Ian Dury
Music hall and punk had no business being compatible, and the pleasure of Ian Dury's work is that he found the seam between them and worked it hard. As frontman of Ian Dury and the Blockheads he wrote songs built on wordplay, comic observation and a delivery closer to a Victorian variety turn than to rock singing. The Guardian called him one of the few true originals of the English music scene, and the description survives contact with the records.
None of those records are among the credits listed here, which leaves the acting, a second line of work whose earliest entry on this page is Teddy Bryant in Number One in 1985. Terry Fitch in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover followed in 1989, and after that came a run of genre pictures that hired him for exactly one quality: a voice that could sound amused and dangerous inside the same sentence. He is Jay Jay in Split Second, Geiger in Judge Dredd and Noah in The Crow: City of Angels.
Those films are, with one obvious exception, not very good, and he is not in them for long. But the casting directors were right about what he offered, and there is a reason a whole category of British screen menace from that period sounds like him. He died in 2000.
Movies (5)
Books (1)
Music (1)
Where to start with Ian Dury
One film here is genuinely important, so take it first: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, a formally extreme and deliberately repellent picture in which his Terry Fitch belongs completely to the world around him. After that the pickings thin. Split Second is a cheerfully daft science-fiction monster film with a devoted cult, Judge Dredd is the expensive misfire in which he plays Geiger, and The Crow: City of Angels is the sequel nobody asked for, though he is among the more watchable things in it. Number One is the earliest of the group and the hardest to track down. His records remain the reason to care; the films are a footnote to enjoy afterwards.