Ian Dury Page 6
It was Peggy who arranged this and other theatre visits during the school holidays, including a concert by 1950s heartthrob Johnnie Ray at the London Palladium. She always allowed Ian to take a friend, usually Barry Anderson. For Ian’s 1958 Christmas treat, Peggy obtained tickets to the London production of West Side Story at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, starring George Chakiris and Chita Rivera. ‘Ian loved it, obviously,’ says Barry, ‘gang fights and music!’ That evening, the two sixteen-year-olds made arrangements to meet Peggy, who was already in town. In a pub near the theatre, Ian struck up a conversation with various members of the cast who were on a break. An American actor asked Ian if he was going to the show. ‘He’s a nice bloke,’ observed Barry, to which Ian replied, ‘Fucking queer.’
Peggy was still hoping that Ian would pass his GCE exams and go on to university. He certainly possessed the brains, but lacked the inclination. ‘Ian didn’t see the point,’ says Ed Speight. ‘German, for instance, you’d think Ian would have been good at languages, but he didn’t like the teacher. He took it at O-level but didn’t pass. Thank God! I couldn’t bear to have heard Ian mouthing off in German!’
‘There were some nice teachers there,’ conceded Ian. ‘Runswick was a nice geezer, one or two more. If there hadn’t have been, I might have got slung out. It was touch and go a few times.’ It was housemaster ‘Beaky’ Runswick who on one occasion caught Ian demonstrating his much-acclaimed ability to spit. ‘Ian could gob in an arc over telegraph wires,’ recalls Warwick Prior. ‘Runswick shouted: “Dury! I hope my eyes deceived me!”’
Ian was rebelling against education because he could. ‘I think they knew I was fairly bright and I wasn’t conforming to the rest of it,’ said Ian. ‘I just didn’t do anything in any of the other classes. There was nothing they could do. It was difficult for them.’ Frustrated by his lack of progress, the school authorities sent Ian to a psychiatrist who would try to fathom his under-achievement. At a surgery in Grays, Essex, a Miss Boniface subjected him to a number of tests and concluded that he was definitely not lacking in grey matter. ‘You’re very intelligent,’ she told him. ‘I know,’ Ian replied, ‘what’s the problem?’ Miss Boniface explained that she had to do her tests for Essex County Council. Ian told her, ‘I’m not particularly disturbed, I’m quite happy, but I’d much rather be at home.’
‘Mum never discouraged my artistic side,’ said Ian, ‘but I think she was disappointed about my school career. She couldn’t understand that at all.’ Years later, Ian found his school reports and wasn’t surprised to discover teachers’ comments such as ‘extremely weak’. But his mother had only wanted ‘the best’ for him and hoped he’d do well. ‘There’s no blame attached. My mum’s whole hopes in her heart were that I would be a lawyer or something, that I would go and use my brains. It was an academically brilliant school, I could have done well, I could have been a lawyer, but I wanted to go to art school.’
‘I’m a Mockney, in the sense that my mum spoke beautifully and my dad didn’t,’ continued Ian. ‘Dad would always tell me to sound my aitches, because he would worry about it, whereas my mum’s lot, who were Bohemians, didn’t. “Art school?” they would say. “Lovely!” My dad came to see me in hospital when I was seventeen, to have my appendix out. He was worried about my hair. I had big sideboards down here. He bought me an electric razor. He wanted me to be straight, but my mum’s family didn’t give a shit.’
Ian’s ‘Aunt Moll’, who had helped him get into the Royal Grammar School, harboured a certain amount of regret about Ian’s time there. ‘Like Chailey, it was also my suggestion. Neither of them was very successful. I thought Ian would get a decent start at High Wycombe, but other things went against it. They never said much to me about it at the time, but afterwards I felt terrible. It was unfortunate.’
Ian passed three GCE O-level examinations: Art, English Literature and English Language, just enough to get him to art college. Just before his exit from school, there was one final, dramatic incident. His old sparring partner, Warwick ‘Rocky’ Prior, had been in trouble. ‘The headmaster wrote to my father,’ recalls Prior, ‘saying, “I believe your son may be a Teddy Boy.” He was reluctant for me to come back, but, before I left, I punched Dury’s lights out. He’d been at it again, bullying, something to do with that poor bugger Busby. It was the end of term, we weren’t coming back, so I gave Dury a sharp uppercut, and he went down like a sack of coals. That was the last time I saw him, except for one occasion on Highgate Hill many years afterwards, around 1969. He was coming up the path, limping. I stepped into the bushes.’
4
Nude Books and Aunties
Walthamstow, 1959. The 1950s had been a bleak, black-and-white decade, but Ian’s London was about to explode with colour, although not officially ‘swing’ for a while. Within three months of leaving the Royal Grammar School, he had become a student at Walthamstow School of Art, an annex of South West Essex College. It was a tiresome, daily journey from Upminster by public transport, but worth every mile. In early October, just three weeks into his course, he sat in the life class, drawing a naked girl named Julia. He considered her to be gorgeous, not unlike Brigitte Bardot and just as unattainable. However, in the interval, as he was quietly shading his drawing, Julia approached. ‘Do you want to come and play with me this evening?’ she asked. Ian’s pencil snapped in two. ‘Not many!’ he replied.
At the age of seventeen, after a long period of anguish, he had fallen into a world that he’d always suspected did exist but now he was sure. ‘I went to Walthamstow School of Art as quickly as I could,’ Ian told me. ‘It was partly the lifestyle that attracted me. Van Gogh, Lautrec, Renoir. I knew about the Bohemian lifestyle. I used to draw all the time and I knew I wanted to go to art school. I didn’t harbour ideas about being a painter as much as drawing and having that lifestyle. It was very easy to get into Walthamstow with three O-levels.’
In the post-war years, Britain’s art colleges brought together students from all strata of society in a way that the universities did not, helping to create a social mix that would revolutionize popular culture. By the early 1960s, ‘art school’ had become a right of passage for the aspiring pop musician, including Lennon, Townshend et al., and Ian was similarly attracted. College discipline was often lax, affording the opportunity to knock off early for group practice sessions and enjoy a lie-in the morning after. Artists and musicians also shared an obsession with ‘image’, and Ian was more obsessed than most. Most importantly, the appreciation of art and music was conveniently subjective. Anyone could hold an opinion, and those of a more forceful personality could hold court.
At Walthamstow, Ian and his arty chums maintained a high profile and gently mocked those studying more prosaic courses. Ian’s friend Barry Anderson, who attended the college to study the hotel and catering trade, was equally as excited as Ian about the prospects the new decade offered. ‘It was our new world,’ says Barry, ‘rag weeks, jazz concerts and of course the girls were starting to wear sexy clothes . . . and at the same moment everything was becoming more radical with the protest movement. It was the birth of a social revolution.’ But Barry noticed that Ian and his paint-smeared gang ruled the roost. ‘He was usually sitting in the refectory with his arms around two girls,’ recalls Barry. ‘“Hey Gus,” Ian would shout, “this is Bumbly Number One and this is Bumbly Number Two!”’1
Ian met like-minded people at Walthamstow to whom his physical disability was irrelevant. They were more infatuated with all things modern: art, jazz, marijuana – ‘the cosa nova’ as Ian would later refer to it. This was ‘the Beat Era’, and the influence of American ‘beat generation’ writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg was now reaching young, free-thinking college students and arty types on this side of the Atlantic. Ian soaked it all up and immersed himself in the lifestyle, becoming spellbound by the secret corners of Soho where Bohemian style flourished. Acting on a tip, he visited a café bar in Old Compton Street in search of ‘Ironfoot Jack�
��,2 a legendary Soho character. ‘I met him,’ recalled Ian. ‘He was a real Bohemian: long white hair, cape, iron foot. I fell in love with the whole idea of being a Bohemian, before they said “beatnik”.’
Inspired by ‘Ironfoot’ Jack Neave and certain French painters, Ian began to refer to himself as ‘Toulouse’ (Lautrec). This time his self-appointed nickname would catch on. It actually suited his diminutive stature and latest accoutrement, a gnarled walking cane. His twisted body and strange gait, enhanced by a streetwise sense of humour, won him many admirers amongst fellow students of both sexes. He liberally dished out the rhyming slang, and, as his confidence increased, his emotional anguish evaporated. He was no longer a freak; he was the one who cracked the jokes and got the laughs. Thus he became an influential member of the clique, proposing outings to far-flung pubs where live jazz held sway.
The creatures Ian encountered on the art/jazz/beat circuit furthered his obsession with ‘looking good’, or at least unconventional. He recalled going out with one girl who was ‘a Modernist’. ‘We used to go down the Two Puddings Club in Stratford. She had eighteen buttons down her herringbone coat and an astrakhan collar, Lebanese points. That kind of sartor-ialism I thought was really brilliant. Yellow stovepipe trousers. Yeah, I’ll fucking ’ave some of that.’
Back in the leafy enclave of Waldegrave Gardens, an outpost of the commuting pinstripe and umbrella brigade, Ian’s appearance was unusual. His hair was quite long for the time, and with his straggly beard, duffel coat and bell-bottom jeans he was bound to raise eyebrows as he limped to and from Upminster tube station. Peggy grew tired of avoiding neighbours who enquired: ‘Mrs Dury, is your son a tramp?’ Ian’s behaviour was also becoming progressively more bizarre; when the house became too small to accommodate his eccentricity he was consigned to the attic. Fascinated by petty crime, he developed a penchant for stealing signs. ‘He would walk in somewhere and, if there was a sign or a notice, anything with words on, it would disappear under his coat,’ recalls Barry Anderson. ‘Road signs, London Transport signs, the attic was full of them. It was his den until his mother found out, and she went absolutely mad. The attic was made out of bounds.’
Peggy decided that Ian had to be annexed. Ever the pragmatist, she acquired a two-wheel Bluebird caravan for 400 guineas and parked it in the back yard. In it, Ian would be allowed to create his own world. He installed a portable oven and a wind-up gramophone and stuffed old socks into the air vents in an attempt at soundproofing. He would be called into the house for meals and the occasional bath, but he otherwise lived the life of a crazy art student, playing rock ’n’ roll records and making a mess. West Essex became his turf, and London Underground his favoured mode of transport. The District Line, which terminated at Upminster, provided access to a string of social hot spots along its route into the East End.
In February 1960, aged seventeen, Ian popped into the Elm Park Jazz Club, where he met a fifteen-year-old aspiring beatnik by the name of Patricia Few. In her hand-knitted ‘sloppy’ pullover and tight black jeans, Pat certainly looked the part. As Terry Lightfoot and his Jazzmen pumped out the traditional jazz, Ian summoned up the courage to ask her for a dance. Initially, Ian’s advances came to little, but that Easter he bumped into Pat again, on the third annual Aldermaston march. As members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Ian and Pat were fully paid-up pacifists, although Ian’s commitment to the cause may have had as much to do with collecting the badges as any strong political conviction. Due to his limited mobility he covered most of the CND march to Trafalgar Square on the back of his friend Terry Malloy’s scooter. Pat followed close behind on foot.
Pat Few would become Ian’s girlfriend and close companion for the next three-and-a-half years. She lived in Dagenham with her mother, ‘a real East Ender’ who impressed Ian with her rhyming slang and would refer to him as either ‘Knitty Crutch’ or ‘Old Mr Shagnasty’, which were actually terms of affection. Ian and Pat would hang out in beatnik pubs like Finch’s in Goodge Street and the Duke of York in Rathbone Street and visit cafés such as the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble and the House of Sam Widges. ‘We just did mad things on the street,’ says Pat, ‘then we got drunk and went home on the tube. I was a little cockney girl, and Ian was posh. I became posh later, and he became a cockney!’
Despite his boasts,3 Ian had still not fulfilled his number one teenage priority, but the waiting was almost over. It happened that summer, on a camping trip to Cornwall with Pat. As weekend ravers, they were drawn to the West Country by the romantic notion of sleeping rough and, as Ian recalled, ‘hanging about in bushes, being ejected by the council.’ In Newquay, Ian and Pat lost their virginity to each other under a crude tent that was little more than a piece of old canvas nailed to a tree, but it afforded them just enough privacy.
Cornwall was home to the burgeoning music scene of the new left. Acoustic folk and blues, which supplanted the now-dead skiffle scene, provided the soundtrack for a generation of roaming radicals. In the environs of Newquay, Ian bumped into two prominent exponents of the acoustic vibe – banjoist Clive Palmer, later to found the Incredible String Band, and Wizz Jones, a precocious guitar talent – both of whom entertained the weekend beats who made the journey to the West Country by hitching lifts. ‘When I was with Ian we never walked anywhere,’ recalls Pat. ‘I would be at the kerbside wiggling my hips, and Ian would be hiding behind a tree until someone stopped to pick us up. It would take twenty-four hours to get back to London, but it was all fun. We were madly in love.’
Ian invited Pat back to Waldegrave Gardens to meet Peggy and the aunts and show her his caravan. Within a few weeks Ian and Pat had devised a routine whereby Ian would enter the house by the front door and divert his mother’s attention while Pat crept round the back and entered Ian’s two-wheeler world. Then Ian would say ‘goodnight’ to his mum and join Pat for a night of passion in the caravan. The following day, usually a Sunday, Pat was invited for lunch. The two teenagers pretended that Pat had just arrived at number 12, but in fact she had simply freshened up in the caravan and knocked on the front door. It was, of course, a charade. Pat would then sit in the drawing room and Peggy would hand her a Sunday Mirror, saying, ‘Here we are, Patsy, would you like to read this?’ while Elisabeth and Molly fought over the Observer. If Pat didn’t know the meaning of a word, Peggy would make her look it up in the dictionary. As a guest of Ian’s mother and sisters, Pat minded her Ps and Qs and quietly observed them discussing cultural topics while coping with the onset of menopause. ‘They were all wondering what they would do about Ian,’ says Pat. ‘He could be a bit of a pig.’
In 1961, the Pop Art exponent Peter Blake commenced teaching at Walthamstow School of Art. Born in Dartford, Kent, in 1932, Blake had studied at the Royal College of Art and become a part-time teacher at various colleges, including St Martin’s School of Art, to supplement his income as a painter. ‘What I did was very contrived and particular,’ says Blake. ‘By having three strings to my bow, being a painter, a part-time teacher and a graphic designer, it kept me independent of any one of them. I straddled the three. If I wanted to stop teaching, I could do design. I never had to paint, I never had to teach and I never had to do graphic design.’
Blake’s artistic influence would soon be acknowledged in a BBC TV documentary about Pop Art, entitled Pop Goes the Easel. On his first morning at Walthamstow he was charged with taking an outdoor sketching class. Unable to locate his students, Blake walked out of the college and up the hill, where he found Ian and others in the Bell public house. Ian was expecting a bollocking, but instead, Blake bought them all drinks. At once, he formed a common bond with his students, which was to become an important factor in their progress. It was no longer a case of young students versus the establishment – their mentor was right there alongside them, and, for Ian, the feeling was righteous.
‘I was still only twenty-nine,’ recalls Peter Blake, ‘and I would be at Ronnie Scott’s the night before, turning up with a hangover, no
t much older than the students. What was exciting was that they were working-class ruffians. Joe Snowden . . . Bill West . . . these were tough characters, big hard youths. One of the students was a market trader in Walthamstow. It was a fascinating mix, very much a social phenomenon after the war ended. Suddenly after the ditch of no art, when people went to the war, a generation had a chance to get a grant and go to art school. Ian would never have had the opportunity before the war. It was as if someone was opening a book and saying: “This is a possibility.” Ian’s crowd was the extension of this phenomenon.’
Ian’s imagination was certainly triggered by Blake’s teaching methods and also those of another tutor at Walthamstow, Fred Cuming, who would say, ‘If you’re into football, draw footballers, if you’re into car racing, draw cars. Draw whatever you’re into.’ Another key influence was Bill Green, the artist who coached Tony Hancock in The Rebel and showed him how to use a bicycle to paint with. Green was a big action painting star whose art ‘performances’ reinforced Ian’s belief that entertainment was an integral factor in good art and that rules were made to be broken. A particular favourite of Ian’s was Green’s huge painting ‘Billy Bunter Promenades Himself in Normandy’.
Peter Blake confirms Green’s influence: ‘Bill became famous for riding a bicycle over a picture, which was parodied in The Rebel, but in fact he didn’t ever ride a bicycle over a picture; he laid a board on the floor, spread bitumen on it and held the bicycle over the board, manoeuvring the back wheel to spray the paint – action paintings. When the press got hold of it they said, “Would you ride your bike over it?” and of course Bill obliged, and the myth built up. At St Martin’s, he set light to one of his pictures at the bottom of the deep stairwell, which became like a chimney. Flames would shoot up four or five storeys! Eventually, the fire became part of the work, but the idea was to burn the surface of the canvas.’