And then another nail, then another. Distorting the portraits of the people and the places he stalks, as a methodology of choice to channel that voice that puts the likes of Liam…sorry, Leon in his place. The story of a class-mate Baxter knew who robbed a pair of shades from Boots on Kensington High Street in the mid-80s and how both parent and law enforcement dealt with the case, able to swerve down different directions of Baxter’s subconscious high street. But what makes the tale so intimate, so intellectual, so inspired, is how it doesn’t rest, nor relax for an instant in what can often be an insipidly repetitive, even vacuously unimaginative attempt to associate one figure (dad) with another figure (son), and forget that the latter has reached fantastic peaks distinctly on his own. There was no dad there to get the record deal, no dad to write the songs. 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. 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 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]

Many of the songs on the album map a chaotic sequence of dreamlike events that try and describe Baxter’s journey of growing up, but none as colourfully as ‘Aylesbury Boy’. “This song is about coming from one place and arriving at another without fitting in to either,” he explains, “and I think of these people like characters from Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away.” Your son Kosmo wrote on the record as well, which I thought was really cool. How does the relationship with your son differ from the one you had with your dad? I Thought I Was Better Than You could almost be a concept album, Baxter scratching closer to the surface of himself than ever before, using voice, music and instruments as way of expression, freeing himself of complication through play and creativity, and making a record that sounds good. Baxter Dury, your instinct is always right, don’t change a thing and question everything. The discography of Baxter Dury consists of six studio albums, one collaboration album, one compilation album, one extended play and fourteen singles. Now, this time around, there is plenty of action, a lot of situational sketches, non-linear recitations of events suspended in a dreamland with an odd, violent light beaming through it. Baxter’s lyrical ability, his semantic acrobatics always succeeds in putting his finger upon the pulse of, then squashing it a little bit more to stretch that sketch into weird, new shapes of brilliance endlessly brimming with images as each clean and sharp bar cruises into another.Yet worry not, the classic Baxter babble is intact, no matter how replete the tunes are with it, the words that bounce up and down and off all points of the song, in moments of tranquility or restlessness, remain ever-entertaining. “I think some of it goes off on that thing, the flow of it has to be free-form I think as well. When I write it, I try not to over-consider it”. 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. Hotly-tipped new singer-songwriters Eska and JGrrey feature in addition to Baxter’s regular vocalist Madeline Hart. 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. Baxter Dury unveils first single from new album 'Happy Soup' - audio". NME. 22 May 2011 . Retrieved 13 June 2021.

These questions – and they are questions, some without answers, some without nasty argument – all arrive, dosed and loaded with a sense of urgency, precision, astute cool credibility from the arresting, bohemian edge, penned from the pre-piss up, and post-apology gallows whilst trying to fasten the final button of the trousers before the whole world tumbles down, that enables Baxter to exit the scene down the fire escape just as cynicism swoops in to take its place. What appearances are worth keeping up to the extent they almost kill us? What figment, fragment, or fictitious mask is worth keeping well-worn and damaging atop the figure? What flights of fancy and cruel games of fate lead us into the pulsating chambers of the night, only to wake up being spanked by a seabass on the shores of self-inflicted malignance and verbosity? There are moments of it” he confirms. “But the moments go into contemporary, real-time. Talking about myself and then I’m off again. It’s pretty beat poetry, 1960s pretentiousness”.

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The more that image of Pinocchio tells more lies, the more the nose grows and pokes people on the arse and gets annoyed at that; coming from the in-between of profound clarity, bohemian lyricism, and odd, psychedelic existence. 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”.