Good morning,
Phew, what a scorcher! Here at The New Cue we like to keep the good time summer vibes going by delivering 24 carat interview gold direct to your inbox every single Monday (or sometimes Tuesday if it’s a Bank Holiday). In today’s edition, we chat to Baxter Dury about his new album I Thought I Was Better Than You, whether or not he’s become a “professional nepo baby apologist”, bad suits and lots more besides.
We’ll see all you paying subscribers on Friday for our regular package of new music recommendations, albums to blow your mind and more. Until then, enjoy the edition.
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start the Week With… Baxter Dury
In 2021, Baxter Dury published his acclaimed memoir, Chaise Longue, which detailed his chaotic childhood growing up as the son of the late Blockhead leader Ian Dury. The experience of going back into his past inspired Baxter’s new album, I Thought I Was Better Than You, which came out earlier this month. A slight diversion from the sound of his previous albums (what he self-deprecatingly describes as “indie man talking music”), it’s a hip hop styled take on his past, and though he’s never shied away from talking about his famous dad, by some distance it’s the most explicitly he’s examined the subject on record. It’s great, give it a spin…
Chris called up Baxter a few days before the album came out for a chat about it and lots more besides…
Hello Baxter, what are you up to?
I’ve been running around like a nut-job. I’ve just been to a weird suit shop in Ladbroke Grove to buy some clothes for gigs and this weird guy starting serenading me. He owns the shop and he’s nuts. He sells secondhand suits and he’s mad. He started singing Wonderful World and was telling me he used to be a big singer in Iran and that was one of his songs.
Did you buy a suit off him after that?
Yeah. It’s so bad, I kind of like it. It’s not even in any colour. It’s like a dark mess of 80s unemployed looking bloke suit. It’s rubbishly good. It makes me look like someone who was once stylish but has had to sleep outside in it for a bit.
Your album is just out, how are you feeling about it?
Yeah alright, I’ve done so many of them now. I’m used to the rollout of being this old bloke apologising. I’ve become a professional nepo baby apologist.
This is your seventh album…
Something like that. I’ve done loads, is it more? I’ve done shit loads.
Obviously your dad comes up whenever you do interviews over here, but do people bring it up in other countries?
It does now because I’ve invited it, stupidly. I got to be like, “Oh I don’t need to do this any more…’ and now I’ve written an album, not solely about dad, but about my childhood, which is inviting people to flood in and talk about it. In places like France they don’t give a shit, they don’t even know who he is. Weirdly enough, in Argentina they’re obsessed with him. One guy said to me, ‘Your music is muck compared to his!’ I was like, ‘Thank you very much!’
Was this in an interview?!?
Yeah! On some shit Zoom. I said, ‘You’re quite aggressive, mate…’ He was like, ‘No! I’m telling you the truth!’ So yeah, he thought I was muck. But I’ve invited it really, so whatever I do now I have to go through it and smile. But whatever else I do after this I’ll never mention it again! After this I’m going back to another course of indie man talking music. I thought I’d done too many courses of indie man talking. You’ve got to think of it like being in a restaurant and you don’t want the same course coming out every time.
Did writing your memoir Chaise Longue open up something in you to want to write about your childhood for this album?
It was just an easy source of information. I don’t necessarily live a life which generates much drama nowadays. I eat couscous, there’s not much more to say really. So I made like an urban mythology of my childhood and put it in a hip-hop structure. That’s the sort of thing that someone clever might do in that world, but I wasn’t trying to appropriate that world, I was merely acknowledging that that’s how they do it in hip hop. It’s just an abstract bullshit songwriting language. People trying to find a poignant honesty in it are misled. And who cares? Does anyone really care how honest it is? It’s not a documentary. It’s music, so it’s totally abstract.
Before the book would you have been wary about doing something this much about your past?
Maybe. I think it’s laziness more than anything else. Like I said, I’ve become a professional son of… And this album really cements it. Being a professional son and daughter of is a pretty sad place to arrive at, but maybe my awkwardness about it makes it interesting.
Ultimately, would you say having a famous musician as a dad has been a help or a hindrance?
Scientifically, you’d have to pretty big study on that. A help for me because there’s a tradition there… I dunno, you can’t really mess with that. It’d be Baxter The Future, you’re messing with the cultural timeline. You can’t unpick it because it’s unique. Whatever I am, I am. I don’t know whether a potato-faced bloke who can’t really sing would have been given the same opportunities. I really don’t know. I can only be honest about it. I take the piss out of myself about it before anyone else can, it’s a defence mechanism.
I heard that Chaise Longue has been optioned for screen...
I don’t know how much that’s meant to be talked about yet. It’s been a long drawn-out process but yeah, it definitely is happening. It’s really exciting.
Did your experience of [2010 Ian Dury biopic] Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll mean that you’d want to be more involved in this?
They weren’t bad, the people that made Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, I just didn’t like it or believe in it. It was a weird version of something. It was a very masculinised sort of cardboard storytelling, authenticating the idea that everyone was a cockney and he was a working class imposter which I don’t think was the right message. Whereas with this will be about bohemianism in the 80s which I think is much more interesting. And nothing to do with dad, really. Just kids in Ladbroke Grove. I’ll be involved as much as they want me to be.
Who would you like to play you?
I think the casting would be about the guy that I lived with, Strangler [Ian Dury’s minder and Baxter’s de-facto baby-sitter, The Sulphate Strangler]. I’d be more of a neutral Elliott-like figure like in E.T.. They’ve mentioned some amazing people. It’s interesting stuff but it is so far away. It’s a long way off.
Did writing the book help you, not come to terms with it, but make peace with your childhood. The fact that you’d told it in your own words…
What happens is you end up writing a version of it. I read some of it back the other day and was like, ‘Well, that’s a load of bullshit...’ I think I have to bullshit. I can only write it in a way that’s exciting to me and abbreviate it all. So it’s kind of not very accurate. I can see that people might get offended by that who were involved. But I don’t think there was any other way of me writing it. I was just excited about writing a book.
What else have you been up to? Are you still into your historical podcasts?
Yeah. I’m listening to the same people [Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s The Rest Is History] but they are frightfully right-wing. Historians can be, maybe it’s a very right-wing trade? So I’m listening to that and loads of boring things on Radio 4. I’m the weirdest fucker in the world.
On your recommendation I listened to the episode on The East India Company and one on the history of the Freemasons.
Yeah, that one’s good. The ones that are brilliant are Columbus, that's brilliant, the Reagan ones are amazing, the Nixon ones are good and also the one about young Churchill. It’s all a bit right-wing but you don’t have to get lured into that. There are facts and it is interesting. I do need to get back into listening to music again though.
Thanks for taking 20 minutes out of your day to talk to us Baxter.
That’s OK mate, nice to talk to you.
CC