Feature: The Definitive Ian Dury

The film has a duty to at least touch on the tragic back story and to the filmmakers' credit this is done artfully. Young Ian fights his oppressors (authority and disability) as older Dury does battle with his own demons (ego and ambition) in concurrent timelines. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll also avoids the issue of spanning an entire lifetime and keeps the action to around 15 years (not including the flashbacks to Dury's days as a young polio sufferer) and, despite children that never age, limiting the timeframe is a wise choice and sidesteps bloated biopic territory such as the Jamie Foxx Oscar bait Ray.

The Definitive Biography, by Will Birch, is a paint-by-numbers biography for the most part, starting at the very beginning (the birth of Ian Dury's parents) and chronicling Dury's early fall and late rise. The book details his early years, from infancy in a broken home to when he contracted deadly and debilitating polio (just 10 years before a vaccine was developed) and the torture of being trapped in a crippled body whilst attending a selective grammar school, where he was bullied and beaten into developing the gruff persona he would become famous for. There are a few nice flourishes of language in the description of events, but the real joy in the book is the same as that in the film: getting to know Ian Dury.

Birch was blessed with many years of one-on-one interviews with Dury himself before his death of liver cancer in 2000 and so the stories in the book are often tinged with the same sense of believable fantasy as his song lyrics: you'd be a fool to believe that songs like Billericay Dickey were biographical accounts of Dury's life, but he plays the characters so well it's fun to think they might be true. As well as the privilege of the Dury interviews Birch went above and beyond to gather accounts of every aspect of his life, from his early childhood neighbours, family friends, school teachers, classmates and ex-girlfriends. While the minutiae of everyday life sometimes makes sections of the book uninteresting, all these detailed accounts combine to create a portrait of an artist who not only triumphed in the face of a handicap but became the sort of person that could triumph precisely because of his disability.

Hardcore fans and casual observers can both enjoy the depiction of the early pub rock music scene in London in the 1970s as London, the UK, and the world built up steam to embrace the punk movement. The book succeeds here where the film can't. While great care has been taken in the book to research the events and locations in Dury's early years as a rocker, the film's budget simply can't afford recreations or digital touch-ups of current locations of long gone, or much changed music venues and so close camera angles, and a pared down variety of locations make do in the back ground while the actors are rightly the focus on screen.

As separate entities, neither the book nor the film are classics of their forms. The biography is fairly rigid in its structure and the biopic suffers from the lack of same. You can read the book or watch the film and have a great time doing it, but while the timing is right and the opportunity presents itself, it would be a shame not to enjoy them both one after the other, in any order. Alone they are solid but unremarkable works of research, labours of love that just fall short of greatness. But together, as companions, the film and the book become more than the sum of their parts; and if they cause renewed interest in Ian Dury's music with The Blockheads, so much the better.

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