“White face, black shirt
White socks, black shoes
Black hair, white strat
Bled white, died black”
My goodness, it’s beautiful, isn’t it? Forty-Four years ago it was a marketing stroke of genius that drew teenage punk rockers into the cartoon jazz-funk-music-hall-knees-up of Ian Dury’s solo debut ‘New Boots And Panties.’ By sheer virtue of the fact that his LP was on Stiff, the same label as Punk Rock favourites The Damned and The Adverts, Dury had found the audience his music had always deserved. His brusque, cockerney take on modern life was an honest, if not brutal assessment of the current state of play in 1977.
Every song is filled with real characters, Dury brings one dimensional bit part players to life in his own art and the results are still as profound as ever. And, nestling among the Patricias, Trevors and the heart warming tale of his dad, is the equally heartbreaking story of ‘Sweet’ Gene Vincent.
In 1977, Gene would have just about to have been almost forgotten. The forward looking nature of the new regime was rendering anything older than yesterday tired and obsolete. Gene Vincent’s achievements of twenty years previous was so far in the past it would have been hard to find anybody still alive who witnessed them first hand. Apparently.
The lyrics to Dury’s hymn to his teenage idol are beautiful, moving and profound. They invoke both the tragedy and the fury that enveloped his life. Gene toured the living shit out of his art with ever diminishing returns, to the detriment of his own worsening health and the utter destruction of this Rock ‘n’ Roll colossus. He made an incredible body of music over a relatively short period of time, in actuality little more than a decade and a half. He shifted styles and changed with the times but he was the Gene Vincent who did Be-Bop-A-Lula and his audience would never let him forget that.
Yet he soldiered on, crippled with pain and dependency, carrying injuries sustained in the car crash that killed that other Rock ‘n’ Roll masterpiece, Eddie Cochran at the tender age of 21. Vincent was penniless and broken when he should have been given the finest medical attention available and living in a mansion. he died in 1971 aged 36 years old. Despite his young years he appeared ravaged by time and his desperate times. A man visibly worn away by addiction and the entertainment industry. Some of the last recordings he made were some of the finest he ever committed to wax, so to speak.
Dury nailed his love and respect for this truly great artist in the most picturesque and loving way imaginable. He put his heart on his sleeve and exposed that love and respect to the supposed brave new world.
As I said, New Boots And Panties is Forty-Four years old now. Dury has been elevated to the high table of British pop culture, alongside that other cunning linguist of the Punk Wars, John Cooper Clarke. But I still don’t understand why NB&P hasn’t been reassessed to be one THE great lp’s of its decade. The reverence afforded less original ’rock’ music of the period leaves me mystified. It has its place as a bona-fide oddball classic, a period piece not confined to the era of its release, full of people and brimming with , humour, vulgarity, lyrical wonder and real life.
Very few LP’s contain any real life at all. So that’s a major achievement in itself. .
VIVA GENE VINCENT. X
🖤
bernie@happening-things.com 