Interview Baxter Dury: Judge and Dury

Everything, for Baxter Dury, is largely fine. Seven albums into a career that’s seen him develop a singular niche of highly evocative storytelling filled with murky characters and endlessly entertaining wordplay, the 51-year-old has outgrown the shadow of his family name to become a cult hero in his own right. He’s BFFs with Jarvis Cocker, recently collaborated with producer du jour Fred again.. and is, in person, naturally hilarious and ridiculous, stripping down to a vest for today’s photoshoot and referring to himself as Buff Daddy (Sean Combs, eat your heart out).

The tales that populate his latest, then, he sees as simply source material: his sources just happen to be a little bit more out there than most. “I don’t necessarily live a life where I’m generating much drama. It’s quite couscous and avocado and streaming subscriptions, so I had to reference something,” he says. “From the start I talk about my parents, but it’s actually not about that, it’s just about being brought up in a certain way. The privilege wasn’t because Dad was famous; he hated being famous so it didn’t really bring much except that I live in a gaff overlooking the river which I have to pay a shitload of money for. But I think there’s another privilege that’s even more important, which is that I grew up around people that took opportunities to follow their artistic way of life and that was really important. I wouldn’t have been able to survive just being someone famous’s son because you perish.”

If the nepo baby argument is one that shows no sign of exhausting itself, then it’s one that, unsurprisingly, Baxter has opinions about. He is, he decides, “a bit of an economic nepo baby”. “In the sense that I’m not a good catch,” he riffs. “If someone caught me they’d just be like, ‘Oh fuck that one. Put him over there for a while…’ I’m not guillotined for it publically, I don’t think.”

If anything, Baxter represents the flipside of the conversation where, sometimes, the weight of a surname can be a challenge in itself. “I think anyone that follows in their parents’ footsteps, especially musically, it’s 99% perilous and you’re never gonna survive - mostly because they’re an obvious mutation of their parents and maybe they sort of deserve what they get in a way,” he says. “But if you do survive it then that journey alone is difficult enough. And either the music’s good or it isn’t, and people aren’t stupid enough to think that it’s inherited.

“I’m sure I’m in music because Dad was in music, but then I’m sure that I’ve got quite good at it,” he shrugs. “To be successful in music, you just have to be quite good eventually. Usually, attention highlights how bad you are quite quickly. For sponsorship deals alone, you can be quite symmetrical looking because your family has a sort of symmetrical DNA and that’s quite advantageous. But we didn’t have that. We were a long line of potato-faced people, so that was never really relevant…”

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”.

“It’s like West London-side Story,” Baxter quips. He’s got other analogies, too. On more than one occasion he compares his latest to the story of Pinocchio while, when we mention the different affectations and voices that populate his vocals this time, he has another idea. “You know the film Beetlejuice, where he pops up outside the animated house?” he grins, sans striped suit but nonetheless evoking the parallel disarmingly well. “I was thinking of it like that as an alter ego, a bit uncontrolled, and then it suddenly calms down and it’s a bit sentimental. It was just a very short collection of moments - like a very pretentious concept album. Like Pinocchio.” There we go.

Aside from fiction’s most famous fib-teller, it’s some altogether more real characters that were at the forefront of Baxter’s mind this time around. Having grown up listening to hip hop, he speaks with audible admiration and excitement for the way Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator have blown apart the genre into something entirely new. “It’s not even really hip hop anymore; it’s manifested into something so complex. It’s such open-ended music now,” he enthuses. As a lover of language, it’s these artists who Baxter feels most inspired by. “The words are important,” he says. “It’s trying to find a bit of a melody in the way [I deliver it], which is why I was thinking about those rap records because beat poetry or poetry are all too dense and rich for a song.

“That’s why I like rap music; they’re really clever and there’s a sort of natural melody to an American accent and the American experience whereas the English accent - which is informed by the English experience - is so flat because we queue up and we’re neurotic,” he continues. “But then also I think it’s music that belongs to people for a reason so you mustn’t try and harness it; you should admire it from a distance.”

He’s painfully aware to caveat that, sitting on the Thames supping an afternoon lager, he is not drawing any parallels to those artists (“I don’t have the right to even begin to venture into that world, but I just kind of like a bit of that - it’s an energy,” he says). But still there’s something about Baxter’s latest, with its explorations into his personal history and delight in the possibilities of language, that makes as much sense sat next to hip hop as it does the more indie circles with which he’s more normally associated.

“I don’t really listen to The Fall. I’m sure they’re good but I’ve never listened to them so there’s nothing about anything I’ve ever done [that comes from that],” he says. “I guess I’ve become confident enough to just talk like the way I do on record, and the traces of hip hop are probably invisible to most people but they’re meant to be in honour of that more than they are The Fall. It’s more Biggie Smalls than Mark E Smith.

“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.

There are all sorts of conversations that ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ provokes: about the pleasures and pitfalls of growing up in such a chaotic situation; about whether you can really be considered that privileged if you were given “£50 to buy an Evening Standard and kept the change, but then I didn’t see my dad for five years and I lived with a drug dealer that died while taking me to school.” There’s no real answer, it’s just Baxter’s life. “As Dad said to me at a young age,” he shrugs: “‘You’re not working class, you’re not middle class, you’re arts and crafts and you always will be’.”

‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ is out now via Heavenly.

Tags: Baxter Dury, Features, Interviews