Ian Robins Dury British 1942 –2000
Ian Dury, singer, writier and artist. Singer and actor who first rose to fame during the late 1970s. He was the lead singer in Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
At the age of seven, in a polio epidemic, he contracted polio. He had spent a lot of time in hospital which affected his education. He attended Chailey Heritage Craft School, East Sussex, in 1951. Chailey was a school and hospital for disabled children. Dury did attend Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe but he left the school at the age of 16 to study painting at the Walthamstow College of Art . From 1964 he studied art at the Royal College of Art under Peter Blake and in 1967 took part in a group exhibition, “Fantasy and Figuration”, alongside Pat Douthwaite, Herbert Kitchen and Stass Parakas at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. From 1967 he taught art at various colleges in the south of England and painted commercial illustrations in the early 1970s.
Dury formed the Kilburn and the High roads in 1971,and they played their first gig at Croydon School of Art in 1971. Dury was vocalist and lyricist , co-writing with pianist Russell Hardy and later enrolling into the group a number of the students he was teaching at Canterbury College of Art, including guitarist Keith Lucas and bassist, Humphrey Ocean, a fellow artist.
