Ian Dury and the Blockheads was part of the soundtrack to my College days, as was the Stiff tour which finally reached the northern outpost at Aberdeen. More recently, Ian and the band played Perth Festival of the Arts – Ian was pretty ill by this stage, but it was still a great gig, and the Blockheads were storming..
As a companion piece to Nowhere Boy, this was every bit as enjoyable thanks to an amazing performance by Andy Serkis as Ian Dury, and a refusal to play the film through as one sweaty gig after another. We did get the great music, but Dury’s chaotic lifestyle, grim early life and family and other relations made this much more than that. The film drew parallels between Dury’s early life, and Dury’s son, Baxter – excellently played by Bill Milner, who gets bullied at school ‘because he is posh’.
Andy Serkis plays Ian Dury.
There was plenty of advice sought from Dury’s widow, and she was apparently present at some of the filming – stopping the action to correct Serkis’s scarf to how Ian wore it.
Nowhere Boy was the better film I think, but this had some great moments, and it was fun to revisit the late 1970s for a while.
