Ian Dury Interview about Spasticus Autisticus

I found the Interview below very insightful and am contmeplating putting some of it, or some of the script into my performance.


Transcribed interview with Ian Dury about his song Spasticus Autisticus. The video can be found on youtube URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSo9OErEmM4&feature=related

Presenter –  Ian Dury is with us today. His latest single is called Spasticus Autisticus, and has just been withdrawn after it failed to be played on radio stations because it was said to be in bad taste. Ian Dury, who was partly crippled after a childhood attack of Polio, wrote the song to mark the international year of the disabled. It seemed that some people found the lyrics offensive. I’ll be talking to him in a moment, but first, a little touch of the song...

Song Plays

Presenter – Ian Dury, when they wouldn’t play it on the radio as it were, were you very angry?

Dury – Well, it was a pre-empted anger in that I didn’t think they were gonna play it when I wrote it, so I was not surprised but still. I wrote it knowing that it really was gonna be blanked a bit

Presenter – But you wrote it obviously in all seriousness, were you not able to persuade any of them beforehand that maybe they should play it for obvious reasons?

Dury – Well on the single Bag, I wrote, I don’t think I’ve got one but on the single bag they’ve got on what’s supposed to be an explanatory note, which is about my tribe knowing no racial creed and pay no heed to such thing. It can be rich or poor, disablement can get anybody, and it was really about Spasticus being a slave who wished to be free. I put at the bottom ‘we too are determined to be free’ and the idea of Spasticus is based on a film called Spartacus which had Kirk Douglas in it. At the end bit they say ‘which one are you is Spartacus’ and he says ‘I’m Spartacus’, and they all go ‘I’m Spartacus’ and they hung everybody who confessed. And that’s really the theme of it. No, because an institution like the BBC or the IBA is institutionalised and I knew that and I really wrote it partly because of that.

Presenter - Have you met many people that actually would admit to you that actually they would be offended by the words, by the theme by the attitude of it all?

Drury – I’ve heard of a couple of people, and I’ve met in fact on a telephone programme in London last week, I met a disabled woman over the phone who was very offended by it. And my mother was very worried about it. We did a gig for MENCAP, which is a mental health charity organization, and we did a gig for that, and my mother was sitting next to a mother and a spastic child and she was very worried about the child being upset or even the other being upset. And I met a man from the Spastics association, the Spastic Society who was also quite upset. He thought I was exaggerating the negative aspect of being disabled. But I don’t think he was right. And I think that the radical, so called radical, spastic societies and theatre groups so far have all been very glad I wrote it. And they say that they’re proud of it. It’s not just about spastics, it’s about every...I wrote the words Spasticus Autisticus cos I don’t know anything about autism and I don’t know anything about it, but I know that it’s one of the most frightening things that it must be for a parent to have an autistic child and not even know why.