Brat summer is over. Welcome to Bax summer?
“I f***ing hope so,” says Baxter Dury, deadpan and dapper as ever — besuited but with the laconic manner of someone who’s just got out of bed — in the bowels of The Social in Fitzrovia, musing on his new record, Allbarone, which he’s about to debut to a select crowd including Jarvis Cocker. “But I don’t know. I love that Charli xcx record, and in fact I played it to the producer Paul Epworth, and went, ‘I wanna make things like that.’ Most people thought I was delusional but he worked in a flavour of brat.”
Wait, so Baxter Dury, the man behind the sleazy hit single Miami — the story of “Mr Maserati … the sausage man” — the one which crystallised him for the wider public as the English Serge Gainsbourg, one of London’s most beloved guttersnipe sons, the self-confessed “nepo baby” of punk-poet icon Ian Dury, and a songwriter of lacerating wit and brutally imaginative slurs … this guy has gone all high energy pop?
“Yeah it’s pop,” he says. “Just with some weird dude over the top.”
The weird dude is himself, the pop was provided by Epworth, the super-producer behind all-time mega-selling records by Adele and Florence + The Machine. A proper music biz A-Lister who Dury says approached him after his show on the Park Stage at Glastonbury last year.
“We knew each other a bit socially, and we always say, ‘Let’s do a record together’, just as a formality,” says Dury. “But I came off stage and he was like, ‘We should work together’, and there was a shift in his eyes.”
Why Epworth chose to produce his first record in years with him is another question. Not that Dury, 53, isn’t a star. He’s just a cult star. A unique proposition. As told in his memoir, Chaise Longue, he was born into a poor but arty household; his mother Betty gave birth to him upstairs at home in Buckinghamshire while his dad rehearsed downstairs. His mother was on benefits, and growing up he split his time between her place and his dad’s, a tower block in Vauxhall.
As he teenager he went to live with the old man, who duly put him in the care of a “nanny” speed dealer called The Sulphate Strangler. He went to school at Chiswick Comprehensive, got in trouble, was kicked out, ended up at King Alfred School in Hampstead but left at 15. After years of drifting in bohemia, he managed to start up his own music career, and since his first solo album came out in 2002, he’s reinvented himself for a new record every few years, slowly building acclaim, getting some stability in Chiswick, where he lived with his teenage son Kosmo (now 23) until he suddenly struck gold with Miami.
Dury inspired that insouciant cool — and droll delivery — of new acts like Self Esteem, Dry Cleaning and Wet Leg. You can see the appeal. Despite being so sweary and Miami being quite Sexy Beast, he’s not blokey — “I hate hate hate blokiness”. There’s sophistication and subversion here, and a gentle sensitivity too.
Despite this, Dury thinks Epworth wanted to work with him because “I’m quite shop-soiled. It was probably interesting to choose something a bit odd and unobvious.” The way Dury tells it, the experience making the record was like The Odd Couple, Epworth as the genius electro whizkid and Dury as the blustering fuddy-duddy having his “process” messed with.
“I went in, played him some music and he didn’t really listen to it. He just sort of went, ‘Hmm.’ And then started making his own. He went into this sort of weird exorcism.” This was all taking place at Epworth’s swanky studio called The Church.
“I sat back for a while, in this palatial place with bowls of fruit. I was stealing food like in Trading Places. Then a couple of days in I realised that it was exactly what I needed, someone to be shouldering it. I couldn’t take control and start my nuanced meandering. He just didn’t listen. He got hyper-focused. Went into these manic episodes. And it made me do the same. And it just worked.”
While the resulting record is certainly full of bangers, this is not brat; it’s still a Baxter Dury record. So while you have something as disco as the song Return of the Sharp Heads, the lyrics have Dury taking apart Shoreditch hipsters and the chorus goes, “You’re just a bunch of soul-f***ers, you total c***s”. He muses on this turn of phrase by saying, “I like it when you sometimes get these really disgustingly rude songs and you can get away with singing them on daytime Dutch radio.”
Elsewhere, on Hapsburg, he’ll scorn humble musicians who get famous and drop everybody to join, “the international f*** omelette.” He’ll declare himself “Chiswick’s Kubla Khan” and on the hands-in-the-air Schadenfreude, he’ll greatly enjoy reading a bad review about his ex’s band.
It’s the kind of eccentric mordant wit that makes you proud to be a miserable English git. And for all the sniping, it’s himself who’s the main target. “Standing on the shores of west London, on Mount Chiswick …” he sneers at himself. “The most clever disses are based on yourself.”
But it’s the title track and first single, Allbarone, which is the biggie. It’s an obvious Ibiza club smash about being stood up in a popular wine bar chain. Dury describes it as a “romantasy … I’m quite confessional in a way but then I make it abstract enough for it not to be litigious.”
It all opens up the chance to do something energetic live, which he began to enjoy after he started including a Fred Again collaboration in his set: “That was the first time I saw a human being move in front of me.”
More than anything, these tunes will allow him to escape the dreaded, “white plimsolled trap of mature man music with all the dull nonsense”. And blokey audiences like he encountered when he supported Primal Scream recently: “it was like playing in a morgue, to the dead men of Britain. They were like the Easter Island statues.”
At this point Epworth enters the Social, sneaks up behind Dury and makes him jump. The Odd Couple reunited, Dury reminds him of his behaviour in the studio: “You go into such a trance you don’t listen to a word I’m saying.”
“It’s just because I’ve got it so loud I can’t hear you,” retorts Epworth.
“It was so loud,” Dury concedes. “He has the biggest speakers in Europe. The Last Dinner Party were upstairs and kept complaining.”
Epworth then reveals what he had been impressed with at Glastonbury. “He has such presence. It’s hard for someone to stand onstage and not sing very much. This pervert, the persona of his Mr Maserati is very widescreen. Having my own take on that was exciting.”
Exciting times are indeed ahead, and this year is the 25th anniversary of the death of his dad, who he thinks would have been into his music. “He would have got older and sweeter and been able to get over himself a bit. You’re always going to be proud of your kids. He would have liked a lot of it.”
In the past he has gleefully called himself “the original nepo baby,” but says no one has ever pulled him up on it and he thinks he’s escaped being cancelled. “That might change though. It’s like the French Revolution, that died down for a bit, and then it all piped up again. I’m like Marie Antoinette.”
Looking at him and hearing all this, his surrealist international word omelette, it’s a wonder he hasn’t been in any movies.
“At one point my book was picked up by the people that made Succession,” he says. “They gave me quite a bit of money and I was fantasising about it. I’d be introducing myself to people saying, ‘How do you do … you know, the Succession people are making my book.’ But it faded away. I think recreating the 1980s was too expensive.”
He brightens then. “But now I’m talking with somebody big about a TV series where I’m a detective in Berlin, solving crimes in Europe.”
I suggest the name Schadenfreude for it, which gives him pause. “That’s a good name, actually.” And with that, he’s off, if not the new Charli xcx, perhaps the new Columbo.
Baxter’s album Allbarone is out on Heavenly Recordings on September 12
