Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3. Contradictions Make The World Go Round.
How much do you know about Ian Dury? Well, you almost certainly know Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, which sold nearly 1.5 million copies in the UK alone. And, of course, you know Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3, which wasn’t quite such a big hit but still reached number 3. And you might even remember how shocking the one that started with the immortal chant “Arseholes, bastards, fucking c**nts and pricks’ was. So you know that he was a post punk poet of deep, rare and original brilliance; a man whose genius was as natural and unusual as any we have seen. You might also know that he overcame crippling polio as a child (contracted during the 1949 epidemic in Britain) to become one of our most beloved entertainers; musician, actor, national celebrity.
But how much more do you know? Well, first, and at risk of sounding like a complete old fart, you may well know that they don’t make them like this anymore; uncontrived, wildly creative, totally uncontrollable, deeply original. Imagine, if you will, Ed Sheeran’s people contacting Dury to propose a duet. Unlike every contemporary of Dury’s magnitude, I imagine he might have, err, turned down the ginger wizard.
What you may not know is that Dury was a complete ragbag of contradictions; tormented and content, kind and vile, real and made up. I love the British contrariness of his parents; one a boxer and bus driver from Essex, the other a health visitor who was the daughter of a doctor and granddaughter of an Irish landowner. When Dury was young his father moved from driving buses to chauffeuring Rolls Royces and then left home. Dury was hit hard by polio; much of his left side was withered by the disease. And yet he became a major pop star; it’s fantastic and unexpected and wonderful. After his illness he was sent to a boarding school for disabled children whose educational system was based on craft but whose principal aim was to toughen up the disadvantaged children in its care. Dury credited these opposing twin principals with much of his success.
Dury was funny and he could be kind, but he could also be a complete bastard. His skill, if that’s what you would call it, was to identify a person’s weakness and then investigate it, bullying them ruthlessly. When fame and cash were his in equal and huge measure, he had a right-hand man called The Sulphate Strangler, a hopeless drug addict who looked after the singer and, mind-bogglingly, acted as a sort of nanny for his son Baxter. The stories are endless, each more bizarre than the other; and if you want to delve deeper, I recommend Will Birch’s excellent biography.
The real contradiction here -and it’s a good one- is that we can still love and admire our heroes while knowing them to be awful people. Or, perhaps more accurately, life is not straightforward, people are weak and strange and often unpleasant but from that can come beauty and love. Or, of course, people are amazing; Dury had a truly tough childhood from which he emerged with a withered body but a spirit so strong that he created deep magic. These, I suppose, are reasons to be cheerful.
Charlie Gladstone