Reasons to be cheerful

Rock music has always had a problem with artifice, which is why it was so rail-roaded when punk came along. The orthodoxy was that rock was about something tedious called authenticity: freak-out dancing and smelly armpits anyone? Punk, on the other hand, was about dressing up, showing off and living in the moment: what working class Brits have always done on a Friday night. And above all, it was a direct descendent of music hall: rude, raucous, crude, comic, short and sweet. It was low-rent, high art performance, with the street as a theatre full of grotesque clowns.
Matt Whitecross’s Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll – out yesterday - understands this perfectly. The first frames of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll show Serkis, in white-face and bowler, silhouetted on a deserted stage in a derelict music hall. From there we see him pulling scarves from the mouth of a saxophone and handkerchiefs from thin air, all the time cranking out lewd knees-up ditties with irresistible rhythms. It’s a cracking performance, in all senses of the word.
More than any other performer of his time, Dury was about music hall: the dark inheritor of George Formby’s crown, a sharp-tongued tricky dicky. He was a one-off but his look and his wilfully unpretty delivery were plundered wholesale. Johnny Rotten, he claimed, burgled not just his razorblade earring, but his whole style – gurningly ugly, deliberately freakish, pure carny.
Rock history, uncomfortable associating itself with anything so purely entertaining as music hall, has often downplayed Dury’s influence. It loves Sid Vicious, and choses to overlook the fact that he added a piece of Grand Guignol to the Sex Pistols’ theatre. The distaste of those who prefer instruments that are made of wood for music hall goes on: more recently, when Carl Barat and Pete Doherty proclaimed their love of Chas And Dave, muso-squirming reached epidemic proportions.
To say Serkis makes the role of Dury his own is an understatement. He’s wriggled into his character’s twisted persona – physically crippled by polio; warped because Dury oozed rancour – as if he’s insinuated himself inside the man’s skin. His Dury puts on the performance of his life all the time: when there’s an audience, it’s spellbinding, and when there isn’t, much of the time it’s such a car crash that you can’t stop rubbernecking. But like music hall itself, once the curtain rises, the tawdry bits and pieces that make up a life become transformed into something unforgettable.
Conversely,for all the appearance of artifice, Dury was utterly, entirely authentic. He was a larger-thank-life maverick with a way with words. The film has been criticised became Serkis’ performance overwhelms the other characters. Well, that’s exactly what it must have been like for all those, in Dury’s life, who were below him on the bill. He was the star of the show, and Serkis shines brighter than anyone else in his. In both cases, we have reasons to be cheerful.