Well, it’s just the first line and the first song. Oh, well, the first kind of proper song ‘Aylesbury Boy’, was just a bit of a confusing, faux confident statement. I saw Fulham play recently… but they’ve got the most middle-class audience and they sort of go, “Come on Fulham… if you don’t mind, give us a goal.” It’s the same sort of thing. “Come on please, if you don’t mind.” There’s quite a lot of the record that touches on your childhood, was it a conscious decision to explore that, and if you don’t mind me asking…why? Baxter Dury unveils first single from new album 'Happy Soup' - audio". NME. 22 May 2011 . Retrieved 13 June 2021. Baxter's last two albums, 'The Night Chancers' and 'Prince of Tears,' received critical acclaim and showcased his ability to tell compelling stories through his music. Dury, Baxter (15 January 2010). "Baxter Dury: 'My dad was lovely, bubbly ... and annoying' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 17 October 2017. It’s a funky poking of the belly belonging to the local charmers stood on a chair in a crowd of folks with chagrinned grins and their egos on charge. A looped bass groove lassoes playful vocals that stretch the perceptions of what shapes Baxter can shake himself into, whilst also reinforcing his ability as a singer to keep a fair percentage of the tune in the hands of Madaline who performs a certain book of vocal wonders, the theatrical and the melancholic, ever the perfect counterpart to Baxter’s earnest vocal, his low howl. And everyone goes ‘yah’.

He originally created rough demos in his living room using barely-functioning machines, then gave them to producer Paul White, who helped them come to life in his living room using some slightly better machines. This lo-fi approach gave Baxter the space to explore more abstract musical ideas and experiment with his story-telling style. Such a forward-thinking and fruitful interpolation of the artist into a new atmosphere, such welcomed interpretations of the songs born there, such a sense of itchiness and execution was in the air for the audience’s perceptions waiting to be stretched and positively satiated by the deceptive, dexterous complexities, the beguiling charm belied by daft, rambling abstraction, the mysterious chest of treasures that exist within the tunes, that Baxter had little choice than to stare self-sabotage head on and say ‘come at me’. “I was trying to sort of fancy it up a bit, season it, for self-motivational reasons” he reveals. “Otherwise, it just becomes a bit of a grind. I don’t want to hear me in the same format all of the thing”. There was none of that ceremonial bullshit I’d been so used to for years. It was just really direct. It was just me and him in quite a shoddy room. Not any comment on his shoddy room. It’s a nice shoddy room. It was just very simple. It was like going to the office every day, you do a few hours and it wasn’t exhaustive, but that’s because there weren’t layers of unnecessary personnel there who were associated with recording over the years. You recorded it differently from your previous work, creating rough demos in your living room. Why did you decide to make a change to the recording process? French novelist Gustave Flaubert said “There is no truth. There is only perception.” It’s a fitting quote when discussing West London’s Baxter Dury. Son of Ian but very much an artist in his own right, Dury’s penchant for perception, or rather, his ability to decode other people’s perception of him, is what’s kept his work so inventive over the last two decades. Maybe the most genuine aspects of life, a life according to Baxter, the beat of incredible disingenuous confidence, of confident vulnerability, can get misconstrued as solely that – as solely a box of puzzle pieces from different puzzles that don’t flow as one, that fail to fit homogeneously. But they can all be assembled into pictures of utmost honesty. Baxter can emote remotely with a special kind of spectral humility from his nonsensical riverbank, and in turn, birth a brilliant array of truths, but so much more interesting, and inspired than wiping his snotty nose on his stripy shirt sleeve in the name of such well-worn wank mantras as ‘I’ve got a heart too, y’know?’

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Two pints deep and basking in the heat of spring’s first truly sunny day on a pub bench a stone’s throw away from his West London riverside flat, Baxter Dury has - after 40 minutes of amusing wrangling - come to something of a conclusion: “I don’t know if it means anything? I think I’m just talking…”

Baxter Dury (born 18 December 1971) is an English indie musician, originally signed to Rough Trade Records. [1] Early life [ edit ] agonisingly puts it: “But no one will get over that you’re someone’s son/Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean/But you don’t sound like him, you sound just like Ian.” On ‘Crowded Rooms’, a song about being trapped in the small-mindedness of upper-middle-class bohemia, Baxter is also trapped in the character he himself chooses to occupy, but also one that was bestowed upon him from the moment he was born and the moment he decided to put his mouth to a microphone: ‘Why am I condemned because I’m the son of a musician?/ Because I don’t wash or you think I’m too posh?’ Baxter is free to be his complicated self on this record because he finally accepts that people are multi-faceted, and they can straddle entire worlds but still just be people. Baxter is ‘posh and unwashed’, he’s high art and low art, he’s the 21st century nepo-baby and Kubla-Khan, son of Genghis khan, trapped in Xanadu, the palace of pleasure that is his own creation. He’s Baxter Dury and he’s no better than you or me.

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a b c "Baxter Dury, son of Ian, talks to David Peschek". The Guardian. 12 August 2005 . Retrieved 10 June 2020. The rambling, rummaging, dialectical comments that litter the album are open-ended ones, purposeful within the framework of how Baxter may view the world, but pointless in a way as those questions don’t really answer anything. “If you’re interested in how the world works, then you see it in a weird way. It’s nice to comment on it” he confirms. I think as you get older you might distance yourself from more of what you originally loved; that’s the danger of getting older, that you’re less likely to fight for what’s original,” he muses. “Musically, you can get quite bad. So I really try to make it interesting, and I can afford to because I don’t really want to be… What’s the question?” He stops, suddenly aware of not entirely knowing where he’s headed. “I’ve just gone into the pints…” If we’d hazard an end to the sentence, we’d say perhaps that Baxter doesn’t really want to be famous in the way that he saw firsthand as a youngster. He would like, as he readily admits, for “people to pay me huge premiums for playing, so I want the music to be as good as it can be”, but he’s also quite content sitting in the niche that he’s carved out for himself, telling his stories, keeping things interesting.

Hotly-tipped new singer-songwriters Eska and JGrrey feature in addition to Baxter’s regular vocalist Madeline Hart. He emerges as either more sinister or less serious than before but still perceptively penetrating the heart of the question with something utterly poignant, extraordinary in how common the thought has been captured like a poetic butterfly lured into the open jar, and equally extraordinary in how it comes across as something apparently pulled from nowhere, only augmenting its sharp-witted, street-smart, surrealistic allure. In August 2021 Dury combined with producer Fred Again for the single "Baxter (These Are My Friends)". The same month, he published his memoir, Chaise Longue. [7] Personal life [ edit ] What he has brought through into his own art, however, are the extreme, often wildly juxtaposed experiences that his youth afforded him. As such, ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’, with its expressive delivery and vivid picture-painting, comes off at times like a strange, hazy play. On lead single ‘Aylesbury Boy’, he’s snaking round Chiltern Firehouse among “the posh kids [that] say yah”; ‘Leon’ tells the story of when Baxter and a childhood friend got arrested for stealing sunglasses from Kensington High Street; later, on ‘Pale White Nissan’, “large men” populate the scene “throwing chairs out of windows”.

While he has always sung with women (it’s kind of his thing) he takes it even further on this record, with an array of new female voices, including Eska Mtungwazi, JGrrey and Madeline Hart, singing as his subconscious. In some ways their voices dominate the record, occasionally giving Baxter only a few lines. Nevertheless, Baxter was born a main character. And, on often on this record, he becomes this heightened version of himself. Baxter Dury is the son of Ian Dury and his wife Elizabeth "Betty" Rathmell. [1] As a young boy he appeared on the front cover of Dury's album New Boots and Panties!!. [2] He left school at the age of fourteen. [2]