Chaise Longue

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Boken i sig ger mig samma känsla som Pulps låt "Mile End", diskhoar fyllda av matrester och mögel, nergångna lägenheter och männsikor utan några andra framtidsplaner eller visioner än att leva dagen ut. Baxter is clear-eyed about his father’s strengths and failings, of which he saw more once he had effectively dropped out of school altogether and was lodging in his father’s flat. For Baxter and his friends, Ian became a “a pot-soaked Fagin”, a source of dope, street wisdom and cool jazz records – after all, “the one thing he loved was attention”. The boundaries between parent and child, as between day and night, were hopelessly scrambled. “Mum listened and supported. Dad broke your confidence and replaced it with his own.” 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. On the way home Strangler, now more upbeat, stopped on the All Saints Road in Ladbroke Grove. He waited for all the drug dealers to gather round the car and then wound down the window and hollered, “Grrrrrroooooaaaarrrrgh.” He sped the car for a short distance and then stopped and waited for the dealers to start chasing us, and then repeated this several times. We genuinely screamed for our lives until we were safely out of danger and then thought it was hilarious.

Maybe the most genuine aspects of life, a life according to Baxter, the beat of incredible disingenuous confidence, of confident vulnerability, can get misconstrued as solely that – as solely a box of puzzle pieces from different puzzles that don’t flow as one, that fail to fit homogeneously. But they can all be assembled into pictures of utmost honesty. Baxter can emote remotely with a special kind of spectral humility from his nonsensical riverbank, and in turn, birth a brilliant array of truths, but so much more interesting, and inspired than wiping his snotty nose on his stripy shirt sleeve in the name of such well-worn wank mantras as ‘I’ve got a heart too, y’know?’ When Dury made the album, which explores life as an adolescent with a celebrity father, few were aware of the phrase ‘nepo baby’. Now, it has become a major cultural talking point, and as we are all likely aware, it’s used to label the children of nepotism, most frequently in the arts.Although this time around, the roles were reversed, the scripts rearranged. A son was involved. Baxter’s son Cosmo.

The aftermath? The aftermath was an acceptance on behalf of a young Baxter that ‘I was marginalised by his need to do what he wanted first, and then be a father later’. It’s the mark of a clever musician to steal what’s required, a thief that knows its place, a kleptomaniac that doesn’t overstay their welcome in the palace of delightful, musical trinkets, to then convince everyone that what’s been stolen belongs rightfully to them, because otherwise there’s an instant whiff of something off lingering in the air like hotdog and doughnut fat falling through the tray, feeding itself through the ventilators located down some narrow alleyway behind a humongous retail park. You do indeed get a sense of being able to see it right away because you can see when people are wearing the wrong-sized pair of shoes. They look really uncomfortable. 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.and all that was part of my growing up. The anarchy and no-sleep-till-Hammersmith style of the era comes across with sometimes painful accuracy - work on a Monday morning, after three nights/days on the lash, if I turned up, must have been a sight for sore eyes. 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”.