The regional genre that gave Ian Dury a reason to live: “So full of feel”
I love the abstraction of great music, how one song can be so fundamentally linked to an artist, yet somehow I can mould the lyrics to feel deeply personal to me; it’s the endless possibilities that make music so fascinating to study.
But one song eludes this analysis, which has a special place in my heart for how genuinely direct it is in its performance and is my personal song, and that song is Ian Dury’s ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3’. Not to diminish the musical achievements of the song, of which there are plenty, but it is a perfect example of the phrase, ‘it is what it is’. There is nothing more cheerful than the performance of Dury’s cheeky vocals, reeling off a list of simple pleasures that give life a little bit of colour amidst the damp greyness of the day-to-day.
Whether it be a cheddar cheese and pickle sandwich or a rather silly porridge oats, there were plenty of things that Dury reminded us were great, and this was coming from a man whose life was riddled with more suffering than the average person could comprehend.
So from that moment on, I was hooked on adhering to whatever Dury recommended as golden treasures in modern life and followed him deep into his world of recommendations. As a man of both wild hedonism and artistic consideration, someone who came of age in the wild parties of the 1970s and quiet corridors of Britain’s art schools, he knows a thing or two about cultural influences.
While ‘Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3’ lists the simple things, his 1998 interview with Uncut goes a little deeper and lists off the influences that made Dury the artist. Woody Allen and the violence of Gene Vincent all feature, but so does the musical impact of Memphis, a place that was closer to his beloved London than you’d ordinarily think.
“There was a lot of jazz in the Memphis soul scene,” he started, “Stax and Atlantic had a couple of great house bands, and then there were producers like Willie Mitchell, who was just great. Al Jackson was probably the best popular music drummer that ever lived; he was so on it, so funky, and so full of feel. He wrote songs with Al Green. He’d actually write a specific tom-tom part. When him and the MGs were backing Otis Redding, something double special happened.”
He expanded on the lore, adding, “There’s stories of him gettin’ into a groove during recording sessions and just carry on playin’ all that, even when everyone else went out for a cup of tea. His music was everythin’, he’d go there and stay there.”
You might be confused as to how Memphis came into the orbit of Dury, who feels so innately British as an artist. Everything from his delivery to sandwich filling choice oozes the tradition of Great Britain of yore, but a closer listen to his arrangements, beyond the London twang, unites these two worlds more than you would imagine.
The groove of R&B and jazz served as a fundamental backbone for Ian Dury’s sound, rapidly keeping up with his charming spoken word approach and giving some of his best music a rich musical sense. He may have altered the soundscape to be more befitting of the British stories he was telling, but there was an undeniable sense of feel that Dury took from those great Memphis musicians and laced into his own music.
