REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL (Part 4)
Two years have now passed from the death of Ian Dury, and as promised in The Unbearable Shiteness of Ian it is time to calmly, critically and objectively rate his body of work. At least it might be time for other people to do that kind of dull, sober review. Me – I think his body of work was a manky as his physical body – the failing of one thankfully stopped the other. As mentioned elsewhere hanging around with a band called The Blockheads suggested the general intelligence of everyone working with him.
Sickness can be an excuse in the short term, but if I worked in industry (and frankly such an idea is anathema to me), using sickness as anexcuse for shoddy work for twenty years is pushing it a bit. Okay Ian, you had polio as a kid but that’s not an excuse for not even trying to sing. And certainly no excuse for Spasticus Autisticus when you neither had multiple sclerosis or autism. You can try to use the excuse that the song is in character, but its basically in the character that didn’t realise that the song would be used in the summer of Joey Deacon to abuse fifty percent of the countries children. The ones who had already been partially been crippled by being hit with what was so euphamistically called a “rythmn stick” a few years before (in my case the rythmn stick was a bamboo cane and made me destest music lessons and much of what came out of them ever since).
What annoys me most about Dury (apart from his son) is that he appeared to be totally aware of how annoyingly useless he was. Look at the list of jobs he could have done on “What A Waste” that he could of done instead of playing the fool in a six piece band. “What a waste, what a waste – but I don’t mind” Dury sings, but what about the rest of us. We blood mind your lousy Essex vowels removing any aspect of wit from the lyrics already sucked out by the monotonous delivery. I bloody mind. And I also beg to differ the “Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll is very good indeed”. Actually not only is it not rock’n’roll (which would be a “thank heavens for small mercies” moment if it wasn’t jazz-funk instead), but it isn’t even vaguely good. Sex and drugs I can agree with, but have you ever tried to do the wild thing or take acid with the Big Bopper on?
In conclusion when discussing Ian Dury one has to hold your hand up and go for a partially disabled bloke he had a remarkable career. But I would go even further. For a bloke who was rubbish it was remarkable he had a career at all. “There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards” Ian says. Not you Dury, not you.