Clever Basterds: another reason to be cheerful

Ian Dury’s birthday.
Early 80s, there were two albums of Ian Dury and the Blockheads  which got thrashed to death and beyond, at least in the circles in which I was, somewhat unstealdy, inclined to move. 

One was New Boots and Panties, the debut album which came out – from memory – sometime in 1978. 

The other was Juke Box Dury, a compilation album of singles, both A and B sides. This was one of those B-sides.  

Dury and the Blockheads were one of the last bands to regularly produce singles which did not appear on albums. This was something done by British bands, going back to the sixties, but most dropped the practice in the ’70s, especially if they had ambitions to conquer the US market. This did not mean singles were not taken from albums, it is just that a number of singles woudl be released in between albums. 

By the early ’80s only a few bands were doing this on any regular basis- the Jam, Dury, and….um. The Beat, I think, did a couple of non-album singles (the fantastic ‘Too Nice To Talk To’ was one). The Pretenders intially did ‘Talk of the Town’ as an inter-album single but it later appeared on their second album. DExys Midnight Runners initially did ‘Plan B’ as an inter-album, one off single, though they did re-record it (with a very different lineup) for their second album ‘Too Rye Aye’.

NOTE: These are all fantastic numbers.

I think Madness also did some inter-album singles but I can’t recall what they were right now.

Anyway, Dury. Brilliant lyricist, by all accounts a pain in the arse to deal with. The Blockheads were an amazing band – their rhygthm section was one of the bestand tightest   around and when they were first heard in the US people could not beleive they were (mostly) white. 

Dury had a hard life – handcapped from youth due to polio, he used to lean on the mic stand for support (Johnny Rotton/Lydon, of the Sex Pistols, saw him doing this and copied the stance even though Lydon’s sole handicap, appart from his attitude, was his teeth).

He was put in a home at one point, and abused ( he sang about it in ‘Dance of the Crackpots’, which starts as a joke and then turns into something much more painful and harrowing).

And he couldn’t keep his trousers on. He seems to have been sexual catnip, to the point of self destruction: there’s a tale in a biogrpahy of him where the bnad was taken to dinner by the head of their record company’s entire European division. They were poised to make it big on the conttinent, but Dury copped off witht he wife of the head of the record company during the dinner. And that was the end of their chances in Europe.

Dury also wrote plays, appeared in films, and was an all-round brilliant bloke. His lyrics are often hilarious and rarely not clever. But he tended, like a lot of birtlalin bods, to self-sabotage.