When Ian Dury had a fight with Omar Sharif
The late Ian Dury was one of the most colourful characters in the history of rock, and he made the musical form a much better place to be in with his efforts. He first broke through in the 1970s in the pub rock movement as the frontman of Kilburn and the High Roads, and it was in this short-lived outfit that he would cut his teeth and alert everyone to his brilliance.
Fusing the influence of his childhood hero, Gene Vincent, with his sharp wit and caricatured cockney persona, Dury provided everyone with respite from the ills that the decade had to offer.
When sitting down with Nick Dent-Robinson in 1992 at London’s Savoy Hotel, Dury gave an account of why he got into music. He said: “I wasn’t very good when I came out of college, spent 12 years not earning a crust, so I started doing music as a joke. I thought of a name first – Kilburn and the High Roads (later changed to The Blockheads) – and then got a band together after.”
A real character, despite being mainly remembered for his acerbic wit, Dury’s life was comprised of two contrasting facets: the loveable comic and an angry man, furious at the world for the hand it dealt him. When discussing his late father with the Evening Standard in 2010, Dury’s son, Baxter, recalled just how tempestuous his father could be, calling him a “Polaris missile”.
“He would seek out someone’s weakness in seconds, and then lock onto it,” Baxter explained. “That’s how he controlled his environment. It was very funny, in a gruesome kind of way … if it wasn’t you he was picking on. But it was a strange obsession, too. Like, why do you want to be like that? He was never really physically violent — he was a small disabled guy — but there was a lot of mental violence.”
It seems as if Dury was acutely aware of the more visceral side of his personality. During that 1992 interview at the Savoy, the ‘Billericay Dickie’ vocalist recalled one instance where his character got him into a physical altercation with none other than Hollywood legend Omar Sharif at the Ritz in London. Unsurprisingly, the larger than life film star gave the diminutive rocker a punch to remember.
Dury revealed: “I have had the occasional arrest for abusive behaviour. Then there was an occasion when I had a major fight in a restaurant – at the Ritz actually, with big Omar (Sharif). It was silly. Very silly. Basically, I called him a name, and he chinned me. He didn’t realise that I was disabled, I don’t think, not that I would have expected that to have stopped him anyway. I don’t really blame him. A lot of my friends have hit me, often. And I usually deserve it because I am out of order. I don’t hold it against anyone – not ever. I get lippy, too frisky.”
