RASPBERRY BERET
Ian Dury holds a unique place in music history. There was never anybody quite like him and I doubt we’ll ever see his like again. He first came to notice with the pub-rock band, Kilburn and The High Roads, which later morphed into Ian Dury and the Kilburns. Rather serendipitously, the only time I caught them was on Kilburn High Road, North West London!
Ian Dury made his first real impact with the album New Boots and Panties, which also put Stiff Records on the map. The album has a valid claim to being the first successful Punk Rock album, although I’m sure Punk purists would disagree. Ian combined a cockney style of story-telling (even though he wasn’t technically a cockney) with an almost Jazz-Rock backing, but the attitude was pure punk showmanship and if memory serves Ian was the first person I knew of, to wear a razor-blade as jewellery. If Ian wasn’t a bona-fide Punk, then he certainly opened the door for all the Punk acts who followed him. A seam of wry humour permeated every song and the fact that Mr Dury frequently referred to himself as The Raspberry (Cockney Rhyming Slang. Rasberry Ripple=Cripple) gave it even more of a twist. I don’t intend to write an appraisal of Ian’s career here, because that has been well-documented in ’IAN DURY: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY’ written by an old acquaintance of mine, Will Birch (of Kursaal Flyers and The Records fame). Suffice to say, I doubt there’s a person alive in the UK who hasn’t heard Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, whether intentionally or not.
The first time I met Ian Dury was when I did a short interview with him for a UK music paper, during the first Stiff Tour. The time and place escape me and I don’t remember much about the interview either. It was a pretty rushed job, as Ian’s star was rapidly rising and I was just one of a clutch of journalist, eager for his words of ‘wisdom’.
The second time was a different story. I had recently arrived at Radio 1 and had been given carte blanche to interview anybody I thought was worth interviewing. Ian Dury was one of my early targets and I arranged an interview with him through Sonnie Rae at Stiff. The interview took place at some hotel I’ve forgotten. I was greeted by Dury publicist supreme, Kosmo Vinyl, who later went on to manage The Clash. Also present was Ian’s ‘minder’ and helpmate Fred.
The first thing that struck me was just how seriously impeded Dury was by the disability he’d developed through catching polio as a child. When I’d seen him on stage, he was like Mr Bojangles and it was easy to ignore the fact that he had a serious disability. Fred had to help Ian onto the bed, where he manually straightened out the affected leg, before sitting or more accurately lying, in a position where he felt comfortable holding court. Over about an hour Ian pontificated on a myriad subjects, including love, family and the future of the media. He was like a hybrid of Max Miller and Andy Warhol and was certainly one of the most informed and perceptive people I ever interviewed. The hybrid thing went even further in that visually, Dury resembled a metamorphosis of The Artful Dodger and an Elf! When I left, I was aware that I had four fifteen minute tapes of pure gold!
The nature of the programme I worked on was that they would use short clips, usually of one to two minutes, of soundbytes from music/celebrity types and I envisaged that we’d be using more than a few clips from the Ian interview, which meant lots of repeat fees for moi. About three weeks after I did the interview, Ian and The Blockheads released Hit Me With Your Rhythm stick which climbed to the UK singles number one slot in the blink of an eye, making my interview even hotter. On the very day the record hit number one, my phone started ringing. It transpired that Ian was turning down all media requests to do an interview. As to why, my memory is clouded, but in a recent chat with Will Birch he told me that Kosmo Vinyl was very keen that media exposure was limited and that Ian wasn’t heard repeating the same things over and over again, so maybe he was the one turning down the requests, or then again maybe it was just Ian being contrary. It seemed like I was the only reporter sitting on a ‘current’ interview with the artist who held the much-coveted number one slot!
As I was freelance I was at liberty to recut the interview and sell the result to any programme on BBC Radio who wanted it and from memory I did this three or four times, each one generating a new interview fee and making it my best paid interview ever. Thank you Ian, thank you Kosmo.
Over the ensuing years I became quite friendly with quite a few of the Blockhead crew. Guitarist Johnny Turnbull and I became quite close friends for a while and socialised frequently. We’d actually become friendly before I interviewed Ian when Johnny’s girlfriend Claire had the next stall to me at Camden Lock. When Do-it-Yourself (criminally underrated) was released, I bumped into Kosmo in the West End and he enlisted my help in fly-posting Carnaby Street, following the D-I-Y ethos. I played Sink My Boats, from that album, on the Radio 1 evening show, I worked on and still think it should have been issued as a single to this day. When I left Radio 1 for BBC TV, I lost touch with the posse, but met Ian again when I booked him to do PM@1. During National Year of the Disabled.
I was appalled when editor Peter Hercombe refused to agree to Ian doing Spasticus Autisticus, which was the chosen song to promote the National Year of the Disabled Campaign. He felt that the song was ‘inappropriate’ for the show and was immovable on that. Given that, Ian chose to perform Very Personal and Really Glad You Came, from his forthcoming album Ban the Bomb (my personal favourite from the Dury canon) by Ian Dury and the Music Students. We arranged to record the backing tracks at Townhouse Studios, in Goldhawk Road, Shepherds Bush, which co-incidentally was where I was living at the time. When we’d finished the tracks we retired to the studio bar and Ian, as was his wont, held court. We started talking about jazz and Ian got on to the subject of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Rather patronisingly Ian said
“You ain’t even heard of Roland Kirk ha ha.”
I told him that I had and owned quite a large number of his records. Ian started bragging, as was also his wont, that he had twenty-two albums by Roland Kirk. Feeling a bit baited, I told him I had twenty-seven! He expressed disbelief and accused me of making that up. I assured him that I wasn’t and told him that he could come back to my place, just down the road, if he didn’t believe me. The conversation petered out and we reired to a hostelry near Shepherds Bush Green.
Near to closing time, Ian asked me again if I really had all those Roland Kirk albums and I told him I had. He asked if I minded him coming back to have a look through them and I said why not. We got some carry-out and headed down the road. When we got back to my house, he was like a kid in a toyshop. I had a pretty large jazz collection and it contained some gems. We sat up for a few hours playing through Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton and all sorts of other left-field jazz/ avant-garde stuff. Feeling a bit knackered I announced I was going to bed, expecting him to request a cab. Instead he asked if I minded him staying the night and mounting a further assault on my collection. I showed him the guest room and left him chilling out to Abdul Wadud.
When I rose the following morning, he was already up and into some Cecil Taylor. We chatted whilst I made breakfast. He stayed the whole day listening non-stop to jazz rare grooves and it was only the threat of my girlfriend, whose house it was, returning from a location shoot and taking a dim view of the ‘invasion’ which persuaded him to vacate.
When showday arrived the following week, I attended the 09.00 production meeting where I set out the logistics of Ian’s performance. Nothing groundbreaking; Ian would perform Really Glad You Came, at the top of the show and then walk to an interview set to be interviewed by Donnie MacLeod.
“Stop Right There!” said Editor Peter Hercombe.
We can’t have him WALK to the interview set.
“Why not? Said I, innocently.
“The man’s a cripple! We can’t have him WALK, our viewers will find that distressing. I argued that they OUGHT to find it distressing and I presumed being disabled was far more ‘distressing’ to the person who was disabled, than it was ever likely to be to the bulk of our audience. I also argued that the whole point of National Year of the Disabled was to highlight the plight of disabled people and where better to do that than on national television. To be honest, I can’t remember whether I won that battle or not, but Ian’s performance went down very well and we got loads of complimentary mail over the following week, an awful lot of it coming from elderly and disabled people.
A few weeks later, I went to see Ian and The Music Students at Hammersmith Odeon and sat directly behind Peter Blake, Sgt Pepper’s cover artist and long-time friend of Ian Dury. I found it peculiar when Ian introduced recently recruited MD Michael MacEvoy and backing singers, ex Arrival members Frankie Collins, Paddy McHugh and Dyan Birch as his ‘best friends’, being that he’d only known them a matter of months. I thought it was particularly disrespectful to guitarist Ed Byrne, who’d been with him since Kilburn days, but that was Ian all over. An extremely complex man, who wasn’t always particularly loyal to the people who stood by him and whom I suspect had quite a vindictive side. In an amusing aside, former Blockhead Mickey Gallagher told me some time afterwards, that the real reason Ian had been keen to come back to my house that night, was because his girlfriend had kicked him out that day and he had nowhere to stay.
A bit of a user perhaps, but an extremely talented and original artist who’s sorely missed.
Rasberry Beret was a single from th album Around the World in a Day, by The Arist Formerly Known as The Artist Formerly Known As Prince. The first time I heard it was in the car of my friend Rachel, who just happened to be wearing a raspberry beret at the time. Happy Days
