‘Spasticus Autisticus’: When Ian Dury furiously hit back at the United Nations
Right, so, complicated question here: when you belong to a marginalised community, how should you feel about campaigns to assist you?
On the one hand, it should be great. After all, you know exactly how many people just do not give the slightest of shits about making your life better. What’s more, you know exactly how many people actively want to make it worse. Through no decision of your own, you’ve ended up in this strata of society where everything is so much harder for you than it is for other people. The vast majority of people cannot or will not understand that you just can’t bootstrap yourself out of it, so anything that raises awareness about your situation must be a help, right?
Well, no. Most of the time, these campaigns are put forth by people who really believe they understand what life is like for marginalised people, but in practice, they don’t. They may be well-meaning (a distressing amount of the time they’re actually not), but they don’t actually engage with what life is like for marginalised people in any meaningful way and end up just being deeply patronising. This is doubly the case when these campaigns are directed towards disabled people.
People really do seem to believe that people with disabilities are essentially children, no matter their age or experience. No less a figure than Ian Dury felt exactly this way in 1981 when the United Nations declared that 1981 would be “the international year of disabled persons” and reached out to him to be one of the faces of the campaign. Dury had contracted polio at the age of seven. A condition which atrophied the muscles of his left arm and leg, necessitating metal callipers on both of them for support for the rest of his life.
How did Ian Dury respond to this request?
By 1981, his successful music career with The Blockheads had made him one of the highest-profile disabled people in the UK. Thus, when Dury initially turned down the UN’s offer to front this campaign, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Pushing and pushing, no matter how many times Dury explained that not only was he not interested, but he had no time for the campaign as a whole. Finding its very concept patronising at best and outright demeaning at worst.
Eventually, his frustration with the project got so all-encompassing that he had no other option than to turn his ire into music. At the time, he was working on his second solo record, Lord Upminster, and the song he poured his anger into became that record’s lead single. It’s name? ‘Spasticus Autisticus’. One wonders just how many people were scandalised by this record at the UN when it came out, because the BBC and even Dury’s own record label had kittens about it.
Despite the song being a plea for understanding, the use of words that Ian Dury himself had been labelled with his whole life made the song unacceptable, and it was banned from radio play by the BBC. Even if it hadn’t been, the chances of it becoming a radio hit were slim as Dury’s label all but refused to promote it. This tanked the album as well, and Dury’s chances of hitting the big time were kneecapped, despite already having a number one single to his name.
Dury would have the last laugh, though, with the song becoming one of his most beloved songs, and it was even performed at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympic Games in London. A sight that Ian Dury would have found absolutely hilarious in hindsight.
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