The news of Ian Dury's demise is premature. Holding court in a Dublin city centre hotel ("nice rooms, but blimey, the paintings on the wall are crap," remarks the former pupil of Peter Blake), Dury is as spiky as a bag of wall tacks. Some weeks ago, a hoax call was made to London's alternative radio station, XFM, informing the onduty presenter, Bob Geldof, that Ian Dury had died of liver cancer (he has been diagnosed as such and is currently undergoing a special form of chemotherapy). "It's all water under the bridge now. Bob gave me an apology. I like Bob - he's got a lot of energy and it pours out of him. Should have done a tad more research, though."
Twenty years ago, Ian Dury was an alternative British pop icon, borne out of teaching at the Canterbury School of Art, a keen vaudevillian sense of sartorial elegance, and a season or two spent playing gigs in London pubs in a band called Kilburn and the High Roads.
Punk rock opened the way for his maverick talents, and although he was neither pub nor punk influenced (at 35 years of age, Gene Vincent and James Brown were more his style), Ian embraced the flow and swam with the tide. Always looked upon as a most unlikely pop star - his ragged Romany looks and locks, the effects of childhood polio which hampered his shape-throwing movements - Dury nevertheless captured the imagination of a public that hankered after wit, not spit.
"What you learnt playing pubs, with you almost in the audience, was how to perform, to entertain people. You also learnt that people can't clap if they have a pint of beer in their hand. But we didn't subscribe to the pub ethic of drinking, so we got out as quick as we could. I always wanted to play more showbusiness-oriented gigs. . . Musically, everything we did was in an attempt to be funky."
ESSEX-born Ian Dury was British pop's ruffled Great Entertainer at a time when everyone else dressed in black. An avuncular figure who swore like a trooper, and who charmed the collective pants off an audience with his semi-spoken cockney slanguage, when he talks it's difficult not to smile. His conversation is peppered with the argot of East End Pearly Kings ("geezer", "sweet as", "orlright, my son"), and is clearly informed by an intuitive grasp of the way words sound.
Unmistakably a visual person, Drury seems to take pride in his larger-than-life and personable individuality. A serious tone creeps into his voice twice during the interview. Once, when he recalls how his mother taught him to read when he was three years old. He says he was always happy with words, concepts, rhymes: "I felt at home with them, could swim in them." His mother wanted him to be a lawyer, and was sorely disappointed when he spent 12 years being a painter. "I was good, but not successful," he avers, somewhat ruefully. He says he knew his limitations, and eventually came to the realisation that he would never be a "Vermeer or a Rembrandt." In time, he became disappointed with his own work and turned to his other passion - music.
The other occasion on which Dury's diamond geezer persona takes a dip is when, unprompted, he mentions his failed one-year romance with actress Jane Horrocks. "Some time ago, a journalist asked her during the course of an interview what the relationship was like. She said, `it was alright'. Alright?!? I rang her up about that." The look on his face as he tells me this is a mixture of indignation and bewilderment.
A thoroughly grounded person, Ian Dury has typical Essex-like disdain for pretension. He recently recorded some Beat poetry and literature for a concept album, a project that gave him valuable insight into the genre. Which doesn't mean to say he has anything favourable to say about it. Ask him what he thinks of Allen Ginsberg, and the reply is pithy and to the point: "A bit of an old tosser." Kerouac? "Almost unreadable."
"Wordsmithing to me is not about poetry," he says. "It's more about journalism, or descriptive portraiture. The shape of the rhythm interests me, rather than the shape of the actual poem."
Ian Dury's latest record is called Mr Love Pants. Backed by The Blockheads, the album is undoubtedly the best one he has made since 1977's New Boots and Panties. It's the only record since then that he has spent the same amount of time on (four years). Dury claims it's always a good idea to decide to wait until all the songs are in good shape. It was easy with New Boots And Panties, he says, because no one outside the environs of the music press and pub rock fans knew him. There was no pressure on him to prove anything.
"I've been circumspect enough over the past 17 years to keep my head down when I've produced a piece of work that wasn't to my satisfaction, but put it out anyway. It hasn't hurt me being quiet. It's pleasurable being out of the public eye as much as it's pleasurable being in it now and again. Let's face it, the area of achievement and momentum of huge success is past, and I'm not at all bothered about such things as managers telling me I've got to do this or that, and to put a record out now before you're forgotten."
"These days I'm enjoying the fact that there isn't the same kind of mad rush - the campaign, the mission, the onslaught, the burning ambition. Some of that comes with a lot of bullshit and you do a lot of things you subsequently wish you hadn't. You tend to cater too much to the idea of your own success.
"You only get one shot at the title, as it were. If you know you're going to get to the end of the track, you mustn't get off the train. You're thinking of providing for your children, which is my main motivation, so you accept you're doing this even though you're too tired, and you're losing the plot. You're not being creative and you're not writing from a rational, considered standpoint. You can see the quality of your work going downhill fast. You keep doing it partly through fear of your success dissipating, and partly because you feel dutybound to carry on for the sake of it. With hindsight, I should have hidden after my initial chart success, and come back several years after."
Things didn't work out that way, however, and following a mediocre solo career, Dury drifted into film, theatre and television with moderate success. Mr Love Pants is a fine return to form, although it ironically comes at a time when he's more in the news for his illness than anything else. The good news is that secondary tumours discovered in his liver and colon are now below the resolution of a scanning machine. Even so, reasons Ian, "you never know what's going to happen". He is lucky (and knows it) to be able to pay for the specialised treatment and consultants. He doesn't mention it, but it seems pertinent to point out that if he was solely dependent on the UK welfare state, he probably wouldn't be talking to me, and the album's release would be a posthumous one.
"Words love me," he concludes, "as opposed to the other way around, funnily enough. At least it seems like that. And I'll take from anywhere. People say the immature artist plagiarises, the mature artist steals. I'm very mature in that respect. Anything that isn't nailed down, I'll clout it. The trigger is having a few beers, laughing, and having a conversation."
Ian Dury and The Blockheads play Midnight at The Olympia on October 9th and 10th