I Thought I Was Better Than You

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Baxter Dury opens his seventh studio album with an existential crisis: “Hey Mummy / Hey Daddy / Who am I?” Immediately, he sets the tone for I Thought I Was Better Than You , a record that delves deep into Dury’s life and, crucially, how he has dealt with the complexities of having a famous parent: “Why am I condemned because I’m the son of a musician?” he ponders on ‘Leon’. 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. 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.” Dury’s UK tour will begin on October 10th, 2023, in Brighton before ending on October 18th at London’s Roundhouse, one of his biggest headline shows to date.

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’. a b c "Baxter Dury, son of Ian, talks to David Peschek". The Guardian. 12 August 2005 . Retrieved 10 June 2020. 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. 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”. Baxter Dury (born 18 December 1971) is an English indie musician, originally signed to Rough Trade Records. [1] Early life [ edit ]

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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.”

Does he ever get cynical? Cynical at what’s happened to where he came from? “There’s a sort of pastel-jumpered culture here. West London is slightly deprived of what it was”, he says. But when it comes to music, he’s anything but. He understands there is more to the pastel-jumpers, the indie kids, and the art schools than meets the eye. “I mean I’m pretty open-minded and encouraging. Especially music. If it’s a kid making music I’d never, ever say anything about that. I’m never dismissive about anyone else’s music I find it a bit too cruel”, he admits. He still is. And he always will be as this record when magnificently unfurling, turning and racing up one street and rolling down one hill into the corners of its darkest, rawest moments will intimately, intellectually, inspiringly attest to. This is your seventh solo record, counting only your studio full-lengths. I imagine a lot’s happened for you in those 21 years since the release of ‘Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift’, do you still recognise and relate to that version of Baxter Dury, personally and artistically? It’s the dark, sullied heart of these half-lies and the shimmering soul of these half-truths that makes Baxter’s world a fascinating one to get a brief glimpse into; always surprising, the scene within the story with new arrivals of destabilising detail and brain-derailing character profiles that work so wonderfully well when captured in these socially relevant oddities, these acidic snippets of history as it happened, or has happened, or will happen.

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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.

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…” 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. Day ghosts raised by long faces,’ he sings in his over gesticulated, Ladbroke Grovian sputter: a ‘Day Ghost’ being “someone who roams the streets avoiding school”, and a ‘Long Face’ being a “disappointed adult”. The language is classic Baxter Dury. 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. 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. 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. A staple vocal presence that compliments even intensifies the rogue, open spaces skulking throughout each moment belongs to Madeline Hart, but new collaborators have cruised through the doors this time with Eska and JGrrey’s vocal abilities (on Pale White Nissan) also feature on the album. “They were kind of people around the manor really. We did it in Deptford and Deptford is an entirely different experience from where I’m from. It’s the other side of the world”, Baxter remembers. “Some of those characters who had lived there all their lives were just part of the process. It was nice coz it’s got a bit of a different personality to it than the snug, West London pomposity fraternity that I belong to. It adds a bit more realness to it”.