classic which continues to earn him a healthy income.
On the back of the tour, teenage American prodigy Rachel Sweet would bask fleetingly in the glow of the Top 40 with her upbeat single ‘B-A-B-Y’. In one of its more outrageous stunts, Stiff marketed the youngster as a “jailbait” country singer. The Akron-born star’s career had begun at the age of six and encompassed everything from commercial jingles to touring with Mickey Rooney and opening for Bill Cosby’s Las Vegas act. She had done a few failed country tunes for her local Derrick label before coming to the attention of Stiff through songwriter Liam Sternberg, who had passed the label some of her demos. Backing for her debut album Fool Around was provided by Stiff stable-mates The Rumour. But ‘B-A-B-Y’ was her first and last hit, peaking at number 35 in the UK.
Wreckless Eric’s self-titled debut album had been released about six months before the tour and had strong associations with Ian Dury. It included a clattering rendition of ‘Rough Kids’, Kilburn & The High Roads’ first single, and Davey Payne and Charlie Hart were among the musicians who played on the record. Amid the excitement that had followed the first Stiff tour, Dave Robinson is believed to have thought about sending Wreckless and Davey out as a double-act in the vein of John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett, although this alliance was never forged. As Wreckless boarded the train for the second Stiff outing, his cover of Buddy Holly’s ‘Crying, Waiting, Hoping’ was about to be released, but it slipped away virtually unnoticed. His follow-up album The Wonderful World Of Wreckless Eric failed to make an impact. Seasoned rocker and songwriter Mickey Jupp also benefited little from the tour and because of his fear of flying had left the cast by the time it went on to the US.
Ian was now too established to join this outing, but he nevertheless remained central to Dave Robinson’s game plan. He was contracted to record another two albums for Stiff and all concerned were determined to sustain the powerful momentum that had been built up by New Boots and ‘Hit Me’. In the spring of 1979, Ian Dury & The Blockheads began recording some of the songs which had evolved during the sessions at Rolvendon and which sounded so different from the material on New Boots And Panties and his four singles. The result was Do It Yourself – a strictly Ian and Chaz affair, both in terms of compositions and musical style. Few Blockheads’ fans could have predicted the more laid-back, jazzy feel of the album’s ten tracks, a sound more akin to Steely Dan’s massively successful Aja, one of Ian’s favourite albums. What had made New Boots so distinctive – the tapestry of colourful characters, the unbridled swearing and the sheer ferocity of ‘Blockheads’ and ‘Blackmail Man’ – were noticeably absent here. Ian’s vocals were more restrained, clean-sounding keyboards and saxophone dominated and although the funky rhythms which had driven ‘Wake Up And Make Love With Me’ and ‘Hit Me’ were present, the overall sound of Do It Yourself was more clinical and polished. Ian’s use of the vernacular and Cockney slang was used to great effect on a number of songs, however, and he was as sexually suggestive as ever. “Shake your booty, when your back is bent/Put your feelings where my mouth just went,” he sang on ‘Inbetweenies’.
Success, meanwhile, had done nothing for Ian’s temperament and members of The Blockheads found him cantankerous and difficult in the studio. Recollections of the making of Do It Yourself at The Workhouse – the studios where New Boots had been recorded – reveal a growing impatience with Ian’s moods and desire to control the entire recording process.
Chaz: “We had got to make a second album and because of the intensity in the group and the intensity of touring, we pieced together what we had left, the songs which hadn’t been used for New Boots. I also came up with a few relatively new ideas and so we put together Do It Yourself. But it was very different because when we were doing it, Ian was being very oppressive. He would just come into the control room and go into his Laurence Olivier monologue and would just want to hold the fort. Once Ian has grabbed the attention, he doesn’t want to lose it.
“At one point I called him up on the phone and said, ‘Look Ian, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed away from the session.’ There was the longest gap ever and then he said, ‘I don’t fucking believe it, I have just been asked to stay away from my own session.’ He put the phone down on me and I carried on and more or less finished the album without him, although he came back in to finish his vocals. He had been using up so much time and it was frustrating. In his eyes, it was not a very good album and he wished he had stopped after New Boots And Panties, although I don’t think that was necessarily the case.”
Behind the sound desk at The Workhouse was Londoner Ian Home, who had first worked as a sound engineer for Ian during the closing days of the Kilburns in 1976 after having previously been employed by Paul McCartney’s Wings. He had an enormous respect for Ian and continued to work with the band right up to Ian’s death, but he too found Ian a hard taskmaster.
“When Ian got behind the sound desk he turned into a different character,” he says. “In the studios, when I engineered him, he used to insist I looked at him and say, ‘I’m the road and you’re the driver.’ Sometimes I’d have to look at him for eight hours and if I looked away he’d have a go at me. So I had to suffer with his suffering. He didn’t want 100 per cent from someone he wanted 110.”
Do It Yourself was released on May 18, 1979, and Stiff spared no expense in the publicity drive for its biggest star. It issued the album sleeve in 12 different Crown wallpaper designs, ranging from garish green and brown stripes to purple and pink floral patterns. Newspapers, magazines and shops were deluged with promotional badges, paint brushes, wallpaper ties and wallpaper, and in a publicity tie-in with Do It Yourself magazine, Stiff despatched representatives to home improvement stores to organise window displays. Paper-hangers also converged unannounced on the offices of the music weeklies and decorated their foyers.
The eye-catching sleeve design of this and many other Stiff products was down to the creative genius of Barney Bubbles (real name Colin Fulcher), Stiff’s long-haired, in-house artist and former lighting engineer with heavy rock band Hawkwind. Barney was also the brains behind the Blockhead logo, which first appeared on the record label of ‘What A Waste’ and has appeared on Blockheads merchandise ever since. Tragically, he would later take his own life.
“The whole artistic vibe of the place was from this mad designer in the basement,” explained Ian.11 “I phoned him up once and said, ‘I want a Blockheads logo and it’s got to be black and white and square’ and somebody in his office went, ‘Wow’ and he’d said, ‘I’ve done it.’ He did it while I was talking to him. He just made this little face with Blockheads and we still use that. We had these watches and when it was three o’clock it said Blockhead. It was all part and parcel of his incredible off-the-wall fun.
“Barney had designed the man in the Norman helmet used on the Bulmers Cider bottle and he got .£15 for that and Jake phoned up Bulmers and said, ‘We want a tanker of cider round here as back-payment, royalties for our designer who designed your little man with the helmet,’ but they never sent one. It was worth a try though.”
Alan Cowderoy recalls: “Barney Bubbles was a hugely innovative artist, very talented. He worked in a little room underneath the loo and either Dave or Jake was in there one morning having a wee and they missed and it was all coming through the floorboards and going all across his artwork. Barney came out screaming at them to stop.”
On the back of the Do It Yourself sleeve, the band stood in a queue in a photograph reminiscent of the Kilburns’ publicity poster. Each wearing sailors hats, they posed outside the window of a wig shop displaying photographs of their customers with their hair-pieces. Ian’s balding handler Fred Rowe stood alone on the other side of the shop, grinning at the camera. “Any resemblance to characters living or dead is not meant to be unkind to men in syrups. Plus love to TRB [Tom Robinson Band], TAJ [Taj Mahal], Clash and everyone else,” read an attached label. Unfortunately, the owner of the shop hadn’t been approached about the picture and didn’t see the funny side. He is understood to have sued Stiff for .£15,000.
The ten tracks, all previously unreleased, were: ‘Inbetweenies’, ‘Quiet’, ‘Don’t Ask Me’, ‘Sink My Boats’, ‘Waiting For Your Taxi’, ‘This Is What We Find’, ‘Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy’, ‘Mischief, ‘Dance Of The Screamers’ and ‘Lullaby For Francis’. As with New Boots And Panties, Ian was determined not to include singles on the record and ‘Hit Me’ was omitted. He wanted his albums to offer his fans new songs, but however laudable this may have been his stubborn philosophy would hit the band financially in the months after its release. But hits or no hits, Ian’s second album was highly awaited and advance orders ensured its immediate entry into the charts.
The opening bars of ‘Inbetweenies’, the ultra smooth opening track, set the tone for the album’s overall sound and feel. In it, delicate piano and jazzy saxophone breaks were laid over a steady and deep-funk rhythm, and combined with some of Ian’s most curious lyrics, ‘Inbetweenies’ had all the sophistication and light touch of vintage Steely Dan. ‘Inbetweenies’ was without doubt one of the album’s strongest songs and, although it eventually disappeared from the group’s set list, it remained a favourite with Ian and band members. “In the mirror, when I’m debonair/My reactions are my own affair/A body likes to be near the bone/Oh Nancy, Lesley, Jack and Joan/I die when I’m alone,” he sang in the first verse. Commenting on the idiosyncratic words, Ian said:8 “What’s it about? I haven’t a fucking clue. I think it’s about friendship.”
The following songs, ‘Quiet’ and ‘Don’t Ask Me’, also bore testament to the jazz influences of its two composers and benefited from Chaz’s imaginative arrangements and frequent contributions from Davey. ‘Sink My Boats’ was one of the first songs that Chaz and Ian had ever written together and was built on a more orthodox rock rhythm. It was also one of the most melodic songs on Do It Yourself. ‘Waiting For Your Taxi’ was a very different affair and contained just one Dury ‘verbal’ – “Waiting for your taxi/Which taxi never comes”. Ian and Chaz had dreamt up the song at 11.30pm on December 31, 1978, in Barbados and put the finishing touches to it at lam on January 1, 1979, according to Ian.8
In ‘This Is What We Find’, Ian introduced a string of unforgettable characters and told their suburban tales like a gossip talking over a garden fence. It was vintage Dury and one of the album’s standout tracks. “Forty-year-old housewife Mrs Elizabeth Wark of Lambeth Walk/ Had a husband who was jubblified with only half a stalk/So she had a Milk of Magnesia and curry powder sandwich, half a pound of uncut pork/ Took an overdose of Omo, this made the neighbours talk,” went the first verse. In the second, he introduced “single bachelor with little dog” Tony Green or Turnham Green, followed by a music hall style interlude. Then, he told the funniest story of all: “Home improvement expert Harold Hill of Harold Hill/Of do it yourself dexterity and double glazing skill/Came home to find another gentleman’s kippers in the grill/So he sanded off his winkle with his Black & Decker drill.”
His cheeky use of London’s A-Z failed to amuse the BBC which deemed the song unsuitable for airplay, although the language in the uproarious ‘Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy’ would no doubt have caused even more offence. (“Bank rob the banks, withhold the rent/Shitters are a wank and the landlord’s bent/It’s time that the babies kept quiet/No it ain’t”. ‘Mischief relied more heavily on Johnny’s lead guitar and Mickey’s keyboards than other songs and wound up with Ian yelling, “I’m sorry I done it”.
Do It Yourself had its more serious moments, however. ‘Dance Of The Screamers’ pointed to a darker side, focusing as it did on people with mental illness. “Some of our self-pity, lover, comes from facing up to facts/It’s hard to be a hero, handsome, when you’ve had your helmet cracked,” he mused over a highly infectious beat. Tortured screams punctuated the song which, at six minutes 41 seconds, was the longest on the album, due largely to a lengthy instrumental. It was a powerful example of Ian’s ability to confront aspects of life which make us feel uncomfortable while keeping his audience on board with Chaz’s dance rhythms.
Do It Yourself signed off with ‘Lullaby For Francis’, a slow reggae track which epitomised the high standard of playing and musical arrangements maintained throughout and served as a fitting finale.
In June 1979, the group set out on a British tour entitled Slam And Segue And Break A Leg, opening at the Colston Hall, Bristol, supported by American oddity Root Boy Slim & The Sex Change Band. When this tour wound up some weeks later at the New Theatre in Oxford, The Blockheads travelled to Europe to play yet more dates. Despite the Englishness of his act, Ian had made an impact in Germany. ‘Hit Me’ had gone to number 24 in March 1979 and, in turn, it generated interest in New Boots And Panties, propelling it to number 29 in the German charts. A series of German dates during this foray into central Europe paid off with steady sales of Do It Yourself and a highest chart position of 23 there. Back in England, the news was better still. Within weeks of its release, Do It Yourself shot to number two in the album chart, behind Abba’s Voulez-Vous. It stayed in the chart for 18 weeks and earned Ian his second platinum album. But the 200,000 album sales were neatly cancelled out by the European tour which lost in excess of £40,000. Those involved in the episode cite an extravagant tour budget as the root cause.
Andrew King: “It was weakness on our part, but also, if Ian could find something wrong with the hotel he was in he would and he would make a fuss about it. In order to shut him up, we just went in the five-star deluxe ones all the way, which was a complete waste of money. He wouldn’t even have the crew stay somewhere cheaper around the corner. ‘No. I look after my crew,’ he said. If we had released ‘Inbetweenies’ as a single and it had all gone on, it would have been all right because we could have used this month’s income to pay last month’s bills. But there came a point when there was no next month’s income to pay it off. That was the beginning of the end. It was a huge tour and they did wonderful gigs, but in retrospect, we were hard at work constructing our own coffin.”
Ian’s determination to keep singles off albums meant that he could not countenance the release of ‘Inbetweenies’ once it was on Do It Yourself. Andrew blames this school of thought on the group’s energetic publicity supremo Kozmo Vinyl, later the manager of The Clash. Andrew believes it was a stance which severely hampered the commercial impact of Do It Yourself.
“It wasn’t quite as essential in marketing terms then as it is now to have a single on an album because there was a much more genuine singles market then,” says Andrew. “There was also a sort of religious reason why it didn’t become a single, for which I have always blamed Kozmo – that The Small Faces never had their singles on the album, therefore we shouldn’t either. I said to Ian: ‘It doesn’t reflect on you how people couple your recordings. You make an album and you can see this is an album and that is fine. But there is nothing in principle against making your hit single part of that album and working out a way for that to fit.’ I always felt that ‘Inbetweenies’ should have been a single and that would have turned Do It Yourself into a real hit. But it was on the album and therefore it couldn’t be a single. Once Ian had said it, it was a point of pride and I have nothing against pride, but it was being proud of being completely bonkers as far as I was concerned. We all knew it was bonkers, but it was going to be done because we had pride and because we thought we could get away with anything. And for a while we did.”
Laurie Lewis: “I got a phone call from Dave Robinson and he said, ‘Have you heard the album?’ and I said, ‘No, I haven’t,’ so he said, ‘Right, I’m sending it round.’ At the time they were in Camden Town so it came through the door about five minutes later and what he had sent me was a white label. Dave had basically said to me, ‘Listen to it and tell me which is the single,’ so I played it through and I honestly felt there wasn’t anything on it that could be a single. I loved some of the tracks very much and the track I particularly loved on it was ‘Inbetweenies’. If I’d had to choose a song to be the single, that would have been it. At the time, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin didn’t even do singles and from a marketing point of view it was suicide, but they were so big they could transcend all that.”
A single was on its way, however, that would more than compensate for the absence of a 45 on the album. ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3)’ was not recorded at The Workhouse during the making of Do It Yourself, but was cut in a spontaneous session at RCA studios in Rome during the European tour to promote the album. Like a discofied rendition of ‘England’s Glory’, it demonstrated yet again that when it came to lyric writing Ian Dury was in a class of his own.
Mickey: “We were on a long tour in Europe and we got to a town somewhere in Italy and the further south you go, the more ill-equipped they are to do rock’n’Roll. So we got to this lovely venue but the electricity is not earthed and when you’ve got a singer with a metal leg you can’t take chances, apart from the guitars and anything else. So we said, ‘We can’t work this venue, the electricity isn’t up to scratch, there’s bare wires sticking out of the walls’, so we pulled the gig without too much fuss. The crew there had obviously had this happen before and what happens in Italy in that situation is that the house crew and the PA crew start beating each other up and involving the English and then call the police. So they’re all beaten up with cuts and bruises and the police impound the equipment and you are stuck in this country – that’s the ploy. So we all got on the coach and we were all going to go off, but they blocked us in with cars in the car park, so we went over the grass verges and out and away and they were all chanting ‘Bologna, Bologna’ which was where our next gig was. So we thought ‘Fuck Bologna’ and we went straight to Rome. We had a few free days so we went to Eretcia Studios which belonged to RCA Victor, who we were with in Italy, and recorded ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ and the B-side ‘Common As Muck’.”
Ian said of the origins of the song’s title:8 “We nearly lost Charlie, one of our lighting roadies, somewhere in Italy. He was leaning over a mixing desk and touched the microphone stand. He got the electricity up his arm and another roadie saw him shuddering, leapt across the stage and kicked him off the gear. If you touch someone you get joined to them. It could have killed him. Then we tried to unload the gear and a group of Italian youths tried to stop us and we nearly had a major fight. We cancelled the Italian gigs and went to our hotel, where we quickly wrote ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ and recorded it in RCA’s studios in Rome. The phrase came because Charlie was still alive – that was the reason for being cheerful. It’s a bit like saying ‘Count your blessings’.”
‘Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3)’ (Buy 50), issued on July 20, 1979, was a rap song with lyrics that read like a Cockney version of ‘These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things’ from The Sound Of Music. But its disco beat meant it would find its way onto the turntables of nightclubs where black US groups such as Chic, Earth Wind & Fire, Rose Royce, The Jacksons and Sister Sledge, were rilling the dance floors. ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ began with a deep sounding African type drum-beat which was then bolstered by assorted percussion. “Why don’t you get back into bed?” The Blockheads chanted as the rhythm got into full swing and Ian stepped forward to deliver a white-rap classic. “Summer Buddy Holly, the working folly/Good golly Miss Molly and boats/Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet/Jump back in the alley and nanny goats.” The verses moved at speed and the tongue-twisting rhymes made the song difficult to perform live. Later, Ian would draw up “cheat sheets” to help him remember the sequence.
According to Johnny, the circumstances in which the song was recorded influenced aspects of the sound which was achieved, in particular his guitar solo.
“We were recording at RCA in Rome and I was playing this hired Strat with really heavy strings on and no pedals, because all the gear had gone on to a gig and we had half a day to record. Ian said, ‘Go on, play that,’ and I plugged straight into the amp and it was such a hard thing to play this guitar with heavy strings on. But he persevered and he kept saying ‘Go on, you can do it, you can do it’ and he made me play. I couldn’t bend them like Eric Clapton because they were so hard and that’s the solo on ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ which was really a bit painful. You can tell I’m not getting the whole tone bend.”
In August, 1979, the single climbed to number three, two places beneath The Boomtown Rats’ second number one single ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. Frustratingly, however, fate conspired to prevent it making that final ascent to the top spot which was instead claimed on August 25 by Cliff Richard’s ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ – his first number one hit since ‘Congratulations’ in 1968.
“‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ went to number three and the next week we were due to go on Top Of The Pops,” recalls Mickey. “But Top Of The Pops was cancelled that week for some reason and the next week it had dropped, and if you go down, you don’t get on Top Of The Pops. Timing is everything and that was a major blow to the flow of the thing.”
Laurie Lewis, who had filmed the video for ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’, found himself being blamed for the missed opportunity. Due to the band’s exhausting tour schedule, the video was shot in the middle of the day at the Birmingham Odeon and Laurie used footage of the audience taken at gigs to simulate the impression of a live gig. Meanwhile, he had the whole rig and stage at his disposal and, unlike a live concert situation, the camera had a free rein. The hand-clapping was dubbed and doubled up with echo to achieve the effect of the audience clapping in sync with the song, a live-recorded introduction by Kozmo Vinyl was cut into the video, and Ian and the band were sprayed with water to make them look like they were drenched in sweat. But there was a last-minute hitch in getting the video completed.
Laurie: “I was under tremendous pressure to get the film out fast and for the last minute with the guitar solo I just ran a long shot of the band playing because it wasn’t going to be ready in time for Top Of The Pops, but then there was great drama. It went down to the Beeb, but there was a strike and Top Of The Pops didn’t go out that night. Dave Robinson went bananas and blamed me, but it was nothing to do with me. That meant I had another week to edit that last section, which I did, and so when it was finished properly it went back to the Beeb. However, a friend of mine rang me up from the States and said, ‘Listen, I’ve seen your film, it’s great’ and I said, ‘Where did you see this, it’s not even finished?’ What had happened was that someone from the Beeb had stolen it, pirated it over to the States and it was already in the shops when I was still working on it. But if it had gone on the telly that week it would have gone to number one, no question.”
Nonetheless, by the end of 1979, Ian Dury was a household name in Britain. New Boots And Panties had achieved platinum sales and remained in the album chart for a marathon 90 weeks; ‘Hit Me’ had made it to number one, selling in excess of one million copies along the way; Do It Yourself ‘had occupied the number two spot in the album charts; and ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ had breached the top three and been one of the most memorable singles of the year. He was one of the biggest names in British pop music – the outsider had been truly accepted.
While Ian ascended to this level of celebrity a musical sea-change had occurred in the UK. Not surprisingly, punk had burned itself out and many of the bands who rode to glory on the tidal wave of phlegm had crashed and split up. For some of those who survived intact, like The Buzzcocks, Generation X and Sham 69, the Eighties would bring no further commercial success. The all encompassing term New Wave became blurred at the edges, eventually incorporating so many different styles as to become quite meaningless. In Britain, ska was the new craze. This native West Indian style of music experienced an unexpected revival thanks to the birth of the 2-Tone label and a brief re-flowering of Mod styles made fashionable in the mid-Sixties by The Who and The Small Faces. Green parka jackets, bowling shoes and Lambretta mopeds were the look on the streets and the movie Quadrophenia, based on The Who’s original album, was a smash hit.
Madness, who had been galvanised into action after witnessing Kilburn & The High Roads gigs, released their first single ‘The Prince’ on 2-Tone Records in August 1979 and scored an instant hit. Their tribute to ska legend Prince Buster reached the Top Twenty, following in the footsteps of stable-mates The Specials and The Selecter, who had made their mark with ‘Gangsters’ and ‘On My Radio’ respectively. For their follow-up, Madness deserted 2-Tone and joined Stiff and stormed the Top Ten with ‘One Step Beyond’. The band’s string of consecutive hits (13 up to 1982) ensured an unrivalled financial return for the label and put Ian’s successes into the shade.
The Beat, a Midlands group which also united black and white musicians, also entered the fray with a double A-side single combining a cover of Smokey Robinson’s ‘Tears Of A Clown’ and a breathless dance song ‘Ranking Full Stop’. They fused the Jamaican dance rhythms with punk’s aggression producing an unexpectedly angry finale to the Seventies. Traditional ska songs were resurrected to stunning effect, including Prince Buster’s ‘One Step Beyond’, covered by Madness, and Jamaican singer Dandy Livingstone’s 1967 song ‘A Message To You, Rudy’, to which The Specials paid tribute. But the ska movement – which aimed to unite different races through music – attracted skinheads with laced-up boots and National Front sympathies. Multi-racial bands like The Selecter walked a tight-rope on stage – running a gauntlet of Nazi salutes and chants of ‘Zeig Heil’. Fights frequently broke out on the dance floors at such gigs as the new dance craze gripped British teenagers.
1979 had indeed been an eventful year and, in its last days, a benefit concert staged at the Hammersmith Odeon in London brought together under one roof many of the musical successes of the decade, regardless of their age or musical style. Ian Dury & The Blockheads took their place on a star-studded bill. The concerts were in aid of an emergency relief fund for the people of Kampuchea (formerly Cambodia) and had been organised as a result of talks between Paul McCartney and the then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. Promoter Harvey Goldsmith was involved in staging the ambitious four-day event and the International Red Cross and UNICEF co-ordinated the distribution of monies raised. Queen opened the event on Boxing Day, while Ian Dury & The Blockheads shared the bill with The Clash the following night. The Who, The Pretenders and The Specials donated their services on December 28, and the last night brought together Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Rockpile (fronted by Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds) and Paul McCartney’s Wings. Just before the curtain fell on what amounted to a preview of Live Aid, the audience was treated to an extended jam session led by McCartney which featured eleven guest musicians, including Billy Bremner and Dave Edmunds (from Rockpile), James Honeyman-Scott (The Pretenders), Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Ronnie Lane (ex-Small Faces and The Faces), Bruce Thomas (The Attractions), Gary Brooker (Procol Harum), and Kenny Jones and Pete Townshend (The Who). An album entitled Concert For The People Of Kampuchea was later released and featured a live version of ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’.
Behind the scenes, however, all was not well with The Blockheads. The relationship between Ian and some members of his band had come under strain and rows were developing, predictably about money. While ‘Hit Me’ had sold a million copies, band members were continuing to draw only £100 a week from Blackhill and the exhausting Do It Yourself “tour schedule seems to have brought the resentment to a head. Ian, meanwhile, was staying in extravagant hotel suites and living the archetypal rock star lifestyle. Drinking heavily and receiving more female attention than ever, time spent with Ian was becoming increasingly unpleasant. His domineering presence left little allowance for band members’ personal lives. While they remained on a set wage, he demanded their undivided attention and he resented girlfriends or spouses who distracted them from what he saw as their number one priority – him.
Mickey Gallagher describes one incident from this alcohol-soaked era: “We would go out for a meal after the gigs and Ian would always like to be the last chicken in the shop. So, everyone had eaten and had a good time and gone back to the hotel just over the courtyard from the restaurant and I was left there looking after Ian. I don’t drink, but Ian’s there saying, ‘Another Guinness’ and there’s only three people left – the two of us and the waiter. He doesn’t talk any English, so Ian starts talking this pigeon French and then starts insulting him – really insulting him. He doesn’t understand, but they can tell by the body language it is not good. I am thinking, ‘We’d better get out’, but by now Ian’s too pissed and he can’t stand up. It took about half an hour to get from the table over to the hotel and he’s stopping all the time. I had him by the arm and we would just get a flow going and he would fall back against the wind. Then he started insulting me saying, ‘Without me, you’re fucking nothing’ and then he fell over and so I said, ‘Fuck you mate, I’m going’ and left him. So Ian’s flat on his back outside the hotel and as I’m going in up the stairs I can hear him shouting for the sound man and so Ian Home came down and picked him up.”
But however much Ian pushed his band and entourage by behaving like a spoilt rock star, he seemed to retain their esteem. Mickey stressed: “I have an ultimate respect for his art – he is a one-off. There is no one else who writes a lyric like Ian or delivers a lyric like Ian and there is no one that I have found who is as enjoyable to write music with as Ian.”
Ian had always got a buzz from the female attention which accompanied his fame and, in hackneyed rock’n’Roll tradition, attractive women would be welcomed into his dressing room after gigs. Amid the bottles of champagne and brandy, stacks of canned beer, and the fug of cigarette smoke, Ian held court, lapping up the adoration. If boyfriends were in attendance he humiliated them, his battalion of heavies keeping them at bay.
“I was quite a muscular bloke then, I kept myself fit and there was no one that would come near,” says Fred. “There were these boyfriends I used to sling out and Ian used to say, ‘I don’t need a security team, I’ve got Spider.’ Sometimes in the audience there would be girls that would adore him and want to come back and they would make their way backstage and their boyfriends would be there seething with jealousy. This French bloke came in and said, ‘I’d like to hit him over the head with an axe,’ and I said, ‘Well, you’ve gotta hit me first.’ He said, ‘Do you think you’re going to stop me,’ and I said, ‘No I don’t think it, I’ll stop you all right. Anyway, why are you talking like that, what’s he done?’ and he said, ‘He talks to my girlfriend,’ and I said, ‘It’s just that he is a public figure.’ So he took a swing at me and I grabbed hold of his arm and I said, ‘Don’t do that because I eat people like you for breakfast, get out of it, I don’t want you in this area now.’ Ray, this big black geezer, came up and said, ‘Shall I get him out?’ and I said, ‘No, he’ll get out of the way on his own.’ I said to the bloke, ‘I know you don’t understand what I’m saying because you’re a Frenchman but I want you to go,’ so he stood back and tried to kick me, so I grabbed his leg and kicked him up the bollocks and said, ‘Now take him out Ray’ He was screaming all about the police.”
Ian’s minders were also called upon to stand in the way of those whom Ian had drunkenly abused. Staff in restaurants and bars would regularly bear the brunt of his heavy drinking, but customers would also find themselves in the firing line. Several times, members of Ian’s entourage had to agree to meet dry cleaning bills, after the inebriated star threw soup and other dishes over waiters. But Ian never curbed his behaviour; he knew that if his mouth got him into trouble, Spider or The Strangler would bail him out. Fred describes one such fracas which took place in a hotel in Berlin.
“The receptionist bloke was wearing a wig and Ian’s come in and said, ‘What’s that fucking thing you’ve got on your head? A dead rat?’ He was really pissed and so I said, ‘You’ll have to excuse my friend, he’s a bit drunk,’ but I was smiling because of the way he’d said it and Ian has a very infectious way of laughing. I said, ‘I’m not laughing at you, I’m just laughing at what he said,’ and as I’m saying that, Ian was doing things to make me laugh even more and I was struggling to stay serious. Of course, this bloke was absolutely furious and in no time at all, he leapt over the counter and grabbed Ian’s scarf. Now you must never grab Ian’s scarf while Spider’s about, so then it was serious. I grabbed hold of his wrist to ease the pressure on Ian, so Ian got all brave again, and I pushed the receptionist to the back of the reception where the keys were, and he came at me and so I just hit him – bang – and put him on the floor. I leaned over the counter, and Ian’s laughing his dick off, and I said, ‘I’m ever so sorry mate, but you mustn’t touch the man.’ He gets to his feet and says, ‘I’m going to call the police,’ and I said, ‘By all means call the police, but I’m apologising to you.’ So another hotel employee comes out and sees the blood on the other bloke’s lip and I said, ‘I’ve had to restrain him from attacking my man. Do you know, this is Ian Dury, he’s a cripple and you mustn’t touch him,’ but Ian was going, ‘Ah fuck him, he’s only a cunt anyway,’ which wasn’t doing much good. Anyway, the police came and got hold of me and took me down the station and Peter Jenner paid them some money and got me off the hook. The next morning Ian says to me, ‘Why did you give that geezer a whack? You shouldn’t have whacked him.’ As we went back and forth, Ian always said, ‘You won’t touch me because Spider will kill ya. He’ll pull your fucking head off.’ But every time he had a go at someone, I had to rescue him.”
Ian had a curious attitude towards violence. He opposed the use of force and regularly lectured Spider about the value of ‘verbals’ over the fist. To Ian’s credit, he played no small part in keeping his roadie/minder on the straight and narrow after years spent behind bars, and even though Ian liked to portray himself as a ‘hard case’ who could handle himself, his most vicious assaults were of the oral kind. But the implication of physical force and an air of menace intrigued him and his inner aggression tended to manifest itself when he was on stage and drunk. During one period when Ian was being particularly obstreperous, one of Ian’s aides remarked, “Whatever is wrong with Ian happened 45 years ago and we aren’t going to solve it now.” Many of those who worked with him believe there’s more than a grain of truth in his observation.
“Ian had been institutionalised and had dealt with that as a young person and as an adult he was severely disabled,” says his former musical collaborator Steve Nugent. “He feels physically precarious and has to depend on other people for physical and mental support and I think a lot of his discussion of violence dates back to his being institutionalised. In terms of his background, he was an early recipient of some of the major accomplishments of the welfare state, in the sense that he wasn’t quite thrown on the scrap heap when he contracted polio. He has certainly got very mixed views about the relationship between his parents; his father was of the servant class, he drove cars for other people and drove buses; his mother came from a more domesticated background and by virtue of that marriage and his subsequent illness, she was a gentle lady fallen on hard times. That’s enough to make you violent.”
Davey Payne’s violent confrontations, meanwhile, did little for industrial relations. Even in the early days of the Kilburns, the dishevelled sax man was infamous for his knife-edge personality and his tendency to go for people, sometimes in the middle of a gig. When Chaz counted the band in for a final encore in Madrid, during the European tour to promote Do It Yourself, Davey lost control. He grabbed Chaz by the scalp and nutted him so hard on the forehead that it burst open – all in full view of the audience. Chaz staggered back to his hotel room, took some pain killers and woke up the next morning to find the band had checked out. He flew to Barcelona only to find that there had been a room mix-up and the others thought he had left in disgust over Davey’s assault.
Generally, those who knew Davey had learned to avoid winding him up as they knew what the consequences would be. Ian was wary of the band’s loose cannon’ and had turned a blind eye to his outbursts, relieved that he had not been on the receiving end. But Davey’s building anger at Ian was ready to boil over.
Mickey: “If the band went to a restaurant, Ian would be obsessed that Davey was looked after. I think it deflected attention away from Ian and Ian quite enjoyed it. He could still be in the limelight, but, ‘Hey, look at that crazy person over there.’ There were times that were totally alien to me where, because Davey was a violent person, fights broke out on stage between various members of the band. I would be shocked, although in terms of the show it looked great. Ian didn’t condone it or defend it, but it still went on and Ian just said, ‘Ah … rock’n’Roll man.’ The next day Davey would be back on stage and everything was forgotten, but I’d still be traumatised.”
“Davey’s rage came on because Ian was getting all the dairy and he wasn’t. He was on a drip feed and so that was the root cause of it. If Davey beat somebody up, the bottom of it was that he was enraged with Ian and Ian thought that was fine, because at least he wasn’t getting it himself. He lived in fear of Davey turning on him and he did once at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin on the Do It Yourself “tour. Ian had the big suite in the hotel and the rest of us had single rooms. We found out that Ian had a suite and he said, ‘We’ll have to have a party up here, everybody can come up and have a party.’ So we do the gig and go back to the hotel and Ian gets ensconced up in his room with what is the perfect combination for Ian – a young girl who is obviously enamoured with ‘Ian Dury’ and her boyfriend, who he can sit in a room and put down in front of the girl. He’s pulling the girl and insulting the geezer and she’s thinking, ‘Why am I with this plank?’ I rang up to Ian and said, ‘We’ve got all these people in the bar downstairs waiting to go to the party and they’ve all invited people’ and Ian says, ‘Oh no, party’s off, have the party down there.’ We couldn’t have the party down there because it was only for residents, so we just barged into Ian’s room and Davey is really enraged by this stage and he is talking about something that had gone down at the gig he wasn’t happy about. I could see Davey getting more and more wound up and I was there telling him, ‘It’s par for the course Davey’ and then he was gone. He rushed over, picked Ian up and rammed his head against the wall.”
Davey Payne believes that Ian was overindulged as a child and that this caused him to abuse the loyalty of those around him in later life. Even though Ian was often obnoxious to those around him, his expectations of them were always high.
“Ian didn’t have a dad at home to give him a smack now and again. He had these middle-class aunties with Burberry rain macs and sensible shoes,” observes Davey. “That’s how he was brought up and because he had had polio, he could throw his weight around and they’d be fussing over him. I don’t think he has really ever done anything by himself. The things that went wrong in his early childhood were what went wrong and they have affected him like things have affected us all in one way or another.”
At the beginning of 1980, as Ian subsumed himself in a draining rock’n’Roll lifestyle, the band was dealt a terrible blow. Chaz, disillusioned with Blackhill and the energy-sapping gigs, left to pursue a solo career. The announcement shook Ian, but Chaz was steadfast in his desire to achieve recognition for himself and to compose new material. Like Russell Hardy before him, Chaz too had become weary of Ian’s difficult behaviour and found his possessive nature stifling. The partnership which produced ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’, ‘Clevor Trever’, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’ and other classics had finally come apart.
Ian said later:14 “You can’t live in each others’ pockets all the time. Chaz obviously had to go and breathe his own breath and sing his own songs. He’s a much better singer than me. He may not have certain front man skills that I’ve got, but he’s got loads of other skills he felt he had to explore. Anything that Chaz has ever done in his life has always been with my blessing and I guess vice versa too. There have been times we haven’t seen eye to eye, but very, very rarely. There’s never been a time when I have worked with Chaz when I haven’t enjoyed it and I haven’t seen him smiling. I have never seen him play an instrument without a smile on his face, ever. I’ve got nothing except love and admiration for Chaz and if I get angry with him it’s only because he’s left my bloody video on top of his car and driven off, that’s all. It’s never because I think he’s out of order. Chaz is slightly a nutty professor and absent-minded about other things and other realities, but he exists beautifully within his own plane.”
Chaz explains the reasons behind his decision to go it alone: “After ‘Hit Me’ we did a three-month tour of 80 gigs and I remember saying to Ian, ‘Look, I’ve got to have a break.’ One of the reasons I wanted to have a break was that the management [Blackhill] were creaming it and wanted to get as much mileage out of our success as they could. The problem was that we didn’t have time to write any new material. We knew the tunes we were playing so well that we could have got a robot to play them and I knew I had a lot more to express. One of the last shows we did on that three-month tour in 1979 was an amazing gig at The Paradiso in Amsterdam. One of the features of the gig was that the floor started to collapse while we were playing and they had to get the fire brigade in. When we went to the dressing room, this beautiful Dutch model appeared and I started chatting to her. We were staying at the Hotel American just across the square and so the band wandered back across and she was with us and all of a sudden we were all separated and somehow or other I had this beautiful girl in my room. She said, ‘Would you like some grass?’ and I said ‘Yeah, shall I get some wine?’ and then other various things were offered to me and in the midst of this incredible best day of my life, a melody popped into my head for a song called ‘Ai No Corrida’. I had my guitar and checked the key and I called Norman in his room and he came and jammed on it. Then I realised that the piece was not right for The Blockheads, it was too melodic, something didn’t feel right. So when I had my time off, I went to a musician friend of mine Pete Van Hooke, who I went to school with, who knew a guy called Kenny Young, who was a lyricist. He invited me around and I took a few tunes and that was one of them on the tape and he wrote the lyrics to ‘Ai No Corrida’. I had no idea what it was about, but it turned out it was all about Oshima’s film In The Realm Of The Senses. I went into that area, which was good in retrospect because I got a record deal with A&M on the strength of that and made four albums and Ian co-wrote a lot of songs on those albums, in fact some great songs.
“I adopted a stance away from the group. I think I had said I didn’t want to do any gigs and every now and again I would have to do that. I don’t think Ian particularly liked it, but he respected it. Ian said that he always felt more secure when I was playing with the band, probably because we co-wrote a lot of the songs. Ian was a wonderful person and he was also very intense sometimes and that intensity would get too much for me. There was a time when he was drinking quite a lot and his humour could change. He could get a little bit spiteful, defensive about a lot of things and sometimes I used to feel that the intimacy that had been built up through writing songs together was actually being encroached upon in a way I didn’t like. I was confused about how I related to him. As you get to know somebody, over the years you get to see the full picture and you start to see a pattern and I was aware of that. When it got out of order sometimes I used to tell him, ‘I have had enough,’ or just not be there, not call him. Ian knew at the end of the day I wouldn’t let him down, but at the same time it was important that he could see I was an individual. Sometimes I felt he wanted a gang, he wanted the winning team, and he cherished the members of that gang so much that he was in danger of becoming claustrophobic. I think he did try to control things.”