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Paralympics 2012: Ian Dury's Spasticus Autisticus was electrifying
The song once banned by the BBC was superbly reclaimed at the Paralympic opening ceremony.
Last night's Paralympic opening ceremony was as inspiring as we had all hoped: Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton and Ian McKellan sort-of doing Prospero (he didn't actually quote much from The Tempest). Making the umbrella the motif was a rather clever nod to a mechanical device that we all use to protect our bodies from rain; just as the disabled use devices to help them get around.
As I was preparing for bed, though, something really startling happened. Behind Stephen Hawking (I hope he had ear plugs), the dance act Orbital started a mash-up of his voice, which lead to the Graeae Theatre Company made up of disabled performers singing Ian Dury's controversial song "Spasticus Autisticus".
Dury contracted polio when he was seven years old and was left crippled for life. With his band the Blockheads he wrote "Spasticus Autisticus" in 1981 as a protest against the International Year of the Disabled, something he saw as patronising. The lyrics were hard-hitting: "So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin/ And thank the Creator you're not in the state I'm in/ So long have I been languished on the shelf/ I must give all proceedings to myself."
Listen to the song here
But what got the song banned from being played on the BBC was his descriptions of the physical reality of being a disabled person: "I dribble when I nibble / And I quibble when I scribble" went one line, and another "I wibble when I piddle / Cos my middle is a riddle". ("My middle is a riddle": what a great line!) Evidently we prefer our disabled people to be tastefully grateful for our sympathy, rather than trouble us with what it's like living with a difficult body.
Watching the performers on stage and in wheelchairs belt out the song was electrifying. It was more than a reclaiming; it felt like something that demanded to be listened to. Rather than the tiptoeing language that surrounds diasbility this felt authentic.
"I'm spasticus," is an echo of "I am Spartacus" from the Kirk Douglas film. As person from what the song calls "Normal Land", I can't claim to understand what a disabled person's life might be like. Ian Dury's song, and the Paralympics as a whole, will hopefully go some way to changing that.