New Boots and Panties!! is the debut studio album by Ian Dury, released in the UK on Stiff Records on 30 September 1977. The record covers a diverse range of musical styles which reflect Dury's influences and background in pub rock, taking in funk, disco, British music hall and early rock and roll, courtesy of Dury's musical hero Gene Vincent. Consisting mostly of love songs and character stories based on the working-class people of the East End and Essex Estuary areas where he grew up, the songs are frequently ribald and profane, but also contain humour and affection for his characters.
Widely considered to be the best album of Dury's career, it is also his biggest selling, having been certified platinum status in the UK for 300,000 sales. Sales of the album during the first few months after its release were modest, and the album's only single, "Sweet Gene Vincent", failed to chart. Subsequently, three stand-alone singles, "What a Waste", "Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick" and "Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3", all reached the top ten of the UK Singles Chart, and their success kept the album in the spotlight and ensured consistent sales over the next two years.
New Boots and Panties!! was among the UK's top 30 best selling albums of both 1978 and 1979, and eventually peaked at number five in the UK Albums Chart in February 1979, 17 months after its release, after "Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick"'s chart-topping success.
The album's title derives from Dury's habit of buying clothes second hand and refers to the only items of clothing he insisted on buying new. According to Ian Dury & the Blockheads: Song By Song, the name was chosen by Dury from a list of twenty potential titles drawn up by compere Kosmo Vinyl.
New Boots and Panties!! has been reissued several times, including a three-disc edition for its 30th anniversary and a five-disc box set for its 40th anniversary.
Background Much of the album was written by Dury, nearly a year before its release, at Oval Mansions (the top floor flat at 40, Oval Mansions, Kennington, London, which he shared with Denise Roudette, and which he nicknamed 'Catshit Mansions') and was written in partnership with Chas Jankel. Some of the tracks were co-written with Steve Nugent.
Dury and Jankel recorded demo tapes of many of the songs in April 1977, joined in the session by Nugent, at Alvic Studios, Wimbledon (run by two musicians, Al James and Vic Sweeney). Jankel played the bass, guitar and piano; Dury sang and played drums. These recordings have since been included as part of Edsel's re-issue of the album. The studio engineer at Alvic told Dury about a rhythm section who were acting as session musicians to earn extra money; bassist Norman Watt-Roy and drummer Hugh "Charley" Charles. As well as playing on New Boots and Panties!! the two became key members of The Blockheads.
According to Wreckless Eric (aka Eric Goulden), the song "Sweet Gene Vincent" was composed on 1 December 1976, the same day as the Sex Pistols' appearance on the Today show hosted by Bill Grundy.
Recording A week after the demos were finished the final album was recorded in the Workhouse Studio on the Old Kent Road. Dury's management company Blackhill – who would also manage the Clash – owned a 50 per cent share in the studio (along with the group Manfred Mann), and put up the £4,000 to pay for the group to record the album in 'dead time' (that is, when the studio was empty – usually late at night).
The album was produced by Peter Jenner, Laurie Latham, and Rick Walton. Jenner was one of the two partners in Blackhill Management, and had been producing since the late 1960s, having worked with Kevin Ayers and David Bedford among others. Although Jenner was the experienced producer at The Workhouse, in practice he left most of the production for New Boots and Panties!! to his young protégée Latham, who had joined the studio four years previously and who also engineered the album, with Walton carrying out production duties on those occasions when Latham was unavailable. Latham later recalled that Jenner's technical input on the album had been minimal and that he had more of an overseeing role:
Davey Payne and Ed Speight of Dury's old band Kilburn and the High Roads were invited to fill out the sound of the album. Payne, who played saxophone, would stay with Dury for much of the rest of his career. Geoff Castle, who played Moog synthesizer on "Wake Up and Make Love with Me" and "Blockheads", was a friend of Speight's who was asked in to help out. During these sessions a chance remark by Charley Charles would later give the name of the Blockheads to the band; while reading the words to the song "Blockheads", the name stuck after the Stiff tour; exactly how is the source of some disagreement.
Release and promotion Attempts to find a record label to publish the completed album were initially unsuccessful. Dury's lack of commercial appeal and his unorthodox look worked against him even in the year of the punk rock explosion. It was eventually licensed to Stiff Records, who leased office space directly below the offices of Blackhill Management. Stiff already had Elvis Costello and the Damned on their books, and would go on to score hits not only with Dury, but with Madness, the Pogues, Kirsty MacColl and others. Licensing the album meant there would be no question of who owned it, or its masters.
New Boots and Panties!! was released on 30 September 1977, following the release of the single "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll". The single was not a commercial success, nor was it included on the album's original pressing (Dury expressed a strong desire for singles not to be included on the album, and therefore the song and its B-side "Razzle in My Pocket" were omitted) although a later pressing included the track, uncredited, at the start of the second side of the album. At that time it was quite normal to issue 'stand alone singles' and public reaction to the album was unaffected. The album did not reach the top of the UK Albums Chart but it did go platinum on 4 June 1979. Its follow-up, Do It Yourself, reached number two.
Artwork The photograph for the album's cover was taken by Chris Gabrin outside Axfords underwear and lingerie shop at 306 Vauxhall Bridge Road, Westminster, close to Victoria Station. Gabrin's Mini van and the Woolworths store on the opposite side of the road can be seen reflected in the shop window, although Gabrin was careful to position himself so that Dury would hide his own reflection. The child next to Dury on the cover photograph is his son Baxter Dury. Ian Dury said Baxter ran into shot just as the photograph was taken, but in adulthood Baxter said the photograph appears too posed to be impromptu. Gabrin said, "I only shot 24 exposures and Baxter was in just four of them. As soon as the films were developed Ian came round and we immediately chose the same shot. We were so excited by the picture that we went straight into my darkroom and made the first print. The album title New Boots and Panties was subsequently coined by Ian."
Dury and Stiff's in-house designer Barney Bubbles cropped the photo and added the hand-drawn lettering on the front and back covers, which was written by Stiff's receptionist Cynthia Lole using a magic marker. The phrase 'There's nothing wrong with it!!' appears on the back cover below the track listing: this was apparently the reaction of the Blockheads upon hearing the first playback of the finished record.
Dury later discovered that, unknown to him at the time, his father Bill had died in 1968 in a bedsit just around the corner from where the photograph was taken. Axfords closed its London store in 1990 to concentrate on running the family business from its Brighton factory.
Hi-Fi+ magazine wrote in 2007 that, had the Parental Advisory sticker existed in 1977, it would have been used for New Boots and Panties!!, particularly for the opening line of "Plaistow Patricia". The 2015 re-release of the album from Edsel Record uses the sticker for those offended by the use of "cunt".
Critical reception
New Boots and Panties!! received good reviews from the music press upon its release. Allan Jones in Melody Maker described the album as "a tense, harrowing account of urban degradation, that conveys with more vocal, musical and lyrical vehemence than any so-called 'new wave/punk' combo has yet been able to muster, the desperation and squalor of the social conditions (and the effects of those conditions upon individual personalities) it so provocatively illustrates." In Sounds Vivien Goldman gave the record a five-star rating, saying, "Lawless brats from council flats have finally found a voice that speaks from, of and about the people. A voice that combines passion with the vernacular 'she got into a mess with the NHS' – sage street advice, plus cinematic observation, plus humour." Record Mirrors Tim Lott observed that "if you can grapple with the sheer unorthodoxy of it it's easy to fall in love with for its quaintness, its limerick simplicity ... The character of New Boots and Panties is indomitable, like Dury. It's a curiosity piece and a pop album and a good joke and sometimes a bad pun and a shot of Bohemian romantics and a load of crap and totally fascinating." Roy Carr in the NME said: .. it's impossible to bag Ian Dury, except to say that he has taken the essence of the Cockney music hall and utilised rock as a contemporary means of expression. On occasions, Ray Davies has dallied with a similar approach, but Dury has none of the self-conscious pretentions that Davies exposed in his flawed Flash Harry caricature. Ian Dury feels no need to adopt a transatlantic voice to comply with his subject matter, preferring to deliver ribald and bittersweet monologues in the tone of voice he was born with ... Whether or not you buy New Boots and Panties at least make hearing the album a priority. It's your loss if you pass. In The Guardian Robin Denselow praised the honesty of Dury's songwriting, saying that the singer "has refined (if one can use such a word of Dury) his early style into a remarkable, distinctively London-orientated blend of cockney music hall, rock, and Bowie-style electronics. This is mixed, with no nonsense and no frills, with a set of powerful, forthright and honest lyrics that will send self-consciously daring punks scurrying back to the safety of their dole queue clichés. I admire him for the way he throws himself full tilt into his emotions, using a backdrop as squalid as the worst of the East End for songs of unashamed sexuality, admiration, or hate. The tribute songs – straight and never mawkish – are to Gene Vincent and to Dury's father, and equally honest are the demented, stream of consciousness tirades."
The album was not a hit in the US, but reviews by American critics were also positive. The music critic Robert Christgau was impressed by the album, writing, "The tenacious wit and accuracy of his lyrics betray how uncommon he believes his blockheaded protagonists really are, and his music rocks out in the traditional blues-based grooves without kissing the past's ass. Tender, furious, sexy, eccentric, surprising." Rolling Stone said, "A provocative combination of Toulouse-Lautrec and Chas Bukowski, Dury punks out in a laughingly distasteful way even as he sits on a cushion of personal warmth, feigning indifference. Whatever you choose to make of his talents, you won't be left untouched." In 1983's The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, John Swenson deemed it a "great" album.
Contemporary reviews have similarly praised the album. AllMusic said