Ian Dury - Book review

'Ian Dury: The Definitive Biography' by Will Birch

If you're a fan of Ian Dury, then you might like to read this book. If you're not a fan, listen to 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick' until you are!

Iain Dury wasn't a particularly great singer. His talents were as much in his considerable personal charisma and in his clever songwriting, both aspects came together in his unique performances. Who else could create such marvellous, clever, defiant lyrics as 'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll,'  'Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick,'  'Reasons to be Cheerful, part 3' or 'Spasticus Autisticus'?

In spite of the dramatic subject matter, this book is slow to get going, I found the opening chapters dragged a bit. Even the author seemed slightly disengaged until around page 77. It slowly picked up pace and suddenly we were on the road with Kilburn and the Highroads and things really began to take off.

Ian then really hit the jackpot with the assembling of the Blockheads, all very talented musicians who lifted  his performance to new heights. Behind the scenes, his private life was usually in chaos and it was usually his fault. His disability (caused by childhood polio) didn't help, but he was an attractive, intelligent, usually charming bloke who refused to let it restrict either his love life or his ambitions.

As well as being a clever singer, brilliant lyricist and unique performer, Ian Dury was also an artist, training with Peter Blake at the Royal College of Art. He acted in a number of films including Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone. He became an ambassador for UNICEF, visiting Sri Lanka to help promote polio vaccination.

Ian Dury was a complex, clever, talented and difficult man. I love his music, I enjoyed this biography once I got into it. I'm glad I wasn't his girlfriend but I'm very sorry I never saw him perform live.

New Year, New Elephants

Ancient koalas munching in gum trees remember

many new years, once they were the first alive

in their gold-red lands under the wide sky.

 

No happy new year for unknown warrior-horses

who remember no poppies, only their boon

companions trapped in mud and blood, screaming.

 

Sir crow, summiting the naked cherry tree

remembers every ruby-fruit and can predict

their re-birth in the joy of summer light.

 

Lady camel transports vast burdens of memory

over baking deserts, while calculating that

the next dune is not too high for her calf.

 

Lord elephant remembers his enemy who

carries boom-stick and saw to destroy

his family, fire and axe to destroy his home.

 

To all creatures great and human I wish

a New Year of eucalyptus, poppy and cherries,

new life, safe haven and making new memories.

 

                                              *

 

(In different cultures, many creatures are symbol for memory.)

Unsuitable authors beginning with M; Alistair Maclean's HMS Ulysses

Continuing cataloguing my books - probably in a totally unprofessional way which would have librarians all over the world shaking their heads sadly. My alphabetical list of fiction authors now runs from A-Y - Ben Aaronovitch to Frank Yerby; no authors beginning with Z. No Q or X for that matter. What am I missing? Who am I missing?

Anyway I've now realised that I have a lot of novels - 56 - by authors beginning with M - Rose Macaulay to Julie Myerson. I especially like Julie Myerson's style of writing and her strange and sometimes cruel stories, but I've got more novels by Alastair Maclean than by her! This dates back to my early teens, before I became more interested in romantic historical fiction - hence the Frank Yerby. I'd been a tomboy as a kid and Maclean's simply plotted espionage and adventure stories appealed to me, a sort of grown up continuation of The Famous Five.

However the first Alistair Maclean I ever read was not an adventure story. It was his very first novel, HMS Ulysses, and I became obsessed with this rather grim and compelling story of the Arctic Convoys in WWII.  Maclean had served as a seaman on these convoys during the war and his descriptions of the hardships and perils captured my empathy and my imagination. I read it time and again. The strange thing about this book is, I had my paperback copy of HMS Ulysses with me at school and it was confiscated.

I was told it was unsuitable and I shouldn't be reading such things. I protested that there was a copy in the school library, which was true, but I was ignored. The book was returned to me at the end of term, without comment. For years I was bemused by the whole episode, until it recently occurred to me that this particular member of staff might have been confused and thought I was reading James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. If she'd really known anything about either book she would have known that the cover illustration, of shipwrecked men huddled in a lifeboat, was not likely to be set in licentious Dublin. School matrons obviously didn't need to be educated.

Authors Beginning With ?...

I've begun cataloguing my books - I was going to say my library but a) that sounds pretentious and b) can it be called a library while it is un-catalogued?

I haven't got very far. I began with fiction author's books. So far, beginning at the beginning I have :-

A - 25 Adams to Auster - seems a normal number of books, I mean you wouldn't want me to miss anything by Douglas Adams, would you. And I could do with more Atkinsons and Attwoods...

B - 47 Bainbridge to Byatt - maybe quite a lot but I can't blame Iain Banks, with or without an M, as the poor guy is dead.

C - 15 Calman to Crosthwaite - not so many C's, I wonder why. Who is missing?

D - 21 Dahl to Dunmore - You can't have too many Dumnores!

E - 5 - what? Yes that's right - Eggars to Evaristo but why only five and why have I only read one of them? Ok, Dave Eggars' Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius took some reading but still....

I need more Authors Beginning with E... any suggestions?

Still Life, With Waders - my poem for National Poetry Day

It was National Poetry Day on the second of October, this year's theme was - Remember.

This poem was conceived a long time ago, as part of a much longer thing I tried writing in memory of my father. As the longer thing still isn't even remotely satisfactory, I've re-worked this bit into a very short poem. I think it works.

Still Life, With Waders

I remember he was a twitcher

before there was twitching.

 
But not just a list of sightings

ticked off like train numbers.

Love seeps from his lists of Lapwing,

Linnet, Greylag, Goosander and

the great, Great Bustard.

 

After life, comes life.

There are still sunset waders

near the shore

up to their Redshanks

in  a skin of light.

'The Quarry' by Iain Banks - book review

Not Iain Banks most exciting book, though I found it very readable, with interesting characters and some great dialogue. In a way it's the author's full circle, returning to a rather claustrophobic world inhabited by a first person narrator who is a teenager, as in Banks first novel, the Wasp Factory. The Quarry however is far less gruesome than the Wasp Factory, though it deals with cancer and the ultimate death of the teenage boy's father.

The Quarry won't necessarily be an especially easy read for some people, cancer is a tragic issue in many peoples' lives. As Iain Banks was himself dying of cancer when it was published, this makes the story sadder still. However he insisted that was purely coincidence. I wonder...

I'm very sad that one of my favourite authors will never write another book, but at least there are a couple of his which I haven't read yet - and I've still to get through all of his very dense 'Culture' novels written in his other guise as SF maestro Iain M. Banks. This man had an imagination the size of the universe!

For loads of information on Iain Banks (with or without the M) his website is - http://www.iain-banks.net/

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Louise Nevelson, the 31 Women number 31, her birthday is 23 September 1889

Number 31 and I've saved the best until last, well in my opinion anyhow. But I need to admit that I've also left Louise Nevelson until the end because I've found her the hardest to write about. I have several excuses...

Louise Nevelson by Richard Avedon

Nevelson was the first of the 31 Women I knew about, as I came across some of her smaller work in an exhibition when I was a teenager. I was mesmerised and captivated by several of her wooden box sculptures, filled with pieces of wooden artefacts some recognisable and some mysterious and obscure. When I eventually saw one of her huge walls I was truly intimidated by her colossal talent. Reading about her life, her struggle for recognition, her ferocious determination to be unique, I have continued to be intimidated; I would absolutely hate to say anything she would dislike!

This post is not complete, obviously. I've already written a lot about Louise Nevelson and my writing's not good enough to post. I'm currently reading 'Dawns and Dusks' which is as close as she came to writing an autobiography, she didn't really trust the written word, putting this down to her disrupted early childhood when she had to cope with three languages Russian, Yiddish and English. This marvellous book contains her words, recorded and transcribed by her friend Diana MacKown, so if I can't write about her art after reading what she herself said about it, there's no hope for me!

My other excuse is that aiming to post actually on Ms Nevelson's birthday is possibly a forlorn hope as she wasn't entirely clear about when she was born, although I'm sure she'd despise my lack of punctuality.

Louise Nevelson described her working process as composing. From Dawns and Dusks I've so far found two great quotes which help to reveal her creative motivation -

"I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except that it has to pass through a creative mind." That creative mind, obviously, was her own.

She proudly regarded herself as a scavenger -

"You're taking a discarded, beat-up piece that was no use to anyone and you place it in a position where it goes to beautiful places... These pieces of old wood have a history and a drama that to me is  like taking someone who has been in the gutter for years, neglected and overlooked. And someone comes along who sees how to take these beings and transform them into total being."

This recycling of existing things, which have had a purpose before the artist came along, is something done by many artists in both 20th and 21st centuries. It began with the Dadas such as Duchamp and Baroness, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and continues today with almost everyone. My current favourite is sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker, but no-one has yet taken it to the sublime heights achieved by Louise Nevelson.