"Good Evening, I'm from Essex, in case you couldn't tell. My given name is Dickie, and I come from Billericay, and I'm doing... very well."
So opens possibly the best song that Ian Dury ever wrote, almost half a century ago now in 1975. While a lot of his other songs are very much punk rock stompers like Spasticus Autisticus and What A Waste, this is a more, dare I say it, folksy, arrangement. With keys that resemble a carousel organ and a relentless oompah rhythm and endless sexual innuendo, Billericay Dickie is the sort of thing that you could almost imagine a music hall performer thrashing out this in the pre-World War I era.
The song itself sees Ian Dury taking on the character of Billericay Dickie. Billericay Dickie is a cheeky chappie tradesman type who brags about his sexual conquests across Essex. However there is also an undercurrent of patheticness about him that he would see fit to do this. That he cannot seem to secure any additional liaisons with Nina ("in the back of my Cortina"), Sandy (who "didn't arf go bandy"), Janet (after he "bruised her pomegranate"), Joyce and Vicky ("a pair of squeaky chickies") or the "charming slag" from Shoeburyness or in fact the "nice bit of posh" from Burnham on Crouch, is never addressed and it's almost as if he doesn't want to address it. Perhaps some of his other habits that he inadvertently admits to might shed some light on this. That he sees fit to use one former amour as a reference to others is one such thing. And then there's the fact that he could only get with Sandy by plying her with brandy and it "took eight to make her randy" and then having to resort to "passing her a Mandie" in order to have his way with her. In fact, when played live, Ian Dury would sort of stifle sobs towards the end of the song as the character realises he's getting older and that sort of thing really isn't attractive to women at his age and is crossing the line from being mildly risky and unsuitable and into being cringe. Because the sort of things that get you laid when you are in your early twenties don't when you are over 35.
(No, regrettably, the converse is not true. The sort of things that act against you getting laid in your early twenties continue to have the same effect on a lady's monosyllable, that is, akin to those silica gel packets in luggage, at age 38. Fuck me, online dating is a toilet. Groan.)
But despite all this, he's doing "very well."
To my mind the reason that Billericay Dickie resonates so well even after 50 years is that we all know people a bit like that. As a great man once said, the people who are bragging about their sexual conquests interminably are either crashing bores, virgins, or playing a character for the grift. Basically, they're either lying, or their lives are so empty that they have nothing interesting about them other than, "have I mentioned I am sexually active today." There's also the fact that Ian Dury's lyrical genius is in full flow. Every verse has the same rhyme for every line which gives it a comedic twist. Even though, at heart, it's a tragedy really. Still, worth a listen and the album it came on, New Boots and Panties (named after the only item of clothing he claimed to not buy second hand) is a winner with every track almost as good as this also.
(IRON NODER 2023 #3)