There’s been no
shortage of disabled popular musicians (Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Gene
Vincent), and even a good sprinkling of polio-survivor musicians (Judy Collins,
Donovan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young), but no other mainstream-successful
singer-songwriter has ever explored disability and attitudes to disabled people
as powerfully and memorably as Ian Dury.
Ian Dury was born
in Harrow, son of a bus driver and a health visitor. After the war, the family briefly lived in
Switzerland, where his father was working as a chauffeur. When the relationship broke down, Dury’s
mother Peggy came back to England with her son and lived with her sister, a
doctor. Aged 7, Dury contracted polio,
he believed from the Southend swimming baths: this was during the 1949 epidemic
when the virus was rife and there was no vaccine. The newly disabled child was to spend
eighteen months in hospital, much of it immobilized in plaster, and then, braced
with a caliper, spent most of his teenage years at Chailey Heritage
Craft School in Sussex.
This
residential institution had the explicit intention of toughening up disabled
children to prepare the rigours of the outside world. As well as the cruelty there was also, Dury reported, quite a few “pervs” on the staff.
Writing about polio and music, George McKay has suggested that the
enforced isolation and immobility which young people experienced with the
disease may have shaped their creative persona, through solitary introspection,
as well as their emotional lives. Dury later said:
“Being in that place is one
of the reasons I talk the way I talk. Before that I talked not quite BBC. A
third of the kids there were funny in the head as well as being disabled . . .
The situation was that from within you got very strong, but also you got
coarsened . . . There was a lot of behaviour that just don’t happen in the
outside world. Later you pretend to be arty about it but when I was there, I
was just there, it was real. Thinkin’ about it now, I realise it was fuckin’
heavy. It was like a hospital in one way, like a school in another way, and
like a prison in another way.”
Because he was
academic, Dury’s family managed to get him entry to the Royal Grammar School in
High Wycombe, where he received further rough treatment because of his
disability. He passed O Levels in
English Language and Literature and Art, and went to first Walthamstow Art
College and then the Royal College of Art, where he studied under the pop
artist Peter Blake. His paintings of
this time concentrate on gangsters or the female nude ("I was very interested in Trilby hats and tits"). Some were exhibited during summer
2013. While Dury was subsequently to teach art at
Canterbury College of Art, he decided that his talents lay elsewhere. So instead,
he recruited several of his students into his first rock band, Kilburn and the
High Roads, which started gigging in 1971.
This first
musical outing was a good pub band, as well as being a bunch of misfits and freaks
who attracted attention for their look as well as their music. But it was with his second band, the
Blockheads, signed in 1977, that Ian Dury became a major British pop star. His Stiff Records releases such as “What A
Waste”, “Wake Up, And Make Love with Me”, “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and “Sex
and Drugs and Rock and Roll” and albums such as New Boots and Panties!! topped the charts during the 1980s. Dury’s gravelly delivery, the tunes of Chaz
Jankel, and the punk/funk style were all part of the success, but the major factor
must have been the wit and poignancy of Dury’s lyrics, a cut above almost all
his contemporaries, except Elvis Costello. He wrote and sang about ordinary English working class lives. As Robin Denselow said in his obituary, Dury was
“one of few true originals of the English music scene, the
only man to successfully combine the energy and excitement of rock 'n' roll and
funk with the bawdy humour, wit and home-spun philosophy of music-hall and of
his native Essex.”
From the
start, disability was part of the story. Dury faced opposition when he wanted to become a performer, and even when successful,
record labels were adverse to him making his disability explicit, but he
overruled them, as with his decision to appear in the 1979 “Rhythm Stick” video
with his withered arm exposed. The song
“Dance of the Screamers” was about the rigours of physiotherapy. Dury explained: “It was called the screaming ward and you could hear
people screaming on the way there, and it was you when you was there, and you
could hear the others on the way back.”
Another song
went:
Hey, hey, take me away
I hate waking up in this place
There’s nutters in here who whistle and
cheer
When they’re watching a one-legged race
And a one-legged prefect gets me in bed
Makes me play with his dick
One-legged horn and he’s shouting the
odds
Driving me bloody well sick.
Perhaps the most
memorable example of Dury's engagement with disability politics came in 1981, the International Year of the Disabled. This was a turning point in the history of
the disability movement, with disabled activists walking out of Rehabilitation
International to form Disabled People’s International. Dury despised those patronizing attitudes too:
The Year of Our Disabled
Lord 1981 I was getting lots of requests. I turned them all down. We had this
thing called the ‘polio folio’, and we used to put them in there . . . Instead
I wrote this tune called ‘Spasticus Autisticus’. I said, I’m going to put a
band down the road for the year of the disabled; I’ll be Spastic and they can
be the Autistics. I have [my band named the] Blockheads and that means they’re
autistic anyway. And my mate goes, ‘No – Spasticus Autisticus, the [rebel]
slave’. Great, I’m Spartacus. So I wrote this tune . . . [I]t wasn’t allowed to
be played anywhere and people got offended by it – everybody except the
spastics.
The resulting song included lyrics such as:
The resulting song included lyrics such as:
I widdle
when I piddle
’cos my middle
is a riddle ...
I’m knobbled
on the cobbles
‘cos I hobble
when I wobble.
So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
And thank the Creator you're not in the state I'm in
So long have I been languished on the shelf
I must give all proceedings to myself
At the time, the
song was banned by the BBC, but twenty years later it was to be part of the
opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics.
Dury was to
have some success as an actor, with roles in films, TV and stage plays, and he
also wrote a musical, Apples, staged at The Royal Court. He turned down the opportunity to write the
libretto of Cats, because, as he
said, "Andrew Lloyd Webber is a w*nker”, thus saving his own credibility but
losing out on millions.
Dury spoke out
for Safe Sex, at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and during the 1990s, he
served as a UNICEF Peace Ambassador.
However, he never became closely involved with the disability movement, and always aimed at the mainstream. In the mid1990s, I remember filming a disability cabaret for
Channel 4 in a London pub with various other disabled performers, with Ian Dury
as part of the line-up. Although he was
friendly, he also appeared a bit bemused by the situation, and remained on the
sidelines with a couple of his mates for most of the recording.
In 1996, Dury was
diagnosed with colorectal cancer. He
died in March 2000, weeks after a final performance in aid of Cancer Backup. Since his death, the reputation of this
well-loved, acerbic, stubborn, difficult, singer-songwriter has, if anything,
grown. He was the subject of a biopic,
and his songs were used as the basis for a play, Reasons
to be Cheerful, by the Graeae Theatre company. I think Dury differs from much of the modern
disability movement because of his uncompromising willingness to name
impairment for what it is. He nails
patronizing attitudes, but he also turns his unblinking eye on the difficulties
and drawbacks of being a cripple. And above
all, he does it with humour.
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