Customer Reviews

Reasons to Be Cheerful-the Best of Ian Dury

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Blending elements of sly English music-hall badinage, Noel Coward wit and wordplay, warm jazz, and disco rhythms into a genre entirely and irresistibly his own, veteran 1970s pub-rocker Ian Dury was the most endearing musician to ever charm his way straight through your funny bone - and into your heart. Whether singing of the public embarrassment resulting from his youthful theft of a men's stroke magazine from a newsagent ("Razzle in My Pocket [A True Story]"), the demands of a morning hard-on ("Wake Up and Make Love With Me"), and the comic possibilities lurking just beneath the surface of history's creative geniuses ("There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards"), or rapping his way through the infectious dance beats of "Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt. 3," Dury had an unerring sense that not only could being naughty be great good fun, as well as an opportunity for verbal ingenuity - it could also get you on your feet and moving when enlisted with just the right dash of insouciant style. Favorite lyrics (from "Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt. 3"): "`Einshtein' can't be classed as witless/He said atoms are the littlest/When you do the bit o' split'liss/You frighten everybody shitless...There ain't half been some clever bastards (Chorus: "Lucky Peters, Lucky Peters")/There ain't half been some clever bas-tards...`Van Goff' did some eyeball pleazahs/He musta bean a pencil squeezah/He didn't do the Mona Leezhah/That was an Italian geezah!...There ain't half been some clever bastards..." I envy the uninitiated - you're about to wonder where Ian and his Blockheads have been all your life, while discovering your own latest "Reason to Be Cheerful (Pt. 3)." "Clever bastards," indeed!

This is the Ian Dury compilation to buy if you haven't got all the original albums. All the brilliant singles are here, along with the best of the album tracks together with some wonderful bonus material (such as the Kilburn & the High Roads stuff).

Dury was a marvellously witty and perceptive lyric writer, and whilst his distinctive cockney drawl was hardly a great singing voice, it marked him as someone who was doing something completely different from everybody else. The Blockheads of course were also a great band, and again this marked Ian Dury out from the rest of the punk/new wave movement.

This is a fabulous complilation, and at the moment its very cheap for a double CD. It'll cost you more to download all these tracks (legally that is!).

Ian Dury was a very popular item when i still lived in London over 20yrs ago. He half-talks his way through songs, backed by a hot funky-type band (with sax)So you get to hear the reasoning from his BIG deep wise heart, cynacism and the humour cockneys are re-known for. American's may find a poetry of its own in the distinctive cockney dialect.This man went through a crucible at one time as he was crippled by polio as a child (though not in a wheel-chair.) As quoted on the album, he was once asked if he felt he had missed out on life being a cripple. "Only a few buses" he said.Powerful music and not commercialised in the least.

This is a very good collection, good eclectic music, I own the LPs for some of the content but loading the CD into iTunes was much simpler than recording from the LP, and I really wanted the music in my library. Enjoy!

This 2-CD collection gathers not the best of Ian Dury solo, Ian Dury & the Blockheads, Kilburn & The High Roads (it's really Dury and friends too), Ian Dury & the Music Students, and 5 "live" tracks recorded "live" in London in 1990, just ten years before Dury's death.

I gave a good review to the Landmark "Sex & Drugs & Rock'n'Roll, Greatest Hits" collection, but this collection tops it by containing several favorites not included on the Landmark set. The volume levels of the songs are better on this version as well. There's no real break between the first two songs on the Landmark collection either.

So if it's a choice, I recommend this collection above the other by a long shot! It includes "Spasticus Autisticus", "Billericay Dickie", "Pam's Moods", "There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards," "F##king Ada (my own censorship there), and many other songs not on the Landmark CDs. This one even spell's "Superman's Big Sister" correctly on the credits, whereas Landmark spells it "Sueperman's Big Sister."

The liner notes reveal nothing, not even a photo of Dury, whereas this collection has a few notes and a few photos.

And, as with the other collection, this one goes perfectly with the 2010 film bio of Dury, "sex & drugs & rock'n'roll". The star looks and sounds so much like Dury it is hard to tell them apart in your mind after a few minutes. Excellent film with an excellent, insightful and touching script, i.e., see it too!

Cette compilation est simplement incontournable. Si comme moi vous ne connaissiez que les classiques "wake up and make love with me", Sex & Drugs and Rock & Roll", "Reasons to be cheerful part 3", alors réjouissez vous, vous en aurez pour votre argent mais surtout pour votre plus grand plaisir. 36 morceaux qui défilent à un rythme soutenu et une partie enregistrée en public tout simplement exceptionnelle.
Seul regret, ne pas les avoir découverts plus tôt.
Merci Monsieur Dury, merci les Blockheads.

I prefer the live versions of these songs because they have more energy and are less canned sounding.