Friday 1 May 2009

No, I'm Spasticus.

Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2009

I thought long and hard about what to write about for this years Blogging Against Disablism Day. I was initially going to write about the access to live music for disabled people which is still, I'm afraid, not good. In accessible venues, lack of accessible toilets and if you are lucky enough to get in lack of decent views of the stage are 10 a penny. it is improving and the excellent people at Attitude Is Everything are campaigning vigorously for venues to be upgraded to include access to ALL music fans.

Then I wondered about blogging about the lack of disabled performers in the music industry. There are of course notable exceptions; Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Ian Dury, Robert Wyatt and Vic Chestnut spring to mind but although that is a subject that brings up all kind of issues of body image and how the media portrays and excepts us and that issue has already been covered by others during BADD. Visit The Diary Of a Goldfish who is co-ordinating this years event for some excellent blog posts on this and many other issues.

In the end though I decided to post a comment from the late great Ian Dury who in 1981 wrote a song which wouldn't be out of place as a BADD posting today. It was banned by the BBC as offensive but as you will see was completely misunderstood. I'll let the video below do the talking as there is little to add. apologies for the slow loading time.

9 comments:

Rob Wilson said...

Marmiteboy,

Your link to this at Diary of a Goldfish didn't come up, so you might want to fix that up.

Ruth said...

Great video, thanks for putting it up.

Attila the Mom said...

Fascinating! Thanks so much for posting this!

Anonymous said...

Wow, great! Interesting to not only hear the song for the first time but to read a little about what happened when it was released.

I've since googled the lyrics. Interesting.

Thanks for sharing.

seahorse said...

This should definitely be re-released!

Lady Bracknell said...

No, I'm Spasticus.

Much missed is Mr Dury.

You will, I'm sure, appreciate the irony that my random group of letters for word verification are:-

fuctisi.

Hurrah!

FridaWrites said...

LOL, Lady Bracknell!

Access at music venues is indeed deplorable. Was too tired to comment on everything Friday/Saturday, but I enjoyed watching the video.

Piley said...

Good post MB... Mr Dury is indeed much missed. I understand they are making a film of his life as week speak, which i'll be well up for a peep of.

P

Andrea Shettle, MSW said...

Is there a captioned version of this video somewhere? As a deaf person, I have no access to it otherwise. Thanks.