Good film.
I’ll give it ****
First 25 minutes was too fast on the eye but the rest was vivid and punchy.
Andy Serkis is electric as the angry, selfish, crippled singer, and Olivia Williams, who plays Ian Dury’s first wife, is fabulous.
The screenplay uses the songs imaginatively.
My favourite scene is a quiet one, where Chas Jankel kept turning down the lyric of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll because the idea was “too obvious.”
Then Chas picked up a guitar and played a few chords and we saw the possibilities of that song, heard what the characters heard, realised it was a monster hit.
Inevitably, the film reminded me of my life as a rock journalist in the Seventies. Riding around in Transit vans with groups, parties where friends sang, rehearsals, roadies and soundchecks, the squalor of pub-rock, countless nights at Dingwalls, the Hope & Anchor, the Nashville, the Torrington, the Tally Ho.
As our tube train got to West Hampstead, I realised that this was the first time I would be seeing a biopic about someone I knew.
Jan said I was not going to like it : “You’ll say: it wasn’t like that.”
Well, the film gets it right. It’s not a whitewash. It shows me the side of Ian Dury that journalists never saw but that I did hear about from friends in the music business.
As for the milieu, I was there and it was like that.
In scripting a film like this, the writer and director have to make a lot of decisions, many choices. They got the important decisions right and that’s why it’s compelling entertainment.
One night in late 1972 I was doing a story for Rolling Stone about Brinsley Schwarz and went with them in their van to do Friars in Aylesbury and on the way home we pulled up at a house in Wingrave to visit a friend of theirs. We sat in the kitchen with a crippled painter-art teacher and his ginger-blond sax-playing pal. A pair of intelligent ruffians : Ian Dury and Davey Payne.
We talked about gigs, groups and jazz. The Kilburns were just starting and the Brinsleys were lending them equipment, helping them to get a few small gigs, starting at the Tally Ho in Kentish Town.
Because I’m writing a rock memoir, and needed to sort out the chronology, I recently read a biography of Ian that was sent to me for review in 2000. I’d not read it before because I didn’t need to read a book about somebody I knew.
Last night triggered a lot of memories, a lot of feelings.
Blockheads drummer Charley Charles, my close friend and neighbour, died of cancer before Ian did. We met Ian’s mum at Charley’s bedside at the hospital, Central Middlesex.
We wanted to see Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll at the Tricycle Kilburn, our favourite cinema, but they’re not showing it, so we went to the O2 in Finchley Road.
As the final credits rolled, most of the audience left, and, as they walked past us towards the exit, I was watching their faces, manners and dress. Ian wouldn’t have liked last night’s audience.
Ian Dury died in 2000.
I told my best friend Doug that we had seen the film.
“Who played Dave Robinson?” he asked
“Dave Robinson wasn’t in it.”