Chewing The Fat With Baxter Dury
Speaking to us from his West-London flat, Baxter is preparing for a run through of his new album. After March saw his latest release, we chewed the fat with Baxter and dissected the twisted lust and wholesome vulnerability of ‘The Night Chancers.’
“It’s a sort of post break-up album. I’m interested in the failed attempts of being something. Rather than people, or me, actually being successful,” Baxter admits. “I mean in a conquest way, you know. If I say romantic adventures, it sounds like I’m promoting the wrong idea. It sounds like somebody sexually pioneering and that’s not true.” It’s these kind of observations and realities that manifest themselves on Baxter’s new album: ‘The Night Chancers.’ “To write songs, you need some form of inspiration,” he begins.
“I don’t really engage globally or politically, so I can’t write about the decline of… you know, the fucking white-tipped penguin or whatever. I’m concerned, obviously, but it doesn’t translate in to songwriting for me.” Instead, Baxter is inspired by the nuanced and weird behavioural idiosyncrasies of the people around him. His new album, he says, is a “psychological journey through the maze bit in the shining” in which you can so easily get lost.
“Really, it’s just about a state of mind. People and things. If you aren’t in a relationship cycle, you’re kind of out and about again aren’t you?” he says. “You put on your old trousers with zips in the knees thinking, ‘Oh this is good,’ but you’re slightly out of date. It’s a bit like coming out of prison and not knowing how to use the tube system.”
Baxter is not unfamiliar with writing introspectively, however the ten-song episodic new album is told vicariously through a series of vignettes and characters. A cinematic experience taking us through the highest-ecstasies and lowest-tragedies of love in the modern age. Baxter explores these most delicate intimacies in ‘The Night Chancers’. To quote Jason from Sleaford Mods: “What’s the point of a nice hotel room if she left at three in the morning?”
Indeed. What is the point? Fancy bathroom tiles and mini fridges start to look a lot less appealing when the sun is coming up and you’re fag-end in hand, naked on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “It’s quite confessional,” he says. “It’s a vain load of bollocks to be honest, really ego-eccentric. But I guess I’m willing to do that, and I have to be willing to talk about it afterwards as well.”
In a time before lockdown (if any of you actually remember) Baxter had just begun rehearsal of playing the album live with his band, preparing for a series of promos and a tour through April and May, beginning in Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club, and coming to a close at Gebäude 9, Cologne. “I’m really excited to play the album now,” he says, eagerly. “I just started listening to it again and I thought: fuck this is going to be great to play live. There’s a kind of sleazy-grooviness to it that I think will come alight.”
Now nearly two decades on from his debut album, though still no less perplexed by the intricacies of life and love, Baxter’s style and sound has developed extensively. From his melancholy new wave debut album, ‘Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift’ in 2002, to the urban goose himself, as we know him today. “I listen back to those things and think ‘wow they’re amazing,’ but also really naive,” he confesses. “It’s no more sophisticated now that it was 18 years ago. I’m a bit more efficient, I guess, maybe a bit more confident, but it doesn’t mean that it’s better. Music’s not something that’s ever better, really. It gets faster or has more notes, but it isn’t necessarily better.” Baxter continues to analyse his progression: “The point where you think you’re in control is the point where you start wearing white plimsoles and fuck everything up. When you think you’re good at music you’re over with, you know, you’re so over with. So I guess that little bit between how good you are and what you’re exploring is where the good bit comes. But then when you start thinking, ‘well I’m very accomplished’, and start doing ten-minute solos, and get a Norwegian Oboe player, you’re fucked, you know?”
Watch the video for ‘Slumlord’ here:
Baxter has garnered a close-knit posse of like-minded individuals around him, working with the usual suspects: backing vocalists Madeline Hart, Rose Elinor Dougall and Skinny Girl Diet’s Delilah Holliday, as well as guitarist and writing partner Shaun Paterson, and Dury’s producer-cum-best mate, Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, John Grant, Arctic Monkeys). “You’re always a bit unsure when you’re working with someone else,” he admits. “You have to let them do their thing, you have to readjust to someone else’s quirk, and that’s what I’m best at pulling out of people, what they’re good at doing. I’m not the sort of person to not be mates with someone that I work with. Usually if they’re good and we get on, they’ll become a good friend and we’ll work for years and years,” he says, continuing: “The same drummer that worked on the first album I ever did is still here too, you know? All those people are still here. It’s 20 years we’ve worked now. It’s amazing.” Those details, he says, are precious. “Sometimes when you’re sitting there in this studio, with big porcelain-tiled machines from 50 years ago where it’s all very expensive and the clock is ticking, it’s not always conducive to relaxing. So I just prefer somewhere smaller that doesn’t have that kind of pressure,” he says, as he goes on to describe the solo-recording process as making him feel like Laurence Oliver, giving a performance to himself.
Baxter’s preceding album, 2018’s B.E.D.’, saw him collaborating with French DJ and producer Étienne de Crécy, alongside usual collaborator, Delilah Holliday. A project which Dury feels a non-considered moment. “I was just in Paris fucking around. I met Étienne and we just fell in to an album without thinking about it,” he begins. “Delilah came last minute and did some vocals. It was all very unconsidered, and a bit tense because it quickly turned in to a band situation, when it was meant to just be a little moment, so we quickly closed that down.”
The picture he paints is more of a spontaneous musical situation that was never meant to be, rather than a planned project. But I think we can all agree, Baxter’s gritty, cockney rhetoric over a French electro-beat is something difficult to ignore. “In one way it was a release to do something so easy. I mean, you press play on a drum machine, I talk over it about what happened that day and you’ve got a song, you know?” he continues, “There’s a good thing about that, but it’s not my skillset, so it’s definitely better to get back in to Star Wars music, as I like to call it. Orchestras and all that stuff.”
Collaborating with French artists is not Dury’s only connection to the country. His broken face, deep voice and “faux sexual allure” as he calls it (“I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what they’re on about, but I’m not going to stop it” he says, coyly, the grin across his face almost visible through the phone) has gained him the seal of approval across the pond. Though despite everyone’s nice trousers, and those little sliced up white sausages you find, it’s more important to Baxter gaining validation from home. “Your euro-artist is fine and you go through the simulation of thinking you’re doing okay, but it’s not the same,” he admits. “It’s your own people you want to impress really. I think that’s where it comes from. I’m just so English, you know?”
“I’m not really into French music or anything. Serge, or any of it really. I’m not being horrible but there’s a lot of shit there. They’re the only nation in the world that clap on the one and three, everyone else claps on the two and four. There’s something deeply and inherently corrupted about their music.” He says, before pausing. “It sounds a bit Brexit that.”
Speaking of which, what does he think about the tragically real soap-opera unfolding in Britain at the moment? “I don’t know,” he sighs. “I just don’t fucking know. My interest in politics and the global politics are at odds because I get more interested in what’s around me, you know? Don’t get me wrong, I think the people that run our country are septic cunts, I hate them. I am concerned, but I’m also thinking: It’ll be alright.” Speaking to Baxter shatters any illusion of the brash, slumlord demeanor I had in mind before we spoke. The reality of his personality is in fact much more grounded. It is clear that Baxter finds comfort in the spoken word. A true raconteur, dancing between anecdotes of his childhood and tongue-in-cheek slurs about the complexities of modern society, with all the quirks and ugliness that come along with it. A poet, a musician at the highlight of his musical career, but also a man, a father.
Watch the video for ‘I’m Not Your Dog’, filmed in Benidorm, here:
“It kind of gives me anxiety in a way, and I’m glad about that,” he begins, referring to the traditionally hedonistic lifestyle of musicians. “I’m glad I’m not very good at drugs. I sort of talk about that a lot, but I’m not really that brilliant at it. I’m a Dad too, you know? I really appreciate those details, I like being a Dad and I like normal life.”
Baxter’s son, 17, is also a talented songwriter. “He’s not just a good musician, he’s a fucking amazing songwriter. I’m wondering ‘is it me that’s done that?’ It’s definitely environmental of some kind, but he’s just a next level musician already” he says. It’s hard not to ignore the seeming lineage forming within the Dury family, and it is one that Baxter acknowledges himself.
“Seasons change don’t they, and we all have a different influence in the way we’ve been brought up, some of us try to compensate for some of it. Some of the ways I was brought up were great, the creative freedoms were amazing. But then some of the boundary-less-ness doesn’t always work. I’ve always got the thought that, as much as I might help with some of his recordings and say my opinions, I’ve kind of got to back off as well, and be careful not to contaminate anything,” he explains. “Lineages are so rare in music, because you’re just cursed by this idolisation of your parents. Usually you get a kind of simile, you just get a young Lennon, a young version of their parents. People accuse me of it all the time, saying: ‘You’re just like your Dad,’ and things like that. But, I’m not, actually. I’m totally independent from that. If he’s ever going be good he has to go through that too, you know? There’s only that country-western American thing where you get these lineages of family generations being great, but I don’t think it occurs that much. Maybe in the academic jazz world but not in the indie world.”
Baxter continues with a humorous anecdote of his son’s future band name, ‘Generation Skip’. “I had to think about it for a while, and then when I realised I said: ‘You mother fucker, what are you on about?’ Quite smart really.”
But what is next for Baxter? “I’m a bit bored of badly dressed blokes from posh schools making bands, but I guess everyone got bored of that years ago,” he jokes. “I’m sort of bored of me talking over music, really. No one needs to hear another bloke talking over anything, so when I do something else I want to do something different. I think that format is done now.”
“I am writing a book actually, about my childhood,” he continues. “I meant to finish it about six months ago but there’s no chance I will and they know that. I really want to finish it, and I will finish it, but it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” The book, Baxter describes, is written about two years of his youth, in which he lived with ‘The Sulphate Strangler’, a friend of his Father’s. “My Dad made me live with him. I wouldn’t say to shake me up, but to show me what the edge looked like so that I didn’t fully go over it,” he explains. “I guess it worked, but he did end up dying in a police cell in Bournemouth. The book vaguely covers that period, anyway. It’s fucking difficult to do. I’m trying to learn how to write it as you talk, so it forgives your lack of education. It’s interesting, but very tough.”
‘The Night Chancers’ is out now.