Ian Dury –
The Studio Albums Collection (Edsel Records)
Vinyl/CD
Out Now
The complete
works of the legendary artist are released on one box set.
Ian Robins
Dury was a genius. End of.
Without
doubt he was taken from us all too soon.
His very unique brand of punk/jazz/disco/funk/poetry was unheard of and
to this day no-one has come anywhere close to being mentioned in the same
breath as him.
He’ll be known
to many as the bloke, with his Blockheads, that brought us Hit Me With Your
Rhythm Stick, and quite rightly in some respects. The song is an incredible piece of work,
still sounding fresh and made to this day.
After waiting patiently behind Village People’s YMCA for two weeks it
made number one in January 1979 and sold 979,000 copies, a figure that today would
probably see an artist at the top spot for a year. My lasting memory will be watching Top Of The
Pops and hearing my Dad say, “I wish somebody WOULD bloody hit him”.
But it
wasn’t just Hit Me that propelled him onto our screens, his enigmatic
personality performed Reasons To Be Cheerful Pt 3, Spasticus (Autisticus) and
What A Waste. His gave us one of today’s
commonest everyday phrases in ‘sex and drugs and rock and roll’ and his left
behind paintings as the result of another of his impressive talents.
He had the ability
to move from serious to comic in the space of a gap between tracks. Often hilarious (There Ain’t Half Been Some
Clever Bastards) and often serious (Ban The Bomb) he tugged and pulled at our
senses and made us think. He was so far
ahead of his time that it’s almost unbelievable. On Yes And No (Paula) from his 1980 album
Laughter he came up with the human equivalent of scratching. Ban The Bomb featured rapping back in 1984.
His second
love of painting was perhaps the influence behind Peter The Painter, a song
about Sergeant Pepper album sleeve designer Peter Blake, and Bus Drivers Prayer
is nothing short of genius as he cleverly substitutes lines for London
locations on a double decker route.
All eight of
Dury’s studio albums are here documenting a terrific output from 1977 through
to 1998 two years before his death from metastatic colorectal cancer, and it is
a must for any music lover, poet or curiosity seeker.
One word of
warning is that Ian often omitted singles releases from albums. The cd version of the box set includes a
bonus disc of the fourteen singles, the vinyl does not.
To give this
collection anything other than top marks would surely damn me to an eternity in
Hell.
10/10
Links
10/10
Links
Published in Louder Than War 30/10/14 - here
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