Baxter Dury - I Thought I Was Better Than You

“Hey Mummy, Hey Daddy / Who am I?”, asks Baxter Dury on ‘So Much Money’, kicking off his new album ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’. It’s quintessentially Baxter, the 51-year-old now on his seventh album, and sets the tone for the rest of the record, on which he revisits his childhood and his efforts to find a place in the world, in what is almost a companion piece to his 2021 autobiography Chaise Longue. His delivery slots in quite nicely with the recent post-punk revival, as does the often minimalist production – there’s a hip hop influence too, reflecting the music he listened to in his youth. There are guest spots; neo-soul artist JGrrey, singer-songwriter Eska, and frequent collaborator Madelaine Hart all make an appearance. ‘Pale White Nissan’ is an instant earworm, in which Baxter thinks back to his experience of being driven to his private school by a “drug-dealing henchman” – also referenced in ‘Aylesbury Boy’ – and it’s followed by the groovy ‘Shadows’. Here, he looks at what’s it’s like to be under the shadow of a famous parent: “Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean / But you don’t sound like him / You just sound like Ian.” In an era of nepo baby discourse, it would be all-too-easy to write Baxter off – his father was a punk legend, after all. But it’d be a disservice; ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ proves a valuable insight into who Baxter Dury is.