IAN DURY AND THE BLOCKHEADS – "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick"

“You know, Marcello,” my music teacher said to me in response to the Evan Parker record I had just played her, “the new Ian Dury single has passages very similar to that.” And didn’t I just know it.

Dury has at least one thing in common with Kate Bush, for it is impossible to categorise him. New wave? He was three years older than Rod Stewart. The inevitable cross-breeding of post-prog pub rock and non-idiomatic improvised music? How does that fit in with “Sweet Gene Vincent”? A music-hall comedian with inklings towards Brecht? An avant-garde performance artist with traditional loves and passions? He was truly sui generis, and as a stage performer, as a theatrical musician, or a singing actor, his only serious competitor in the ‘70s was his great friend Alex Harvey; stricken by polio, he made no attempt to conceal it in concert – indeed he exploited it, used his stick as both weapon and seducer, hunched up confidentially around his microphone; and his aura was so effortlessly summoned that it all worked beautifully. Furthermore, he had sufficient resources of inherent cool to base an entire song (“Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll”) not only on an Ornette Coleman record, but on a Charlie Haden bass solo on an Ornette Coleman record (“Ramblin’”)!

He rose from the Walthamstow Art College of the early ‘60s, besotted by Bridget Riley and Wee Willie Harris and Christopher Nevinson and Ornette Coleman; he was a sometime participant in the mould-breaking improv music/theatre group The People Band, several of whose members ended up in his pre-Blockheads band Kilburn and the High Roads, and one of whom, saxophonist Davey Payne (who came in for George Khan in the High Roads), remained as crucial a mainstay in the Blockheads as Dury’s writing partner, guitarist/keyboardist Chaz Jankel.

With the Blockheads there was funk and soul as well as vaudeville and white noise, the whole of which united with transgressive brilliance in 1977’s New Boots And Panties!! It isn’t an accident that for many of my contemporaries – Simon Reynolds included – their love of music was sparked by this record; its long chart residency gave it the title of “the New Wave Tubular Bells,” though it was simultaneously above punk and the truest punk rock there had ever been. The gorgeously languid jazz-funk ripples of “Wake Up And Make Love To Me” blend with great naturalness with the matter-of-fact lyric and delivery. “Billericay Dickie” is avant-garde Max Miller, chirpy but cautious and always on the point of detonation. “My Old Man” is a very touching autobiographical portrait of his dad. “Sweet Gene Vincent” moves between and blurs the two poles of grief and celebration as few tribute songs have managed. “Blockheads” is a furious, rabid rant culminating in a freeform post-Eno/Mackay duel between Payne’s sax and Geoff Castle’s Moog. “If I Was With A Woman” foresees Jankel’s “Ai No Corrida” but climaxes with a Terry Riley minimalist vocal pinch. And you should have seen the look on my mum’s face when she walked into my bedroom just as the intro to “Plaistow Patricia” – “ARSE-HOLES-BAS-TARDS-FU-CKING-CUNTS-AND-PRICKS!” – made itself known. As with Escalator, it seemed that everything I liked about music in 1977 was in there somewhere.

So it was with “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” and I can think of few more deserving number ones. It sees Dury and the Blockheads at the peak of their saturnine game. Lyrically it isn’t much beyond an inventory of places and races around the world who like to get off on the confluence between sex and dance represented by its title, but there are so many lovely touches: the furiously ecstatic bilingual switching from French to German, the smiling restraint of the verse next to the franticity of the choruses (“It’s nice to be a lunatic,” “Two fat persons, click click click”) and Dury’s phenomenal vocal performance, alternating between langourous cool (the emphasis he puts on the “Bom” in “In Bombay” to meet Mickey Gallagher’s upward-rippling piano stroke) and just-past-rational orgasm (the Glaswegian “HUT MEEE!” towards the end, and his call and response with Jankel’s hysterical guitar, his “Hit me”s become progressively more feral).

And the music – that wonderful quivering organ sustenato throughout, the abrupt high-register piano clusters, the oooohhh spine-descending tingle of Norman Watt-Roy’s bass in tandem with Charley Charles’ crisp, Meters-inspired drumming (a natural British counterpart to what Bernard Edwards and Tony Thompson were achieving contemporaneously in Chic) – all leads to, climaxes in and leads away from Payne’s astonishing sax torrent, all Barbieri squeals and Ayler atonal flurries. Eventually Payne is left alone with the drums and rhythm with a sustained false register two-note tenor overblow, before a whistle blows, and he blows both alto and tenor simultaneously, in an explicit tribute to Roland Kirk before merging back into the music (on TOTP he continued to blow bubbles out of a pipe for the remainder of the performance).

Uncompromised free improvisation on a number one record, and my improv-sceptical classmates dancing to it at the Valentine’s Day school disco – is it any wonder I rejoiced? The Blockheads would subsequently prove itself a group sufficiently broad stylistically to incorporate both Wilko Johnson and Don Cherry within its line-up, and Dury went on to become a rock Kerouac and Spencer of sorts; not in terms of any direct influence, but because of a similarly natural ability to rise out of and away from artistic categories and be completely and comprehensively true to himself, yet so open to everybody and everything else. “Rhythm Stick” hitting number one – and that summer’s follow-up, the top three hit “Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3” with its Adriano Celentano and John Coltrane namechecks – gave me the feeling that Our Side was winning, and that the so often unpromising arena of the British singles chart could still harbour unexpected magic. Ten out of bloody ten.

Nothing new under the sun again. His brand of Jack-the-Lad rock ‘n roll goes back to the late sixties and early seventies: Kilburn and the High Roads was a staple of the weekend Union gigs at Liverpool. It probably has Max Miller as its godfather and its roots go way back to the Victorian music hall. So, new wave it is not. I can’t see it as punk either but I won’t object if others argue the toss.

But Ian Dury was a true original. A kind of walking, singing Viz comic, pushing all the buttons of outrage with quite astonishing inventiveness and ending with a wink and a look of boyish blue-eyed (I haven’t a clue what colour Dury’s eyes were but you know what I mean) innocence that made me want to take him home and cuddle him. There are Dury songs I like a lot better than Rhythm Stick – just about the whole of New Boots and Panties for starters. But it was radio friendly. Can you imagine DLT playing Plaistow Patricia on the morning show? Traffic chaos would ensue for certain. Dammit, I like the B-side better – There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards, one of those cases of a relatively innocuous A-side covering up for a more contentious B-side? I like What A Waste more. But Rhythm Stick remains a damned good song.

I’m a fan, in case you hadn’t guessed. My middle name is… Oh, sorry. The man is a sadly lost national treasure.

“a rock Kerouac and Spencer of sorts” <– stanley? (first of all i thought edmund then haha i thought frank)

can’t really say more than tom and marcello have to be honest, an absolute classic, but i wanted to draw people’s attention (particularly anyone in edinburgh) to a fantastic show i saw on the fringe:

http://www.myspace.com/abfcap

it’s a two-hander between dury and spider telling the tales of dury’s life. yer man playing dury is excellent. thoroughly recommend it (i’m guessing it might tour later in the year too).

and yes the title of the play is ABFCAP (as in the initials of the first line of plaistow patricia)

I wish I liked Dury more and hate to sound contrary, but a blend of pub rock and jazz funk with squawking sax to the fore is close to my idea of hell. This and What A Waste felt like jolly novelty records at the time to 13-yr old me, not much more, like (shoot me down for this heresy) a smarter BA Robertson. I did like the Theme From A Summer Place coda on Reasons To Be Cheerful, though.

A Stiff 45 at number one certainly was a breakthrough for “us” but there’s something far more groundbreaking, for me at least, just round the corner.

I must say that now we’re going through a period that everyone (bar Lex, any others?) can remember, the scores are going through the roof. This is tough on the non-contextual write-ups/scores on the earlier number ones, but pretty hard to avoid I suppose.

I don’t disagree with the changing of the guard aspect of HMWYRS, though; as if to emphasise a great leap forward, in the same Top 3 was RAK’s last throw of the dice, Lay Your Love On Me by Racey. Apparently – I’m snaffling this story from another Popular contributor, so apols! – Racey were put together as a replacement for Mud, who had left RAK for Private Stock and to have a go at writing their own material (well, you can’t blame them with Rob Davies on the team). Bit of a time lag, but it does seem obvious when you know. Their hit in the spring of ’79, Some Girls, is pure Les Gray.

Lay Your Love On Me is Tiger Feet redux. I sniggered along with Rhythm Stick as a kid and sneered at the vertically-challenged Racey singer with the permanently upturned collar (is this cool? Is it?). But I now much prefer the fairground organ, party noises (I’d like to think RAK were picking up on the early Sugarhill 12s), and expertly honed pop fizz of Lay Your Love On Me.

Both hits appeared on K-Tel’s Action Replay along with a US no.1 that didn’t bother the charts here, even with a TOTP appearance – Nick Gilder’s Hot Child In The City. Beyond that it was almost a straight New Wave/Disco split: Supernature, YMCA, I Love America, Radio Radio, Hanging On The Telephone, Tonight’s Drummer Man. And in classic K-Tel fashion, it ends with Streetband’s bread-strike hit Toast (featuring a singer we’ll deal with some years hence) segued into Suzi Quatro & Chris Norman’s rather sweet Stumblin’ In.

This scared me as a six-year old, whilst other children found it funny. I think that it was the clearly foolhardy and masochistic nature of asking to be hit above and beyond anything else. And the leeringness and roughness of Dury’s voice – always present as a threat even during the gentle and light passages – made him seem the sort of grown-up whom children should steer clear of. Even then, the music struck me as being exceptionally good, though, I think.

Now, of course, it sounds like the best pop you could desire; the most rooted in lived experience, while transcending through imagination. Murk and gaiety!

A word of praise for 1979’s ‘Do It Yourself’ Blockheads LP, which always tends to be neglected in the towering shadow of ‘New Boots’. Blocks of songs which crash into each other, a ceaseless funk, always becoming a greater and greater compounded experience for the listener, a sense of the world becoming more and more manic and lurching, through the nasty testosterone swagger of ‘Mischief’, the breakdown and desolation of the ‘Screamers’ Dance’ and finally reaching some sort of consolation with ‘Lullaby For Frances/is’. That’s not an album that you can possibly ignore when it’s playing.

wl@11: I don’t suppose I’ll ever count as being able to remember, as these charts are not my charts, and this is as much an exercise in exoticism for me as it is a trawl through pop history. Though I was only a year old at this point anyway.

From the distant perspective of this side of the Atlantic, Ian Dury’s appeal is, shall we say, muted. I’ve enjoyed him on occasion, but the outpouring of affection above is making me want to revisit NB&P!! at least and see if I can tease out a bit more to like.

loved this at the time and still do – it did feel as if the lunatics were taking over the asylum – particularly as it was on stiff.
Was the album Do it yourself a bit more hardcore? I seem to remember loads of people buying it on the strengths of the singles and then seeing loads of copies in second hand shops pretty soon after.
I think a 9 is about right because it is almost so self consciously clever that it resists the sense that anyone could access it in the way that, for instance, they could with the Beatles or Abba at their best. It reminds me of ‘Do the strand’ which with it’s globe trotting name dropping has a similar arch cleverness.

Jonathan #17 – it’s great to see people enjoying the exoticism, and there’s plenty more of that to come this year. While revisiting NB&P!!, try searching out Dury’s swansong “Mr Love Pants” – not 100% consistent but some belters, in particular the very angry “Itinerant Child” which picks up where the Levellers left off. As I remarked to a friend at the time (Dury already had terminal cancer) – you don’t know what you got till it’s gone, but sometimes you get enough notice that it’s about to go so that you can treasure it while it’s still here.

#21 – Well, quite. It was partially the knowledge of Dury’s declining health that coaxed me into seeing him and the Blockheads a second time, towards the end of the 1990s – and what a show that was, with the irrepressible Norman Watt-Roy vyeing with Ian as the true star.

I must get around to revisiting Do It Yourself, which I didn’t buy at the time as there were plenty of other copies floating around at school. It didn’t contain any singles – which although admirable, failed to prolong its shelf life – and despite wonderful tracks such as “Sink My Boats”, there couldn’t help but be a sense of general anti-climax after the glories of New Boots.

Undaunted, the band bounced back with “Reasons To Be Cheerful”: the first ever rap hit anywhere, and given Chaz Jankel’s musical connections, presumably made in the knowledge of the newly emergent genre….?

Another very appreciative nod to the great Barney Bubbles sleeve from me. I have no idea what that thing is – it always looked like a deconstructed Cubist Dalmation turned into a kids toy – but it’s one of those sleeves that seems to come from a brain I couldn’t hope to touch for wit and invention. I’d say exactly the same about the record too, with this and the New Boots album they really hit the magic sweet spot. Maybe “only” a 9.5 from me though.

A great b-side to boot, one of my favourite lyrics ever

Van Gogh did some eyeball pleasers
He must have been a pencil squeezer
He didn’t do the Mona Lisa,
That was an Italian geezer

#25 – Well deduced LondonLee. All is revealed on the reverse side of the sleeve…

http://tinyurl.com/5wvd6v

this has come up a teeny bit before — david essex! — but it was definitely a THING in the early days of punk; that at last “we” were throwing off the oppressive cultural imperialism of the american accent in all pop; that only now could we speak in our own accents, about the romance of our own back-streets and strange suburbs

dury didn’t sing “american” at ALL: and he didn’t sing about mepmphis or tulsa or new orleans; he sang about billericay, plaistow, harold hill! which was all incredibly (if with hindsight rather weirdly) exciting at the time; we have mythology TOO, and it’s RIGHT HERE IN YOUR HANDS ppl

*goes writes songs about wem and clun*

#26, Three Degrees’ Woman In Love would surely have been a Number One at any other time. A great record up against some very stiff competition…(sorry!)

Re #27

Oh of course, it’s been years since I looked at the back of the sleeve. What on earth it has to do with the record I don’t know but it works brilliantly.

Tangramtastic. I did wonder about this sleeve as it seems such a striking leap from the conventional dross we’ve witnessed so far (and another rare case of ‘artists not on the cover’). I wasn’t sure if it was a European edition or not.

As for the song, 9 one second, 10 the next. I heard it a few years later when I was old enough to remember and instantly enjoyed it. How could you not be amused by Dury’s intonation? And it’s probably the best #1 single to feature hot sax, amongst other things (hard luck Georgios).

The Blockheads played a free concert in Nottingham’s Market Square a few weeks ago and I went along but, sorry, Erithian, I found it rather depressing. Unlike the late 90’s gig that Mike refers to above when, despite having to be carried onstage, Dury was really rather wonderful. ‘See you next year’ he said at the end, but he was dead within a year.

I always wanted to like Dury more than I did. I had friends who knew him in the Kilburn and the High Roads days and thought him a genius. I bought all the singles up to the slightly dodgy ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ (still have the 12″ in the loft). This is great, a 9/10 for me, as is ‘Sex etc’, and ‘What A Waste’ gets 9.5 but my personal favourite is a B side (let’s hear it for B sides!) that seems to sum up what’s so great about his approach to life: ‘You’ll See Glimpses’. I think I’ll play it now. It’s on the back of ‘Sueperman’s Big Sister’, a single whose label is a hand-corrected version of Nick Lowe’s ‘So It Goes’ single. ‘They take me for a mug because I smile, they think I’m too out of tune to mind being patronised…. all I want for my birthday is another birthday… this has been got out by a friend.’ One of those records that makes you feel like part of the human race.

I’m still struggling to articulate what it is about “Hit Me” that affects me so much as a piece of music, rather than for what it represents in the wider context of chart pop. And I think it’s primarily to do with what I perceive as the almost dream-like quality of its opening, dominant piano/bass-led riff, coupled with the almost mythical travelogue of the verses. For me, the chorus is where “everybody else” is invited in for a chirpy, cheeky Cockney singalong, as if that was what the song was all about – but for me it’s almost a smokescreen, an entryist device which allows the rest of the track to exist. And it’s within the restlessly undulating contours of the rest of the track that I reside as a listener, shifting over periodically to admit the chorus’s house-guests.

Dream-like? Un-equipped to play vinyl in my school study, I had this on one side of a home-made C90, which I used to play over and over again as I drifted off to sleep, inventing videos that eventually turned into dreams. And so there’s something here which touches that half-asleep/half-awake state of consciousness, in a way that still cuts deep – allowing me to visualise the music almost as a physical space, which part of me still inhabits. If that doesn’t sound too pretentious…

I had experienced a similar effect with Rose Royce’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” a few months earlier, albeit as a one-off moment. The first time I heard the track was on FM radio one morning, as I emerged from sleep into wakefulness, and so the sparse, haunting oddness of the arrangement – the syn-drums, the rising and falling string shimmers – first took root in my sub-consciousness as I dreamt. I woke up with the strangest sense of wonder at what I literally perceived as its other-worldly quality, and it’s a sense of wonder that I’ve never quite lost over the years. No other piece of music has ever done this to me!

#39 – Mike, for someone who’s struggling you do a mighty fine job.

My experience of this song – first hearing it – was quite different to most here, I’m guessing. It’s Sunday night, and I’m allowed (as my parents are watching 60 Minutes) to go to the bedroom and listen to the radio (saving battery power in my own, once a week). What do I listen to? Dr. Demento, of course! He plays all kinds of odd and strange music, creates his own world of the gauche, the giddy, the flat out weird (I grew up in a Mothers of Invention household, so his regular playing of Frank Zappa is merely the baseline of oddness for me). And one night, I heard this song. No explanation where they are from (I knew enough at twelve to know it was an English accent) nor any of how successful the song is back home. Just as I didn’t quite get “Y.M.C.A.” at first, I didn’t quite get this one either, but I understood they were both wide-open enjoyments of the world.

While the Village People were inescapable, Ian Dury and the Blockheads were only heard on Dr. Demento (though they may well have been on the New Wave-friendly station I had yet to discover). “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” was thus understood by me to be a novelty song along the same lines as The Bonzos (also a Dr. Demento favorite) – funny Englishmen who were great musicians as well, obv. I was amazed to find out a few years ago that this went to #1!

Only a nine? Can’t think of any more worthy, cast-iron 10s than this beauty.

Re #45 (and #19) – my rule of thumb is that if there’s even the slightest doubt in my mind that something’s a 10, then it’s not a 10. That doesn’t mean there’s any kind of flaw I could articulate in it (though this was a less close call than “I Feel Love”, which also had most of the comments box crew in disagreement).

I think it’s self-consciously clever, sure, but not in an inaccessible or alienating way: I don’t get any sense of side from “Hit Me”, any idea that Dury is sneering at the audience (I think “mocking” in my review hit slightly the wrong note – it’s a bit softer, “teasing” maybe).

One of my personal favourite artists of the period and much missed. Ian Dury was an extraordinary individual with a talent to match and he was very much up my strasse. “Rhythm Stick” was utterly typical of Ian’s offbeat quirky humour, only this time we are also treated to a stupendous backing track as well, which for me sells the record. Each to their own, of course, but I would be surprised if Dury attracted any criticism here, although perhaps his perception as a cockney git may have antagonised one or two people from points further north. He certainly produced some distinctive material and this reflected itself in his albums as well as in his live performances, which began life on the pub circuit as Kilburn and the High Roads. In essence, though, he was a poet and was fabulously funny, ducking no target, particularly the slight matter of his own inconvenience of polio striking him down from early childhood.

I consider it pretty pointless waxing lyrical (quite literally) about Dury’s contribution to popular culture when the initiated do not require it and the uninitiated are perfectly cabable of doing the research themselves. All I would like to say is that I too consider it a waste never to have been the ticket man at Fulham Broadway station (the underground closest to Chelsea FC), as Ian did in his wonderful “On the Waterfront – I could have been a contender” lament; and that there have indeed ain’t half been some clever bastards and that this wonderful man was one of them. God bless him.