When Chaz Jankel walked into Ian Dury's dressing room in a pub in
Shepherd's Bush one night in the mid-1970s, he wasn't exactly welcomed
with open arms. Almost forty years on, however, the legacy of that
first meeting between the two men who a couple of years later would
take their unholy mix of jazz-funk music hall to the top of the charts
with Ian Dury and the Blockheads is still going strong. This should be
made doubly clear when Reasons To Be Cheerful, Paul Sirett's play for
disabled theatre company Graeae, arrives in Dundee next week as part of
its current UK tour.
Set in 1979 not long after Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government
has been elected, Reasons To Be Cheerful (not to be confused with
Martin McArdie's play of the same name for 7:84 Scotland inspired by
comedian Mark Steel's book) finds a gang of die-hard Blockheads fans
locked out of a sold-out gig at Hammersmith Odeon. Over the course of
the night, however, things turn out somewhat differently. As indeed
they did for Jankel all those years ago in Shepherd's Bush.
It had all started the day before, when Jankel had been purchasing a
Wurlitzer keyboard at a local music emporium, where he left his
telephone number in search of a gig. This was picked up by guitarist Ed
Speight of the Dury fronted pre-cursor to the Blockheads, Kilburn and
the High Roads. Speight contacted Jankel and invited him to watch the
High Roads the following evening with a view to auditioning for the
band. After the show, an impressed Jankel made his way towards the open
door of what passed for a dressing room, where he was stared out by the
band's somewhat defensive vocalist.
“'Ere, mate, do I know you?” said Dury, without waiting for an answer.
“Well, fuck off, then.”
Jankel backed off, but was invited to a rehearsal by Speight the next
day anyway, whereupon “I got the gig. Ian was a bit wary, because he
was king of the pub circuit, but it was as big as things were going to
get, and it wasn't going anywhere beyond, but we stayed together for
nine months.”
After the split in 1975 ,and, despite such inauspicious beginnings,
Jankel started writing with Dury, and within a few months of the
Blockheads being born, both debut single Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,
with it bass-line ripped off from Charlie Haden's on jazz saxophonist
Ornette Coleman's Change of the Century album, and it's follow-up,
Sweet Gene Vincent, were in the bag. Part of the appeal of a sound that
eventually charted with What A Waste and debut album, the saucily
titled New Boots and Panties, was the glorious counterpoint between the
band's sophisticated musical backing and Dury's cockney geezerish
demeanour.
“Ian was labelled the godfather of punk,” remembers Jankel, from his
home studio where he's writing and rehearsing new Blockheads material
with Derek Hussey, aka former Dury minder Derek The Draw, who has sung
with the band since Dury's death of cancer in 2000. “His lyrics were
anarchic, and I think he was the first person to hang a razor blade
from his ear, but musically we were way ahead. Punk had no light and
shade, which was fine for a while, but Ian loved subtlety in music,
whether it was jazz, blues, country, all of it. His lyrics were just so
incisive and colourful, and he wrote a lot about people who didn't get
on the balance sheet as it were. Ian felt quite disenfranchised
himself, because of growing up in this institution with autistic and
disabled kids where they were all thrown in together. But he was very
intelligent. There are so many people out there who think they write
good lyrics, but they just don't address the people who are on the
edges of society. Ian had an empathy with these people, your Billericay
Dickie or Plaistow Patricia, who are where they are, not because it's
their fault, but through circumstance, and he did that with humour.”
These songs and more are played live in Reasons To Be Cheerful, which
is the latest treatment of Dury's back catalogue following another
stage musical, Hit Me! The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury , in 2009, and
the big-screen biopic, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll the same year. In
truth, though, Reasons To Be Cheerful sounds more akin to the mini-wave
of fan-based musical plays kick-started by mini Edinburgh hit, Meeting
Joe Strummer. Either way, Jankel, who isn't directly involved in the
show, maintains he hasn't seen anything like it.
“It's probably the most special theatrical performance I've ever seen,”
Jankel enthuses. “It's got attack, and it's got humour, and Jenny
(Sealey) the director is deaf, so it's a remarkable feat in itself that
she's directing a musical, literally getting into the vibrations of it
all. I was talking to her the other day, and she's a punk at heart.
She's really anarchic, and is cut from the same emotional cloth as Ian
was. That's why she gets him.
“The play also captures a time that's very similar to now, but when
you're in the middle of it you can't really see that. There was a
Conservative government and mass unemployment then, and that's what
you've got now as well. The only difference I can see is that then
there were a lot more platforms for discontent. Now, it's more diffuse.
Back then you had the eccentric old pub acts telling it like it was.
That's where Ian came from. But now, it just seems like we're not very
good at revolutions. The French are a lot better at it, but it's never
been the British way. The songs we were writing then were full of
discontent and contempt, and that comes through in the show.”
In some respects, Dury is the perfect pin-up boy for the disabled
lobby. Having been struck down with polio aged seven, Dury spent some
time in the school for disabled children mentioned by Jankel before
studying at at Walthamstow Art College, where he was taught by pop
artist Peter Blake. Dury walked with a stick, and even worked it into
his stage act as the likely inspiration for the Blockheads 1978 number
one, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick. If 1980's I Wanna Be Straight
hinted at a hidden yearning to be able to stand upright by Dury, the
following year's Spasticus (Austicicus) was a provocative howl of
defiance, which, even if it hadn't been banned by the BBC, in
Thatcher's Britain was a commercial kiss of death anyway.
“Ian never really identified with being disabled,” Jankel admits, “even
though he knew people could see that he was. He never really identified
with just one group in that way, but I think he'd admire the spirit of
Graeae. Ian was clever, and when he got ill with cancer, he became very
humble. All those rough edges he had rubbed off, and he became a much
more sympathetic person. The anger had been tamed out of him towards
the end. Ian loved writing lyrics, and even when he got tired playing
live, he loved the apres show, back at the hotel with a couple of pints
of Guinness. He was the gang boss, and we were the gang.”
Reasons To Be Cheerful, Dundee Rep, March 20-24
www.dundeerep.co.uk
www.graeae.org
The Herald, March 13th 2012
ends
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