Reasons to be cheerful: an interview with Jemima Dury, Guilfest, 2024

Image: Jayne Houghton

While the beer queues grow ever longer at Guilfest due to a booze-planning debacle, those ensconced in the Literary Tent have shade, seating and entertainment. Jemima Dury, daughter of Ian, pops in to talk of her unusual early existence and the enduring allure of her father’s lyrics

My third and final interview at Guilfest is Jemima Dury, the daughter of Ian Dury. She arrived looking effortlessly cool, wearing a black Blockheads T-shirt, orange-framed sunglasses and white strappy sandals. But when you’re directly related to the writer of “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick”, “Reasons To Be Cheerful, Part 3” and “What A Waste”, the genes are working strongly in your favour.

Ian Dury died in 2000, at 57, but left behind an archive of such depth that Jemima was able to publish a book about her father’s lyrics, Hallo Sausages, in 2012 – which has since sold out and now commands a high price on Ebay. There may be further publications.

My next guest today is the eldest of Ian Dury’s four children. To say Jemima Dury’s childhood was unorthodox would be something of an understatement. Ian Dury, of course, found fame when he was in his mid-thirties and died in 2000 from cancer at the age of just 57. In 2012 Jemima released her book Hallo Sausages, which is the collected lyrics from her father’s career. Jemima, are you the keeper of the Ian Dury archive?
You could say I’m the curator. I don’t know about the keeper.

As we’re here today at Guilfest, I have to ask – are you a festival-goer?
Yes. The festival I’ve been to the most is Hope Festival, which is tiny. I like Green Man. I took all my kids when they were really tiny to the Secret Garden Party. That was interesting. That’s not to be recommended. Lots of toffs on acid. I love festivals, but I came to them quite late because it’s a cheap holiday for the kids.

Did you see The Blockheads earlier today?
I did. They were fantastic. That’s the first time I’ve seen that particular line-up. It was very moving because it’s the first time I’ve seen them since Derek Hussey, the last lead singer, died. So yes, very good. Very, very good.

Which artist or band would you move heaven and earth to see at a festival?
If you mean people or bands who are headlining a lot, I like Fontaines DC. A big Irish band. But I’m also a fan of spectacle as well. So, you know, I’d never say no to Stormzy or Beyonce.

Interest in your dad never seems to go away. Why do you think that is?
Well, I think it’s because of the quality of the writing and the music. But it wasn’t just him, it was everyone he collaborated with. Behind it all is his humour and humanity, and social observation. That makes it quite timeless. There were probably other things too, but I read all the posts on Facebook, whenever I do socials. I read all the messages and they’re always saying, “Oh, I really miss him. I really miss his humour and he made me laugh. What a great guy. He was really intelligent.” So I think people like to keep listening and remembering.

Thanks for sending me those clips of your dad on the Michael Parkinson show.
It’s good, isn’t it? Dad with Michael Parkinson and Arthur Scargill.

Which is on YouTube.
That’s right.

Your dad left you, left the family, when you were very young, You were only three or four years old at the time.
Yes, about three or four.

Do you have recollections of him being around?
No, not really. Sort of impressions rather than recollections. I pieced it together later in life as you tend to as an adult. Kind of put two and two together. I don’t remember us being a family unit. Just the odd event. But blurry because I was so young.

What was the reason your dad left?
Well, he was ambitious and hungry to do something, and he was difficult to live with. I think there was a mutual agreement between my mum and dad. Perhaps it was for the best. “And you go back to London, Ian” – I think there was a bit of that. But it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t an easy thing to agree to. He wasn’t conventionally family-oriented.

When your dad left, how did your mum cope?
Well, it was pretty shit. It was the mid-Seventies. There was a lot of stigma towards beatniks in a small village in Buckinghamshire. I think she had a very tough time. Ian was transitioning from art teacher to musician. That meant there was zero money. They were already struggling artists and then suddenly he stopped teaching. I think she had to borrow money and for some reason she wasn’t eligible to sign on with the social services. So yes, tricky. Not very easy with two tiny kids.

Success arrived quite late for your dad, didn’t it? He was in his mid-thirties.
He was at art school. It was like training to be a doctor in those days. You did four years at foundation and three years at college. So into his twenties, well into his twenties, he was at art school and he was an illustrator as well for the Sunday Times Magazine and Radio Times. He was doing quite a lot of commissions. He thought that was his career. But the whole time at art school, there was music. He was the social secretary at Walthamstow School of Art. He put on Tubby Hayes. He was obsessed with music, like the early rock’n’roll records from Elvis in the Fifties. I think, gradually, Ian really liked writing and really loved music. He played skiffle and was a percussionist. His mate said, “Why don’t you get a band together?” It just evolved over time. And then when his time at the Royal College of Art came to a close, in ’66, he was in small bands, college bands. And one thing led to another.

You were quite conventional as a child, weren’t you?
How dare you.

One of the quotes I read was that your dad said you’d try to “daughterise” him.
I live by daughterising. Daughterising is just another way of being patronising. But you’re the kid. I was quite critical of him and he knew that. There were a few key moments where I went, “I don’t know if that’s a very good idea, Dad.” I was always critical about creative decisions. He used to get his own back by making a joke out of it, by also being patronising.

Despite all that, you went to live with your father, didn’t you? You’d just passed your driving test and became his de facto taxi driver.
I moved in with him at various points. His dad had been a chauffeur for Rolls-Royce. Ian kept his dad’s chauffeur’s hat. He sent me out to buy a car one day in a very, very Flash Harry sort of rock’n’roll way. Just said, “Go and find a car.” And I was like, “OK.” I came back with a giant, pearlised-green Ford Granada. The front seats were like giant sofas. It was automatic and I drove it around London for about a year and a half with his dad’s chauffeur’s hat on.

Your dad had polio when he was young and had a tough upbringing. He had to go to special schools. But he was something of a force of nature. Going to those schools would have toughened him. There was violence from teachers at some point.
It’s a bit worse than that. At some of the schools there was sexual abuse and there was real, real cruelty. But this was in the Fifties. It was seemed to be the best option at the time for a disabled child because you learnt crafts, you learnt cobbling, basketry or a trade, you know, and that was the idea. And that was before anyone realised he was very capable of other things. His mum would have liked him to have been a lawyer or something along those lines.

Do you think he was clever enough to be able to do that?
Yes, but he didn’t have the right temperament. He was already very precocious and rebellious and into music and drawing.

Your brother, Baxter. He’s been in the music industry, what, 25 years?
Yes, I don’t know exactly. But quite long.

Baxter says your dad was like a Polaris missile, in that he could sense weakness in people. Is that something that rings true with you?
Yes, Baxter and I used to joke about that. There was a bloke who had been out of order and we joked about getting him together with dad and a crate of Budweiser, lob them in a room. We sort of fantasised about it. We knew the bloke would come out a very different person. That sounds terrible. Ian was really naughty sometimes, bordering on cruelty, because after everything he had gone through, it had made him very aware of weakness and not wanting to be weak himself. Being very, very tough, he sensed other people’s vulnerability quickly. Especially if he was drunk, he would really go for the jugular. We all came on the end of that. It was a pretty tough experience. But on most occasions he was quite remorseful. Not always.

What sort of characters did your dad surround himself with? You said some of your babysitters were hard drug addicts.
There were amazing people all the time. I’m very, very close to loads and loads of his friends. They’ve been friends for life for me, regardless of age, but yes, it was pretty chaotic. There were colourful minders. They were pretty colourful and pro certain behaviours, but also incredibly protective. I think Baxter and I felt glad they were around a lot of the time.

I read in a book a few years ago about one of your dad’s minders. It was in Belgium or Holland, and your dad used to allow fans backstage afterwards. One of these people was being obnoxious, and the minder went over and said, “Do you mind if I call you Superman?” And the guy said, “Why?” And the minder says, “Because in two seconds you’re going flying through that window.”
Yes, I think there was some physical contact with other people at times.

Your dad remarried later in life, and there are two other children. Do you see them?
I haven’t seen them for a while. Baxter and I were very much around after Ian died. We stayed very, very close to make sure everyone was supported. Everyone’s an adult now and has their own careers.

We’ve discussed your unorthodox start to life. But what about later in life?
I went to theatre school and was a dancer until I was about 20. I got injuries, so that came to an end. Then I decided to go into acting. I did a disastrous audition for RADA, which made me think, “Oh, maybe I don’t want to do that.” I went to university instead, went into some drama production, and then my mum died. Dad died six years later so that kind of wiped out the late twenties and early thirties for me. I met my husband and had kids so that was the next phase. I got into writing and started to edit all of Ian’s lyrics around 2008 or ’09. I knew I wanted to do that straight after he died. It was to preserve them and protect them. I came across thousands of manuscripts when I was clearing the storage unit. I thought, “Well, I have to do something with them.” So that’s how Hallo Sausages came about. That was published in 2012. Through editing his work, I started to write. And I wrote a short story, a sort of memoir essay, about him, which was in Ted Kessler’s book My Old Man – about tales of fathers and I contributed to that. I gradually started to write fiction, my own things, which is ongoing.

It’s difficult to get hold of Hallo Sausages. Did it completely sell out when it was first published?
Not exactly. It went out of print after 10 years. It’s like Alan Partridge’s Bouncing Back now. Pulped! It’s become cult. It has a high price on Ebay.

Did you bring a copy with you?
No, I forgot.

Do you make anything from your dad’s estate?
There are royalties. There’s still a publishing company and a record company involved. All four of his kids get a bit from royalties. I treat it like an admin fee, because I do a lot of the licensing and copyrights and keep an eye on them rather than cut the deals. There’s still quite a lot of management.

Tell us about the archive. How big is it?
Lots of letters. Thousands of lyric manuscripts. There are beautiful, beautiful handwritten versions of “Hit Me…”, “Reasons To Be Cheerful”. Because he was an art student, they all look beautiful. There’s lots and lots of stunning writing and lots of notes, lots of letters to the bands. I really liked the Kilburn And The High Roads archive. There are even petrol receipts for the old van going up the M1. As an archive nerd, I find that quite exciting. I might do a book about the Kilburns, because there’s a complete audit of the band. That was before they had major management. Between Dad and his then partner, Denise, they were doing all the administration. He kept absolutely everything from angry letters when they didn’t turn up to a gig, to all the booking forms for Charisma Records, and it’s fantastic. All the contracts, receipts. It’s an interesting portrayal of a pub rock band.

Have you approached a publisher to do anything?
Not yet, no, but I will. I’m going to at some point. There’s a guy I worked with on an exhibition of Ian’s artwork. He’s hopefully going to design it.

You never tried to become a singer yourself so you could play a festival like this?
No, too much competition – too much family competition. Also, I can’t sing. I was quite happy with that. I just kind of missed it. But I did try to play piano. Dad definitely wanted me to go into music. He got me a drum kit and a piano.

Was Baxter always a performer?
Not exactly. He’s grown into performance but he was always incredibly creative. Very, very artistic as a kid. Beautiful drawings I’ve found – in Dad’s archives, actually. Very creative, always listening, soaking it up, naturally musical. That just evolved over time. The performance came a bit afterwards. He had to find his feet with that.

What about your children? Three children? Have they shown any interest in following in their grandfather’s footsteps?
They’re not in bands but they’re all pretty musical. My daughter’s Aretha Franklin in the shower. Very shy, all of them. They’re quite backwards about coming forwards. They’re not very confident with themselves as musicians and they haven’t had an awful lot of experience, but they are naturally musical.

Do you ever listen to your dad’s records today?
They just go around and around forever in my mind. I don’t actively play the tracks. They’re constantly being referenced in my head.

Do you have a music collection?
Yes, but I’m kind of lazy musically because I grew up with people always playing music. Baxter’s always playing music and I married a DJ. So I tend to listen to what they’re playing and then occasionally say, “I really like that.” I don’t necessarily know what it is – I’ve never bought a record in my life.

Have you ever tried DJing?
No but I’m a really good selector. I could put a radio show together, but I can’t DJ, no.

Could you give us a few “reasons to be cheerful”?
Family, friends, swimming in the sea, being reminded of loved ones who are no longer with this us, and being out in the sun.

Let’s take some questions from the audience…

Audience member No 1: I saw Ian Dury’s art exhibition at the Royal College of Art in 2013. Where is his artwork kept? Are they in storage?
Yes and some of it is with the family. A lot of what you saw was on loan from friends. A lot of them went back to the owners. People came from all parts of his life to lend work, which was amazing. But most of it is in storage.

Audience member No 1: They were quite varied, weren’t they?
We talked about a catalogue at the time, but it’s just the expense, really.

Audience member No 2: I just wondered what you thought of the movie [Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll], with Andy Serkis playing your dad.
I loved it. There’s a lot of artistic licence in it. I was OK with it. I was involved from a very early stage so I knew what was going to happen. Some friends didn’t find it so easy because it bent the truth. The writers had to find a through line so it’s very much a father and son tale, you know, to get a character arc and the tension and the conflict. I didn’t really feature in it. But as film-makers, I thought that was fair enough. The only bit that really bugged me was the wrong pen. They’ve got him writing with a Biro. “No, no, no! Did you not listen to me?!” So there was a bit of that. And somebody else said he didn’t ever have those turn-ups on his jeans, they’re completely wrong. There are a few details that people, including myself, got hung-up on, but Andy was incredible. I turned up to see him on set one day and it was absolutely chilling. I mean, it was just amazing how he got into Ian’s physicality. He was outstanding. And, by the way, my grandad wasn’t like Ray Winstone.

Jemima Dury, thanks for joining us today…