Ian Robins Dury was an English singer, songwriter and actor best remembered as the frontman of Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Described by The Guardian as “one of few true originals of the English music scene”, Dury drew from music hall and punk traditions, often incorporating observational humour and word play in his lyrics. At age seven, Dury contracted polio, most likely, he believed, at Westcliff Swimming Pool in Southend-on-Sea during the 1949 polio epidemic. After six weeks of isolation in the Royal Cornwall Infirmary, Truro, Ian was moved by ambulance back to Essex, to Black Notley Hospital in Braintree, where he spent eighteen months regaining his strength and mobility. Polio caused paralysis on the left-hand side of his body which led to a permanent disability.
Dury formed Kilburn and the High Roads in 1971, and they played their first gig at Croydon School of Art on 5 December 1971. Dury was vocalist and lyricist, co-writing with pianist Russell Hardy and later enrolling into the group a number of the students he was teaching at Canterbury College of Art and Medway College of Design (now the University for the Creative Arts), including bassist Humphrey Ocean. Managed first by Charlie Gillett and Gordon Nelki and latterly by fashion entrepreneur Tommy Roberts, the Kilburns were popular on London’s pub rock circuit and signed to Dawn Records in 1974 but, despite favourable press coverage and a tour opening for rock band The Who, the group failed to rise above cult status and disbanded in 1975. Kilburn and the High Roads recorded two albums, Handsome and Wotabunch!.
The single “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll”, released 26 August 1977, marked Dury’s Stiff Records debut. Although it was banned by the BBC, it was named Single of the Week by NME on its release. The single issue was soon followed, at the end of September, by the album New Boots and Panties!! which achieved platinum status. “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” was not listed on the album’s track list, yet it was nonetheless present as track 1 on side 2 of some later 1977 pressings).
Under the management of Andrew King and Peter Jenner, the original managers of Pink Floyd, Ian Dury and the Blockheads quickly gained a reputation as one of the top live acts of new wave music. The Blockheads’ sound drew from its members’ diverse musical influences, which included jazz, rock and roll, funk, and reggae, and Dury’s love of music hall. The band was formed after Dury began writing songs with pianist and guitarist Chaz Jankel. Jankel took Dury’s lyrics, fashioned a number of songs, and they began recording with members of Radio Caroline’s Loving Awareness Band – drummer Charley Charles (born Hugh Glenn Mortimer Charles, Guyana 1945), bassist Norman Watt-Roy, keyboard player Mick Gallagher, guitarist John Turnbull and former Kilburns saxophonist Davey Payne
In October 1977 Dury and his band started performing as Ian Dury and the Blockheads, when the band signed on for the Stiff “Live Stiffs Tour” alongside Elvis Costello & the Attractions, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, and Larry Wallis. The tour was a success, and Stiff launched a concerted Ian Dury marketing campaign, resulting in the Top Ten hit “What a Waste” and the hit single “Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick”, which reached No. 1 in the UK at the beginning of 1979, selling just short of a million copies. Again, “Hit Me” was not included on the original release of the subsequent album Do It Yourself. With their hit singles, the band built up a dedicated following in the UK and other countries and their next single “Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3” made number three in the UK. The band’s second album Do It Yourself was released in June 1979 in a Barney Bubbles-designed sleeve of which there were over a dozen variations, all based on samples from the Crown wallpaper catalogue. Bubbles also designed the Blockhead logo. In the 1980s, Dury initiated an acting career in film and television. His best-known later recordings include “Profoundly in Love with Pandora”, written for the 1985 ITV series The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, and the 1981 single “Spasticus Autisticus”. The latter, a protest song reflecting Dury’s life with polio and his opposition to contemporary attitudes about disability, was performed during the opening of the London 2012 Paralympics.
