Special Guest Blogger: Ian Dury

Right, pull up a chair, clutch your cuppa, and let’s have a proper chin-wag about the bits of my life that actually mattered. I’m not gonna stand on a soapbox and wax lyrical like some pretentious pop-poet, nah, I’ll give it to you straight, with the kind of language a true Londoner would use when he’s had a few pints and a proper rant. So, strap in you lot, and let’s go.
I was born in the East End of London right in the middle of a blitz, where the only thing falling faster than the bombs were the chances of any decent music on the radio.
School was a hard grind  but the real lesson I learned was how to survive on a diet of battered fish and chips, and the occasional jam sandwich when the canteen ran out of anything decent. That’s the sort of culinary inspiration that later fed into the lyric about a dog-eating-a-dog in Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3.
At 17 I signed up for the Royal Air Force. Not because I wanted to fly a Spitfire, nah, I was looking for a free meal and a roof over me head. And, let’s be honest, the uniforms made you look proper sharp even though i came with a you can sod-off attitude, the RAF also nicknamed me Sparky. Not because I was bright, but because I kept sparking off arguments with the Sergeants, but I did learn to play the clarinet in the band.
When I finally got my discharge papers, I walked back to London, after a stint as a handyman and a teacher, I found myself in Kilburn, hanging out with a bunch of blokes and we formed Kilburn & the High-Roads, a band that was part punk, part rock-'n-roll and all-out chaos.
Our first gig was at the Rock Garden where I  stepped up to the mic, looked at the crowd, and thought Right, let’s give ‘em something they’ll never forget and came up with a tune that I’d later call 'Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick'.
Sadly, the band split up after a few years and i went solo and my first solo record, New Boots and Panties!!, was me saying I’ve got a voice that can sound like a thunderstorm mixed with a tinny radio, and I’ll use it to say whatever the hell I want.
The track that got the world and the tabloids to notice was when i was with Ian Dury and the Blockheads called Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and i followed that with Spasticus Autisticus about my disability after contracting Polio when I was seven, and The BBC banned them both, which only made them more appealing.
I didn’t set out to be some iconic figure. I just wanted a good gig, a decent pint, and the chance to say whatever I felt like when the moment struck. Yet, somewhere between those blokes and lasses in the clubs and the radio stations that finally caught my drift, something happened where people started to listen but I was just  being myself, a bit of a nut.
I tossed rock, funk, reggae, and a dash of cabaret into the same pot and served it with a side of sarcasm, the Pop World needs a bit of chaos now and then just to keep the boring bits at bay such as the diagnoses of bowel cancer which forced me to write one more album and do a farewell tour but i was always proud that i was a man who walked to the beat of his own drum and it appear that this particular drummer learnt his drumming skills on a trumpet.