My time at Melody Maker overlapped with the final year or so of Brian Case being on the staff. I don't think we exchanged more than a few words - he was pretty fed up by that point, barely in the office (the jazz section had been discontinued some years earlier, he was writing entirely about film for his last few years at MM). Soon he left to become the main writer about film - his other great passion aside from jazz - at Time Out.
I did not know then that prior to joining the Melody Maker he'd written for NME for several years, covering jazz with the occasional foray into rock etc.
A great critic - here's something I found just today where he caustically castigates a record I like (although in truth it's really "Jazz Is The Teacher (Funk Is The Preacher)", the inclusion on C81, that really lives with me - much of it I find nearly as battering and flailed as Case does, but not with the same kind of lifelong jazzbo antipathy, more a rocker's frustration).
I don't understand half the references but I enjoy the way his language moves.
And a nicely nasty swipe at Julie Burchill - who'd he encountered in his later years at NME - and here is scolded for her lack of movie knowledge.
And then this droll piece, which is possibly off-color by today's standards- comically mixing up Kingston, Jamaica and Kingston-Upon-Thames
And finally, here's Case praising, mostly, a record that I love - and that was the very first rock music long-playing record I ever did buy, the week it came out.
Ian Dury and the Blockheads
Do It Yourself
Melody Maker, May 19th 1979
by Brian Case
Uneasy lies the loaf that wears the titfer. Ian Dury's new album dispenses with the outsize characters of New Boots & Panties and moves bravely — since that cast of grotesques is clearly reproduceable, and bankable — into the autobiographically confessional. Of course, that needn't necessarily rate a round of applause — I would be desolate if Randy Newman broke cover — for, as Billy Wilder said of Marilyn Monroe, "there are certain wonderful rascals in this world, and one day they lie down on an analyst's couch and out comes a clenched, dreary thing."
The positive sensuality of 'Wake Up And Make Love With Me' has disappeared and so has the once-removed sexual violence of 'If I Was With A Woman'. Poles have been eroded, and what remains is infinitely true, infinitely troubled, and communicated through craft — and that is the name of the game. Dury distances pain through his love of words: he does not need the swaddlings of impersonation.
'Dance Of The Screamers', therefore, is a dance in the sense that Last Tango In Paris and Strindberg's Dance Of Death are a knees-up. Mother Black, and they draw their catheter of blood. 'Screamers' sets his on-stage kukka-burra brips and gibbon squeals in the context of total despair, algebra of need, visceral response, and is paralleled by what sounds like Davey Payne's overblown upper-register saxophone: a hip correlation. The lyrics are a blat of sexual rejection: "it's hard to be a hero when you've had your helmet cracked"; and the Black/Jewish wisdom in extremis of "some of us are witty, luv, it comes from facing up to facts." The number is too long, and the sarcastic "skies are blue" interjections are too obvious. It needed longer in the oven.
'Sink My Boats', on the other hand, is excellent. Germinating from the Woody Allen routine — "My wife was so immature she'd come into the bathroom without knocking and sink my boats" — the sketch that brought you "I didn't recognise my first wife with her wrists closed" and a lawsuit, Dury has constructed an internal monologue which precisely surfaces character. The closed circuit of "will you still love me when I'm over the hill is another stupid question" anatomises the endless bicker-and-rebuttal of a relationship on the skids, Where both parties bridle at the obverse of their ploys. Did I tell ya this is only rock 'n' roll? The tune is lovely, the arrangement harmonically complex, and the keyboard breaks — Mickey Gallagher? — inventive.
A more diffuse despair can be found on 'Mischief' and 'This Is What We Find'. Both utilise a catalogue of unfortunate happenings to fictitious characters, but move into sharper focus. 'Mischief' lists various naughtinesses — "Barry breaks the windows of his broken home — 'ave a guess — his tiny mind's been scarred" — and subverts these ineffectual rebellions still further with inconsequential documentation — "his dad's a shipping clerk." Behind the pathetic hell-raising lies the old cockney routine of local hero-worship — 'ee ONLY shaved a cart'orse's ankles and flogged it to The Filfth — tasty but inadequate — and the number ends in infantile apologies and pleas for mercy. It's very good indeed, and will get better on the road, as 'Quiet', 'Sink My Boats' and 'This Is What We Find' have refined against a sounding-board.
'This Is What We Find' — the outstanding piece here — is an Edward Gorey amusing mausoleum of catastrophe, and Dury takes transparent refuge in the sacerdotal pipes to reflect upon its burden — i.e.: the flesh is grass. A beautifully balanced piece, in which gabble prepares for thematic repetition, and one laughs at the indignities of the human condition: "A sense of humour is required amongst the bacon rind."
There's plenty of the familiar suburban self-improver in the vocabulary — and elsewhere, "blandishment" in 'Sink My Boats', "the wherewithal" in 'Dance' — as a mockery of the orotund in the face of such humiliation, and an Art School survival in the term "jubblified." There is a jolly pump and Wurlitzer bounce to the backing, and fun in the misfit of words to music.
'Don't Ask Me' and 'Inbetweenies' deal with the early stages of romance. "Here I stand with a doughnut for a brain," sings the suitor in 'Don't Ask Me', and goes on to list his virtues like a street-trader: "On my life, I believe we're tailor-made." The Blockheads complement the voice with nicely varied interjections, and there's a good guitar solo. All very Aldgate, and effective.
'Inbetweenies' is more complex. "A body likes to be near the bone" and "I die when I'm alone" indicate the desperation in this pitch, which settles for friendship with "at least you've put me on the team." There's a beautifully placed ambulance siren in the backing, and some good jazz piano.
'Quiet' contrasts three manners, the polite, the authoritarian and junior rudery. Based on an old schoolmaster of his, Dury's lyrics catch precisely the tone of posturing officialese — "quiet, persistent louts and clowns," "quiet, or else there will be measures" — and subverts it with a chorus of "plop-plops" and "big jobs." The guitar break, spitting like a cat in a bag, is very impressive.
'Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy' and 'Waiting For Your Taxi' are slight, the latter mingling taped conversation and traffic noises like Mingus and Kirk, and launching an upper-register screamer from Davey Payne. Here is a deep, pneumatic whump to the vocal, a catchy chant like 'Rhythm Stick'.
Finally, 'Lullaby For Francis/Frances' — a sort of bookend to 'Wake Up' — opens with a fanfare before ducking into reggae. Dury's voice here is beautifully tender, deep, husky — for a change — cleanly recorded. I missed some of the words elsewhere in the mix. Melody and treatment are charming, and Charley Charles's beat — centipede with a wooden leg — is lithe and living. In the context of the album, a lullaby — "safe and sound, that's a promise" and "it's time to impose a curfew" — registers like the all-clear after a psychic air-raid.
Do It Yourself stands in the same relation to New Boots & Panties as Joseph Heller's second novel, Something Happened, does to Catch-22. Both artists kept us waiting, and finally delivered a less fevered dimension which nonetheless bears the authentic trademark.
Whether any of the new numbers will adapt as singalong material in live performance is conjectural. The important thing is that Ian Dury's creativity is still functioning at peak, and will move you from tears to laughter.
