Song Book Dury - Jankel

You wandered in upon my life
And haven't lost me yet
Said the turkey to the carving knife:
"What you give is what you get"
A fresh and lovely summer's day
We thought would never end
Said the bloodhound to the stag at bay:
"I thought you were my friend"

Glad To Know You (Chaz Jankel - Ian Dury)

After the Chaz Jankel post I decided to have a look at some of the songs he wrote with Ian Dury and that turned out to be very rewarding. Whereas the first collaborations of New Boots and Panties!! showed a clear division between words (Dury) and music (Jankel), this later became more ‘blurred’, especially with the non-Blockheads songs.

That first album has been rightly acknowledged as a classic and received a full cover treatment in 2001 as Brand New Boots And Panties: A Tribute To Ian Dury.  As far as tributes go, it’s definitely one of the better ones, but as this album is still easily available, I decided to ignore those covers. Instead, I plunged into a digital rabbit hole looking for obscure covers and forgotten Dury-Jankel compositions… The results were not bad, enough for an 18 song CD Song Book! It has to be said though that the focus is really on the first 2 Blockheads albums, plus a few songs that Dury and Jankel wrote for others.

As expected, covers of Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, Sex & Drugs & Rock'n'Roll, and Wake Up And Make Love With Me are plenty, but I think I managed to select some of the more intriguing ones. Perhaps not surprising, everybody’s favorite Spasticus Autisticus gets seldom covered, but I found a decent one. The other Blockheads compositions include: What a Waste, Inbetweenies, and Lullaby For Frances.

Probably best known as the lead vocalist on Freeez’s classic hit single Southern Freeez, Ingrid Mansfield Allman was also involved in Ian Dury’s life. This resulted in a one-off single: The Jam Jar Song / Stop Wasting Your Time, both written by Dury-Jankel, released in 1981! Two years later Chaz recorded Stop Wasting Your Time again, but this time with a singer named Kitty Grant.  And the B-side was a cover of Glad To Know You from Jankel’s solo album Chasanova / Questionnaire!

As for this particular Song Book the lyrics of the songs are way above average I decided to include them all, but the covers do include 3 instrumentals as well! Special thanks to my friend The Dishonorable Edward Pastanga who helped me out with transcribing the lyrics of The Jam Jar Song / Stop Wasting Your Time.  Being British helps a lot I guess ;-)

Like with many songs most parts are easy enough to follow, but sometimes… Using youtube to text didn’t help much, these skipped the same parts I didn’t catch. Weirdest experience was using Grok, who replied correctly that those 2 songs are not on any lyrics site, but suggested me to add a youtube link which would enable it to transcribe those lyrics.  So I did and a few seconds later got the results, which were … interesting, apart from the title Stop Wasting Your Time, everything else was totally different! However I could see that those new lyrics followed the main melody…

Note that other covers can be found on the Stiff Records posts here!

p.s. In hindsight The Jam Jar Song would have been perfect for any of my previous car posts…