“When we went to America, I told him, ‘These Americans Ian, they adore you, they love the stories you tell.’ Everywhere we went, the place was jammed. I told him, ‘In Europe and England, you’ve always been able to pull a bird and get knobbing, but in America you ain’t. What’s the reason for that?’ The American birds never went for him. He only pulled two the whole time we were there, and one of them was a bit of a Magnus [Pyke]. I said, ‘That’s a geezer ain’t it?’ He liked them like that. ‘Fuck off,’ he said.”

“Me and Davey had a few arguments. Davey used to tell me he was going to give Ian a whack. I told him, ‘You’ll have to give me a whack first and you won’t find that easy.’ In Germany, we were in the hotel and the bloke behind the desk had an Irish [jig] on. Ian pointed it out to me because I’m bald and I won’t wear one. Ian asked him, ‘How much hair you got under there?’ The bloke took umbrage and got the right hump. I said, ‘Allow me to apologise for my friend, he’s drunk.’ But Ian knocked all the stuff off the counter. The geezer leapt forward and grabbed Ian by his scarf. I wasn’t quite quick enough, so I grabbed hold of his hand and wrenched it away from Ian. I thought he was a mug and I didn’t want to hurt him. I was saying, ‘Please don’t make me do it,’ but Ian’s going, ‘Fred, knock him out!’ As I turned to talk to Ian, the geezer’s punched me on the side of the head, so I had to deal with him. He called the police. They spoke to me in English, but when we got to the police station they could only speak German! Peter Jenner had to pay money to get me out of the nick.”

“Ian told me that when he was young he should have been kicking a ball about and scrumping apples, but he was put in this institution. It must have been quite bewildering for this affliction to hit him at such an early age. I never noticed it. All I saw was the man, but he used to think that everybody noticed his disability. He had a down on himself. He invented it. I told him, ‘They see you as an artist and a rocker, not a raspberry [ripple]. It’s your talent, not your fucking bodily structure.’ He asked me, ‘Do you believe that?’ I wasn’t in the habit of giving him bollocks. He used to thank me. You could up him for a few days, then he’d be on his own. If he never had some old tabby with him to cheer him up he’d go into depression again.”

“But he changed my life. I’d never met anyone like Ian before. I had a huge mistrust of people due to my mixing with the criminal fraternity, but Ian made an impact on me. He would say things that were complimentary, then stand back and let you digest what he’d said. When I met him, I thought he was an ordinary bloke writing songs, but he was far more than ordinary. I know for certain that if we hadn’t have met, I would have pursued a life of crime and been back in jail. But I became engrossed in Ian’s world and people like Dave Robinson were suddenly treating me with respect. Ian was the catalyst. He treated me as an equal. I’d never had that before.”

As told to Will Birch, May 2008. Photographs: Fred by Terry Lott, Fred and Ian by Chris Gabrin.

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Following their marriage in December 1938, Bill and Peggy moved into 1b Belsize Road, the flat that Peggy had been sharing with her sister Molly and occasional visitor Elisabeth. Bill was employed as a bus driver and would often arrive home from work to find his wife and her two sisters involved in some deep intellectual discussion from which he felt excluded. In 1939, with the threat of war with Germany on everyone’s mind, Bill persuaded Peggy that they should consider moving from the middle of London. Bill found some rentable housing in Harrow Weald, to where he and Peggy moved in the summer of that year. Molly came along too.

 

Ian was born at Weald Rise on 12 May 1942, but within 18 months Peggy had decided to take him to live with her mother in Cornwall, to avoid the bombing in and around London. Bill stayed at Weald Rise and continued to work for London Transport. In 1945, however, he saw an advertisement for a job as trainee chauffeur with Rolls Royce. Before long he was chauffeuring businessmen around England and even across Europe. When Ian contracted polio in 1949 and became a boarder at Chailey Heritage Craft School for disabled children in East Sussex, Bill would often visit his son and turn up in the Rolls Royce.

Bill Dury, at the time he was driving for the Western European Union, circa 1963. The BOAC coach terminal at Victoria is in the background. Photo courtesy of Jemima Dury

 

For the remainder of his life Bill lived alone in small flat in Ebury Street, Victoria, but he and Peggy never divorced. Bill died from acute bronchitis and emphysema on 25 February 1968, aged 62.

 

Although the certificates provide only scant, yet crucial, detail, with the help of family and friends’ reminiscences and Ian’s own recollections, it was possible to piece together a portrait of Bill Dury, the suave and upwardly aspirational ladies’ man, who yearned to rub shoulders with toffs. Although it is part conjecture on my part, I feel sure that Bill was knocked off his feet when he met his wife-to-be, Margaret (Peggy) Walker. Peggy was descended from a family of wealthy Irish Protestant land-owners. It was quite a contrast to Bill’s working class roots and his occupation of bus driver.

Bill Dury, third from left at back, with work mates at Western National, c.1937. Photo courtesy of Margaret Webb

‘I would read through the small ads in the back of the music rags every week,’ Malcolm told me. ‘Primarily for the purpose of looking for pop cultural events that might in some way intrigue me… Kilburn and the High Roads… the idea of calling yourself after the name of a street obviously intrigued me.’

Roberta eventually came face to face with Ian at a Kilburns gig at the City of London Polytechnic in September 1973. They became close friends for a brief period until Roberta had to return to her native America. She had no idea that Ian would bombard her with letters over the next five years. Those letters reveal the inner workings of Ian’s often tortured brain as he patiently awaited success, knowing all the time that he had the musical goods, if not the best method of delivery. However stylish and amusing Kilburn and the High Roads might have been, the band’s musical fragility and ever-changing line-up impaired their chances of commercial success. When Ian wrote the above letter in May 1977, in which he complained about being ‘skint’ and on the ‘rock dole’, he had just found the musicians who would become the basis of the Blockheads and was about to record his breakthrough LP New Boots and Panties!! For Ian, stardom and financial reward were just a few months away.

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Unpublished gems from the gob of Ian Dury #5. Photo: courtesy of Chris Gabrin

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Unpublished gems from the gob of Ian Dury #4. Photo: courtesy of Ed Baxter

“Being older didn’t seem any kind of drawback. At 31 I was quite fond of myself, with what I looked like, I was quite confident about the glamour quotient. I was quite a cocky dick on stage, fearless. In a way, that came across. It’s not until you’re about 36 or 37 that age does begin to creep across your boat race. I’d been teaching and Keith said, ‘How old are you Ian?’ I must have been 27. He said, ‘Ooh, your skin goes like pastry over 25!’ He’d have been about 21 or 22. Plus we were well aware we had a couple of good looking boys in the band. Keith… as long as you cover the spectrum, a couple of loopies and a couple of crackers, you’re alright. I knew I was old, but I didn’t feel it. Charlie Watts is older than me, I’ve known him since 1964. I’m younger than Ringo and I’m younger than Bill, so I’m the youngest on the bill!”

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Unpublished gems from the gob of Ian Dury #3. Photo: courtesy of Chris Gabrin

“Fred Rowe at the Torrington… I was singing and I saw a brandy glass come flying through the air. Smash! It bounced off me and hit the drummer. Fred’s talking to a girl with large bosoms and didn’t notice it. I said, ‘Fred, a geezer’s just thrown a glass, get up the back, when he moves he’s yours.’ When the number finished I said, ‘I get paid to stand here like a cunt, who threw the glass? Whoever it was better go home now. You all know who he was, send him packing.’ The geezer moved and Fred said ‘Gotcha…’ ”

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Unpublished gems from the gob of Ian Dury #2

“When I was at the Royal College of Art there was a bloke in the graphics department who had this book about the Nazis. The back third was sealed with a warning. I wanted to burn the book. I didn’t want it to exist, to be in the world. If you show that image to somebody it will be burnt into their mind for the rest of their life. What good does that do? I’ve got a friend who has to stay out the way a little bit because of his paintings and he had a book called ‘The Encyclopaedia of Sexual Perversions’. It was German, printed in the thirties. There was some innocuous stuff in it, but one photograph of a geezer hanging from a washing line by his bollocks, which were stretched by about two foot. When you turned the book upside down, he had a big smile on his face. Masochism. The book was full of it. I’m glad I’m clean. I don’t want to be tainted by that stuff. Another book, ‘The Encyclopaedia of Murder’ by a bloke called Colin Wilson. There was a bloke in it called Albert Fish who ate kids with sugar. I can’t handle it, I’m a naïve little prat from Upminster.”

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Unpublished gems from the gob of Ian Dury #1. Photo: courtesy of Kees Bakker

“I got invited by Lord Gowrie to be a rock’n’roll… there was me, Pete Townshend and Bob Geldof. They knew the three of us had read a book. We were in the Arts Minister’s office for lunch… I thought, ‘Fuck me what am I doing here?’ Somebody came up to Bob and said, ‘Why don’t you invite Ian and Pete to be on your [charity] record?’ I would have done it, but he never asked me. Bob said, ‘These two haven’t had a hit record for 15 years.’ I couldn’t argue with him. I’m quite glad I didn’t do Live Aid and very glad I didn’t do anything that’s happened subsequently. I don’t actually believe that’s what it’s all about.”

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When ‘The Definitive Biography’ was announced (it was my publisher’s title by the way), the news reached ‘Sex & Drugs’ author Richard Balls. Apparently, Richard was so incensed by the title that he complained to his publisher, Omnibus, whose commissioning editor, Chris Charlesworth, posted a blog on Rock’s Back Pages in December 2009. You may care to read Chris’s blog and some of the subsequent comments (scroll down to ‘Ian Dury Biography’): http://www.rocksbackpagesblogs.com/author/chris-charlesworth/

Chris, who hadn’t actually read my book when he composed his missive, rightly defended Richard’s book and trumpeted its merits, but cast doubt over whether ‘Definitive’ could possibly live up to its claim, because Richard, Chris suggested, had done all the Dury research that could possibly be done, implying there was no need for another tome on the subject. ‘Richard’s book was… and remains definitive.’

Fight!

Actually, I chose not to rise to the bait. I simply began to spread the word about the imminent release of ‘The Definitive…’ utilising Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc (which is all part of an author’s duties in the modern age). Suddenly, after a hiatus of several years, there was a rash of positive reviews on Amazon for Richard Balls’ book. These were from such reliable sources as ‘EM’ and ‘MT’. The latter wrote: ‘this [Balls' book] is THE definitive book on Ian Dury’ – even before ‘The Definitive…’ had been published! One Amazon customer, the mysterious ‘DCD’, even stated: ‘I won’t review this book [‘The Definitive…’] as I haven’t read it and have no intention of doing so.’

So there!

That’s it really, except to relate that I bumped into Chris Charlesworth recently at a book launch for Zoe Street Howe’s ‘How’s Your Dad?’ Chris was sort of apologetic about his rant on Rock’s Back Pages and wanted ‘to clear the air’. It was Balls, he said, who had voiced his annoyance (over ‘The Definitive…’) and this was what prompted him to post the objection. Chris was also complimentary about ‘The Definitive…’ saying, ‘from the bits I’ve read it’s a damn good read.’

Richard Balls (or ‘Ball’ as he now styles himself) gave us a book that was well-researched and I admit that I scoured it for clues when writing my own book, ‘as you do’. For the record however, ‘The Definitive…’ offers many exclusive and direct quotes from Ian Dury himself, taken from numerous first hand interviews I conducted (sadly, Balls was unable to interview Ian); it also contains details of Ian’s father’s family background (in contrast to Balls: ‘information about [Bill’s] family background is thin on the ground’); it features a family tree that I researched and drew up, going back five generations; it quotes numerous extracts from letters written by Ian to his muse Roberta Bayley, and includes an interview I conducted with Kilburns’ guitarist Keith Lucas, who until now has remained tight-lipped about his dramatic bust-up with Ian. There are also 35 previously unseen or rare photographs and a beautiful jacket illustration by Sir Peter Blake.

My advice?

Read both!

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