I’ve just obtained a contract to write a book on another of my heroes – Ian Dury. It fired me up! I’ve already started. What do you reckon of this start to the introduction??
On Track – Ian Dury
Opher Goodwin
In 1976 I had been teaching for a year. I was twenty-seven-years-old and considered myself quite young and still pretty hip – a product of the sixties underground. I ran a lunch-time club where the hippest long-haired kids gathered to play loud music in defiance of the staid hierarchy. I felt I had more in common with the kids than I did the staff. I was surprised to find the young hipsters listening to the Doors and Velvet Underground and asked them if they didn’t have anything of their own. This was music from my era. They told me that there was nothing that was worth listening too. So I introduced them to Roy Harper, Captain Beefheart and Country Joe and the Fish. They lapped it up.
One evening I was at home when the doorbell rang. A crowd of young punks stood on the doorstep – long-hair now short and spiked with brylcream, tight jeans, rips and razor blades, silver-sprayed shoes held together with safety pins. It was my lunch-time students. ‘Right, you boring old fart. We’ve come to play you some decent music!’
I ushered them in and was regaled with Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned and New York Dolls. The dawn of a new era. Punk and New Wave heralded a clear schism with the past with a supersonic burst of nascent energy. Rock had rediscovered itself, remoulded itself and re-emerged with a bang. A new philosophy. Unleashed. Unfettered. Complete with a new rebelliousness. The naivety of the sixties revolution was replaced with a snarling anarchy. The new punks were as much at war with the sixties generation as they were the establishment. The world had realigned. I was the boring old fart – but I lapped it up.
In 1977 the Stiff label exploded with the likes of Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Wreckless Eric. The leading light was Ian Dury and the Blockheads. Sex &Drugs & Rock & Roll was stamping its defiant riff at the nation and was instantly banned and then New Boots And Panties took us all by storm. We’d discovered a new wordsmith whose clever outspoken couplets, married to a storming funky backing from the Blockheads, propelled us into another age. Ian defined the times and set the tone. His combination of punk, funk, poet and vaudeville created an entirely new genre. This was not New Wave, not Punk; this was Ian Dury!
