Sunday, October 29, 2017

Baxter Dury: Miami


When I went to university in 1978 all the cool kids had a copy of Ian Dury's debut album New Boots and Panties!!, which had been released by Stiff Records the previous year.

A five-year-old Baxter Dury was photographed for the its cover alongside his father.

Forty years on, Baxter is an artist in his own right. Miami is a track from his fifth album, Prince of Tears, which was released this summer.

Writing about Harper Simon, I suggested that it may not be possible to avoid sounding like your famous parent. I see I employed an observation about Liam Botham's bowling action to prove my point.
The Dury's may be a different matter. The film Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll suggested that Ian had been a rather middle-class child and had adopted his cockney geezer image as a carapace to protect him from the world.

His biography on Wikipedia rather bears this out, though the film threw the idea away when it got the chance to cast the biggest geezer of them all, Ray Winstone, as his father.

So is Baxter Dury's image a calculated copy of his father or the just the style that comes to him most naturally?

I don't know, but I like this record.

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