IAN DURY AND THE BLOCKHEADS – “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”
What is the relationship between the charts and everything else? The charts are a show home for pop music, filled with its shiniest mod cons, but one stuffed with hidden doors and tunnels, records that can tumble you out of pop and into other worlds which have their own codes and rules and no cosy countdown to set things in order. And in those other worlds – some of them, anyway – the charts are a sunlit palace of temptation, but to step (or be plucked) into it is to risk having your life and art and the world it came from turned higgledy-piggledy.
Every so often a door between the palace of pop and one of these other worlds opens so wide that every visitor can’t help but notice it and the walls between what’s mainstream and what’s not suddenly seem very thin. “Double Barrel” is one of them, so you could argue is “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”. So is this: it promises a sharper, smarter, more dangerous place than Number One hits generally admit you to.
This wasn’t a fluke, either, a canny act taking advantage of the January lull: it sold close to a million copies, a megahit in an era of them. “Rhythm Stick” is the sound of a band well aware that they’ve written a smash, and pushing themselves to make the delivery count. There isn’t a wasted note or fluffed decision on the track, but the whole thing comes off as wonderfully simple - a darting, jabbing groove designed to seduce even the most stand-offish of blokes onto the dancefloor, and a superb backdrop for Dury’s amazing performance.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Ian Dury – like a lot of highly quotable songwriters, he works best for me quoted. But on “Rhythm Stick” he makes every word count, caressing the line-end “-o” and “-an” sounds, wheezing and gasping through the chorus, then kicking off on the coda as the guitar shrieks him on. This is one of the first number ones where the hip-hop concept of “flow” really seems relevant: riding a rhythm, racking up bonuses with multi-syllable combos.
Like “Y.M.C.A.”, this is an ostensibly inclusive lyric, celebrating the universality of dancing (or screwing), but there’s also something mocking, even sinister about it: check the promo clip of Dury onstage, surrounded by darkness, blinking, contorting, urging the dance on but always apart from it. That goblinoid malice doesn’t come across so fully on record – “Rhythm Stick” got to No.1 because it was infectious and jolly as well as demented and sardonic – but it’s there.
The distance, as much as the playful aggression, might make this one of the most laddish dance records. It’s never beery or off-putting, though: there’s just a thread of cheek to it, which if followed might lead you quite out of pop and into some very rum places. Though just then the top of the charts was as rum a place as any. The people who didn’t fit in anywhere were getting their chance not just to make, but to define pop music: interesting times ahead.
9
TOTP Watch: The Blockheads must surely be counted as one of the greatest of TOTP acts ever. Anyway, they performed this twice.
19 January 1979. Also in the studio that week were; The Olympic Runners, Racey, Frankie Miller, Olivia Newton-John, The Three Degrees and Chic, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘This Is It’. The host was Peter Powell.
26 January 1979. Also in the studio that week were; Doctor Feelgood, Doll (the eighties start here!), Judas Priest, Phoebe Snow and Donny & Marie Osmond (eh? The hits had dried up for them three years before), plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Cool Meditations’. The host was Dave Lee Travis.
These running orders do indeed make 1979 look like something of a golden age.
#25 – Well deduced LondonLee. All is revealed on the reverse side of the sleeve…
http://tinyurl.com/5wvd6v
#24: “Dance Of The Screamers,” though, might be the most extreme thing they ever did – see my recent blog post on the subject.
this has come up a teeny bit before — david essex! — but it was definitely a THING in the early days of punk; that at last “we” were throwing off the oppressive cultural imperialism of the american accent in all pop; that only now could we speak in our own accents, about the romance of our own back-streets and strange suburbs
dury didn’t sing “american” at ALL: and he didn’t sing about mepmphis or tulsa or new orleans; he sang about billericay, plaistow, harold hill! which was all incredibly (if with hindsight rather weirdly) exciting at the time; we have mythology TOO, and it’s RIGHT HERE IN YOUR HANDS ppl
*goes writes songs about wem and clun*
Ooooh, I have to link to the lengthy and copiously illustrated Barney Bubbles tribute post, from whence the image at #27 came (it also credits Popular’s own LondonLee, who supplies photos of the full Armed Forces artwork on a separate linked page).
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/?p=1296
#26, Three Degrees’ Woman In Love would surely have been a Number One at any other time. A great record up against some very stiff competition…(sorry!)
I’m very glad it wasn’t…I couldn’t stand the record. Cabaret time (unlike its predecessor “Givin’ Up, Givin’ In” which was Moroder-brilliant and didn’t even make the top ten bah!).
Re #27
Oh of course, it’s been years since I looked at the back of the sleeve. What on earth it has to do with the record I don’t know but it works brilliantly.
LondonLee @ 25: It’s called a tangram.
Good for keeping an unmotivated maths class quiet for, ooh, all of ten minutes!
Tangramtastic. I did wonder about this sleeve as it seems such a striking leap from the conventional dross we’ve witnessed so far (and another rare case of ‘artists not on the cover’). I wasn’t sure if it was a European edition or not.
As for the song, 9 one second, 10 the next. I heard it a few years later when I was old enough to remember and instantly enjoyed it. How could you not be amused by Dury’s intonation? And it’s probably the best #1 single to feature hot sax, amongst other things (hard luck Georgios).
I know what a Tangram is, thanks.
The Blockheads played a free concert in Nottingham’s Market Square a few weeks ago and I went along but, sorry, Erithian, I found it rather depressing. Unlike the late 90′s gig that Mike refers to above when, despite having to be carried onstage, Dury was really rather wonderful. ‘See you next year’ he said at the end, but he was dead within a year.
I always wanted to like Dury more than I did. I had friends who knew him in the Kilburn and the High Roads days and thought him a genius. I bought all the singles up to the slightly dodgy ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ (still have the 12″ in the loft). This is great, a 9/10 for me, as is ‘Sex etc’, and ‘What A Waste’ gets 9.5 but my personal favourite is a B side (let’s hear it for B sides!) that seems to sum up what’s so great about his approach to life: ‘You’ll See Glimpses’. I think I’ll play it now. It’s on the back of ‘Sueperman’s Big Sister’, a single whose label is a hand-corrected version of Nick Lowe’s ‘So It Goes’ single. ‘They take me for a mug because I smile, they think I’m too out of tune to mind being patronised…. all I want for my birthday is another birthday… this has been got out by a friend.’ One of those records that makes you feel like part of the human race.
Re 29: Mark, pls post those Wem and Clun songs when they’re recorded (hint, you could make a Dury-style mention of Wilf Lunn in the second one).
Re 32: Agree heartily, couldn’t understand why the fire and vim of Givin’ Up Givin’ In didn’t do better. The 3 Degrees’ indian summer also included The Runner, again (from memory) pretty dark, moody and hard to keep still to. Woman In Love (“I’m not a child, I’m a wo-man, I love yoo-wah” etc) was the biggest hit of the three but too icky for my tastes.
I’m still struggling to articulate what it is about “Hit Me” that affects me so much as a piece of music, rather than for what it represents in the wider context of chart pop. And I think it’s primarily to do with what I perceive as the almost dream-like quality of its opening, dominant piano/bass-led riff, coupled with the almost mythical travelogue of the verses. For me, the chorus is where “everybody else” is invited in for a chirpy, cheeky Cockney singalong, as if that was what the song was all about – but for me it’s almost a smokescreen, an entryist device which allows the rest of the track to exist. And it’s within the restlessly undulating contours of the rest of the track that I reside as a listener, shifting over periodically to admit the chorus’s house-guests.
Dream-like? Un-equipped to play vinyl in my school study, I had this on one side of a home-made C90, which I used to play over and over again as I drifted off to sleep, inventing videos that eventually turned into dreams. And so there’s something here which touches that half-asleep/half-awake state of consciousness, in a way that still cuts deep – allowing me to visualise the music almost as a physical space, which part of me still inhabits. If that doesn’t sound too pretentious…
I had experienced a similar effect with Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” a few months earlier, albeit as a one-off moment. The first time I heard the track was on FM radio one morning, as I emerged from sleep into wakefulness, and so the sparse, haunting oddness of the arrangement – the syn-drums, the rising and falling string shimmers – first took root in my sub-consciousness as I dreamt. I woke up with the strangest sense of wonder at what I literally perceived as its other-worldly quality, and it’s a sense of wonder that I’ve never quite lost over the years. No other piece of music has ever done this to me!
Re: #11 – there’s still a couple of years before I’m born and a few more before I am pop-aware!
My first impression of this was a mixture of “hur hur hur he said ‘rhythm stick’” and “blimey he’s a scary man”. Nowadays Ian isn’t so scary but there’s still a fair amount of FNAR going on here. Also I can’t believe that bassline player has any fewer than seventeen fingers! I love the daft piano flourishes and the relatively gentle guitar bibbling, but agree that the saxophone is a bit much. I’d give it an 8.
#39 – Mike, for someone who’s struggling you do a mighty fine job.
A rare live album that’s genuinely worth hearing is ‘Straight From The Desk’ of the Blockheads live at the Ilford Odeon on December 23rd 1978. The excited audience break the floor during ‘Billericay Dickey’ leading Dury to warn in his introduction to Rhythm Stick;
“Yoo, You monkeys, You’ve browken the floor! (crowd cheers) Now, ‘avin’ browken it, we don’t want nobody fallin’ down the ‘ole, do we? (crowd cheers) Now we’ve made one! (dirty cackle!) So – if if you can ‘old back a bit from the abyss, ‘cos the first ones to go are going to be those lovely men in blue jerseys (crowd cheers) and they all come from Essex!”
It genuinely DOES sound like quite a night.
My experience of this song – first hearing it – was quite different to most here, I’m guessing. It’s Sunday night, and I’m allowed (as my parents are watching 60 Minutes) to go to the bedroom and listen to the radio (saving battery power in my own, once a week). What do I listen to? Dr. Demento, of course! He plays all kinds of odd and strange music, creates his own world of the gauche, the giddy, the flat out weird (I grew up in a Mothers of Invention household, so his regular playing of Frank Zappa is merely the baseline of oddness for me). And one night, I heard this song. No explanation where they are from (I knew enough at twelve to know it was an English accent) nor any of how successful the song is back home. Just as I didn’t quite get “Y.M.C.A.” at first, I didn’t quite get this one either, but I understood they were both wide-open enjoyments of the world.
While the Village People were inescapable, Ian Dury and the Blockheads were only heard on Dr. Demento (though they may well have been on the New Wave-friendly station I had yet to discover). “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” was thus understood by me to be a novelty song along the same lines as The Bonzos (also a Dr. Demento favorite) – funny Englishmen who were great musicians as well, obv. I was amazed to find out a few years ago that this went to #1!
@ #30 thanks Mike for that link to the Barney Bubbles tribute. I hadn’t realised how many of his sleeves I had loved – particularly the Imperial Bedroom sleeve which until now I had assumed was an original by some Picasso acolyte.
there is a link to news of an upcoming book on BB in November from that page to this: http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2008/05/06/reasons-to-be-cheerful-the-barney-bubbles-revival/
Only a nine? Can’t think of any more worthy, cast-iron 10s than this beauty.
Re #18 – “goblinoid” was a fleeting remnant of a Lil Wayne reference I wanted to make but couldn’t quite think how to: the line in “A Milli” where Wayne goes “OK you’re a goon, but what’s a goon to a goblin?” and the word “goblin” is weirdly distorted in a wonderful trapdoor-opening-to-sukrat-town way.
Re #45 (and #19) – my rule of thumb is that if there’s even the slightest doubt in my mind that something’s a 10, then it’s not a 10. That doesn’t mean there’s any kind of flaw I could articulate in it (though this was a less close call than “I Feel Love”, which also had most of the comments box crew in disagreement).
I think it’s self-consciously clever, sure, but not in an inaccessible or alienating way: I don’t get any sense of side from “Hit Me”, any idea that Dury is sneering at the audience (I think “mocking” in my review hit slightly the wrong note – it’s a bit softer, “teasing” maybe).
To this day, still my absolute favorite Ian Dury track. I always thought he was kinda hit’n'miss, that people dug him more cuz he was a made-for-punk oddball, shrivelled arm & pervo tendancies intact. His great band certainly helped raise him to another level. I give it an 11.
One of my personal favourite artists of the period and much missed. Ian Dury was an extraordinary individual with a talent to match and he was very much up my strasse. “Rhythm Stick” was utterly typical of Ian’s offbeat quirky humour, only this time we are also treated to a stupendous backing track as well, which for me sells the record. Each to their own, of course, but I would be surprised if Dury attracted any criticism here, although perhaps his perception as a cockney git may have antagonised one or two people from points further north. He certainly produced some distinctive material and this reflected itself in his albums as well as in his live performances, which began life on the pub circuit as Kilburn and the High Roads. In essence, though, he was a poet and was fabulously funny, ducking no target, particularly the slight matter of his own inconvenience of polio striking him down from early childhood.
I consider it pretty pointless waxing lyrical (quite literally) about Dury’s contribution to popular culture when the initiated do not require it and the uninitiated are perfectly cabable of doing the research themselves. All I would like to say is that I too consider it a waste never to have been the ticket man at Fulham Broadway station (the underground closest to Chelsea FC), as Ian did in his wonderful “On the Waterfront – I could have been a contender” lament; and that there have indeed ain’t half been some clever bastards and that this wonderful man was one of them. God bless him.
Waldo @ 49: Speaking as one of those for whom Manchester is the poncey south (or more pertinently as one who was taken to Hertfordshire at the age of 11 and was given the most brutal and effective of elocution lessons), there certainly are “cockney gits” that I have always found somewhat grating. It’s one of the reasons that I never really warmed to Marc Bolan, for instance. But Ian Dury never seemed like that to me. Yes, he milked his cockneyness for all it was worth but never in a smugly superior way. Nothing about Ian Dury was smug and that was one of his endearing charms. I’m sure more than one Northerner has heard Billericay Dickie or Clevor Trever and nudged his mate with a knowing wink.
Another of Dury’s antecedents which I might have mentioned in my earlier post would be the Beat movement of the late fifties and early sixties. Amongst previous Popular appearances, he is kin to the Temperence Seven as much as Lonnie Donegan. He would have fitted in perfectly in the Liverpool cultural landscape of that time – not Merseybeat but the older, more visceral, art-poetry-jazz-theatre scene around Adrian Henri and Arthur Dooley at the Cracke and O’Connors. Londoner Adrian Mitchell was part of that scene, and I don’t know if Mitchell and Dury were friends but it seems hard to believe that they weren’t.