CQ: Ben Whalley tells the Stiff Records story… Ian Drury of Blackheads and his rythm stick…
15h10-UTC Saturday 15 December 2007-CE
How strange to think that there are poor souls to whom the dreadful Punk and 1970s-New-Wave are treasured memories of youth. Now I know who Ian Drury was, but he was only earning a living I suppose.
By pure chance, MY young time was when PERFECTION in Pop JUST HAPPENED to arrive, so I am a With-It Rock’n’Roll Teenager for ever; envy me you sad come-latelies. Lyrics are supposed to scan.
Ben Whalley produced and directed the documentary ‘If It Aint Stiff’ about Stiff records shown on BBC 4 on Friday 14 December 2007. He must have been interested in the 1970s popular music scene. I was not.
Once Radio Northsea International closed and left us without free radio (aside from the boring Caroline album station, with queer DJs, on shortwave) I dropped any interest in current popular music (I thought for ever).
I would overhear dreadful stuff on the radios of other people, and in shops, such as I-Was-Driving-In-My-Car and Hit-Me-With-Your-Rythm-Stick. I now understand that this was Punk and New-Wave.
ILR stations in this period were contemptible to me. They were part of a duopoly where the same people worked in both Beeb and IBA stations. There was no opening for “a man and his missus” to small-start a station and work it up.
I now know something about Ian Drury, of whom I did not, the other day, recall hearing previously. Apparently, he was the lead singer in a group called the Blockheads. He was the guilty party with that god-awful rhythm stick crap. He was skinny from polio which is always a tragedy, but no excuse for making a horrible punk noise.
I understand he has walked-on-by. He could now make a virtual-reality new-man-of-himself, as he communes on the cosmic-energy-field, if there were such a natural dispensation.
By the time that I tuned back to AM radio, it was 1982 and I had arrived in Merseyside, part of the listening area of the superb Radio Nova from Dublin. I was astonished to discover that there were superb powerful ballads such as ‘Desert Moon’ by Denis de Young, and ‘Hello’ by Lionel Ritchie; song lyrics scanned again.
The Beatles began, so far as I can make out, the bad habit of singing songs where the lyrics are oddly emphasised in order to cram them in to the melody. Punk made a point of it.
EDITED Wednesday 24 June 2009
