Ian Dury credited childhood polio for his sense of rhythm: “A freedom thing”
“I don’t want to be any more important than the bloke who makes chairs or delivers milk,” Ian Dury said back in 1981, claiming his primary goal was to simply be ‘useful’.
He was nearly 40, but had only been properly famous for a few years, having made the belated leap from punk cult hero to rock star with singles like ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ and ‘Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick’.
Dury’s wit and turn-of-phrase as a songwriter were a huge part of his unique appeal, but even those talents, he feared, could potentially do more harm than good within his worldview. “Perhaps as a lyric writer I’m a bit too flash,” he said, “And make people think they’re not good at all”.
Dury’s deep concern with his utilitarian value and rejection of fame almost certainly has its roots in his childhood, much of which he spent in hospital schools in the south of England. He had contracted polio in 1949, at the age of seven, and never fully recovered, leaving him with partial paralysis on his left side and a permanent chip on his shoulder. From the formative ages of 9 to 12, he was a student at Chailey Heritage Craft School in East Sussex, where the methodology at the time was to help children overcome their disabilities through ‘tough love’, for lack of a scientific term. It was post-war England, and the stiff upper lip was seen as a better trait to encourage than self-acceptance.
As such, Dury carried a low self-opinion into his adulthood, admitting that “I was 25 before I could walk naked across a room in front of a young lady. I was so embarrassed about it”; that self-doubt carried over to his music, as well. “He was simply the best and most original lyric writer I have ever encountered,” his former manager Charlie Gillett told The Guardian in 2009, “but he never seemed to have any real confidence in his abilities”.
If there was one thing Dury did seem to feel proud of, it was his sense of rhythm, which he didn’t necessarily see as a talent, so much as a deep understanding that was earned the hard way. “Rhythm is the master, it’s my master,” he told the Melbourne newspaper The Age in 1981, “Rhythm is something I understand in a way that lifts me to heaven more than music does; much more.”
As a kid, the musician’s polio had left his left arm and hand fairly unusable, but the disease had stopped at the wrist on his right arm. This meant that, even while both his arms were in plaster casts, held upwards, the fingers on his right hand were still free to move and exercise, constantly tapping out rhythms.
“I used to do the ‘William Tell Overture’,” Dury recalled. “That became a drum kit for me. It became a freedom thing. Rhythms were there that I could do and practise and think about, and enjoy when I was nine. That was when I was kind of restricted in every other way…but that’s why I suppose I can tap things out in my brain now.”
That backstory certainly adds some unexpected weight to a song like ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, which always seemed like a fun, silly tune, but maybe had more of a celebratory, cathartic nature to it than one would initially presume.
