Storm Thorgerson Ian Dury Reasons To Be Cheerful Signed Print

Description

The late Ian Dury, was a raconteur, humourist, diamond geezer, early rap artist and musical wizard. Ian Dury was a storyteller who made a virtue of local memories about growing up in Upminster in Essex, whilst avoiding sentimentality and parochialism.

Ian Dury is forever etched in our collective conscious for Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick and Sex and Drugs and Rock N Roll and also because Ian Dury refused to let his disabilities deter him. Before Ian Dury’s untimely death he had a late renaissance, beginning with the release of a compilation called Reasons To Be Cheerful (followed by Mr Lovepants and New Boots and Panties revisited).

I remember him best for his irascible humour, colourful stories and irrepressible penchant for word play, including ghastly puns, spoonerisms, bon mots and the like. Reasons To Be Cheerful clearly invites Dury like visual jokes, i.e. the image itself would be like a reason to make one cheerful. Our collection included a gift horse – a horse with a large ribbon tied around its belly, a princely toad, a deer with an eye on it – as in Idea and a seahorse being ridden by a human jockey going nowhere fast, the jockey exuding bubbles and using a whip to spur his steed onwards. Silly I know, but it makes me smile.