*** Welcome to piglix ***

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

"Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll"
S&D&R&Rsingle.png
Single by Ian Dury
B-side "Razzle in my Pocket"/"Close to Home"
Released 26 August 1977 (UK)
Format 7" single
Recorded 1976
Genre Rock, funk rock
Length 3:14
Label Stiff Records
Writer(s) Ian Dury, Chas Jankel
Producer(s) "Nobody"
Ian Dury singles chronology
"Crippled With Nerves"
(1974)
"Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll"
(1977)
"Sweet Gene Vincent"
(1977)

"Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" is a song and single by Ian Dury. It was originally released as a Stiff Records single with "Razzle in My Pocket" as the B-side, on 26 August 1977. The song was released under the name "Ian Dury" and only two members of the Blockheads appear on the record – the song's co-writer and guitarist Chas Jankel and saxophonist Davey Payne.

The song was written by Ian Dury and Chas Jankel in Dury's flat in Oval Mansions, London (nicknamed "Catshit mansions" by Dury) that overlooked The Oval cricket-ground. The pattern of work adopted by the pair involved Dury presenting Jankel with his hand-typed lyric sheets. According to Chas in Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll: The Life of Ian Dury he would be repeatedly given the lyric for "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll" but Jankel kept rejecting the song, only for it to be at the top of the pile again the next time, only to be rejected again. This went on until Dury sung the song's guitar riff to Jankel and sang the song's title in time with Jankel's riff.

Sometime later Jankel heard the Ornette Coleman tune "Ramblin" (from his 1959 album Change of the Century), which included also Charlie Haden and Don Cherry) and heard exactly the same bass riff being played by Haden. Dury once apologised to Coleman for lifting the riff but, as Coleman explained, he (or possibly Haden) had lifted it himself from a Kentucky folk tune called "Old Joe Clark". An alternative version to this story exists: as Dury explained when he guested on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, he had apologised at Ronnie Scott's Club for the riff lift to Haden, who responded by saying there was no need for an apology as he had lifted it from an old Cajun tune.


...
Wikipedia

...