Baxter Dury discusses his new album and life as a “very budget nepo baby”
Since writing his 2021 memoir, Chaise Longue, Baxter Dury has been on a reflective journey. Around the same time, work began on his new album, I Thought I Was Better Than You, naturally touching upon similar themes as boasted by the book.
Baxter’s childhood was abnormal, to put it politely. As it is well documented, his father was the late, great Ian Dury. Throughout his lengthy career, Dury Jr has worked tirelessly to carve out his own musical DNA, which has squashed the lazy artistic comparisons between the pair. Musically, he’s his own man, and if it wasn’t for their shared heritage, they’d likely never be mentioned in the same breath. However, the time has now come to reflect on his early years, which includes addressing the elephant in the room.
The reason for Baxter’s decision to reminisce isn’t some stark realisation about his childhood and the profound way it has turned him into who he is today. He’s now in his 50s, and his lifestyle is less hectic than it once was, making it difficult for a storyteller like Dury, whose art intertwines with his personal life. Thankfully, he has a treasure trove of inspiration stored in the back of his mind from his chaotic childhood, which was pivotal in making his new album, I Thought I Was Better Than You.
Baxter’s last record was The Night Chancers in 2020, awkwardly released during the pandemic. Subsequently, he never toured the LP. As a result, with his schedule free, and Baxter wrote his memoir and collated a compilation album before returning to the studio to work on his next record.
Speaking over Zoom about his new record, Baxter explained to me: “As someone who asked them to rely on that kind of lyrical content aspect because I’m not naturally a singer. I was always worried about what the subject matter would be because I don’t necessarily live a life where I generate much drama these days. So I sort of had to kind of consider what I was writing about.”
It wasn’t a lockdown-induced reality check that slowed Baxter down, but a gradual change that happens to us all with age. “In your 50s, you’ve got to tame shit down because it’s a bad look and a bad feeling to be living in a perpetual nightlife world,” Dury says.
While Dury admits the tales in Chaise Longue are more of an “urban myth” and admits even he can’t “distinguish the truth any more” before adding, “usually the truth is bleaker”. Throughout his songwriting, Dury has used the same approach, consistently blurring the lines between fiction and reality by inhabiting larger-than-life protagonists.
“It’s a mechanism, and I seem to use it. Maybe that appeals inherently somewhere in my nature,” Dury says, pondering his use of characters. “If you’re not singing dense political narratives, which I avoid purely out of ignorance, I go for more self-experience emotional-based bollocks,” he self-deprecatingly adds of his art.
From a lyrical standpoint, I Thought I Was Better Than You is Baxter Dury delivering lines and spinning yarns in a way that only he can, albeit about his youth. Production-wise, there’s a strong hip-hop feel to the album. Paul White was sitting in the producer’s chair for the project and has previously worked extensively with rapper Danny Brown.
Dury says the genre is one he finds “inspiring” and listened to extensively during the album’s recording process. “I wasn’t trying to make a hip-hop album. I was just nicking some of the tricks,” Baxter makes clear. “They do things very cleverly that allow the narrator to be centre stage without the music getting boring, and there’s a lot of verbal scriptions in it while being melodic. So, it gets away from that monotonous British indie poetry man music, which I might be responsible for sometimes.”
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.
‘Nepo babies’ come in all shapes and sizes. On the one extreme, there’s Brooklyn Beckham, who has released a photography book despite barely knowing how to use a camera. After his first ‘career’ failed to get off the ground, Beckham is now attempting to become a celebrity chef in America. Undoubtedly, he’d not have received these same opportunities if it wasn’t for his family name.
In the music industry, the tag has been thrown at everybody from Inhaler’s Eli Hewson, whose father is Bono, to The 1975’s Matty Healy, whose mother starred in the ITV soap opera Coronation Street and doesn’t have family ties to the music industry. While having celebrity parents can help get a young artist on the radar of a record label or raise intrigue, it doesn’t mean the general public will necessarily care unless they have the talent to back up their bloodline.
During the early days of Inhaler shows, there would be middle-aged U2 fans buying tickets to support Bono’s son, but it is the songs that remain responsible for them returning to future concerts. In all likelihood, initially, Baxter’s name will have helped him at the start of his journey, but it hasn’t gifted him a two-decade career in the music industry.
“You mustn’t be in defence of being entitled, and I don’t really claim it either way. I’m a very budget ‘nepo baby’ if I am a ‘nepo baby’. I think someone will have to study the conditions I was brought up and the conditions somebody else was brought up to see if there was much of a difference,” he says of the ongoing cultural debate and whether he’s part of the club.
“When I was young and pretty useless, there may have been a moment when someone gave me undue recognition, but it didn’t last long. I don’t have any contracts as an influencer,” Baxter jokingly adds after a moment of honest reflection.
He also claims “young people don’t give a shit because they’re less aligned to it,” which is undeniably true in his case. Dury’s collaboration with Fred Again on ‘Baxter (These Are My Friends)’ has done significantly more for his career with that demographic than his surname.
When the pair collaborated in 2021, Fred was firmly on the rise, but 2022 was the year he took over the world. The superstar electronic musician recently headlined Coachella, and Dury is thrilled by the track’s success.
Explaining how the track happened, Baxter says: “I didn’t really know who he was. He was just a nice posh bloke with a big mic. I just hung out with him a few times, it was very nice, and it was as simple as that. He was very clever at just getting me to talk. He didn’t want me to write it down and made me feel at ease at doing what he wanted me to do. I saw videos of it being played in America a few times with a big screen of me and my broken face, and I was like, ‘Jesus Christ’.”
On that same topic, Dury is impressed by the way in which artists like Fred and others in the dance scene have thrown away the rulebook on operating in the music industry. “They don’t even have to rely on the radio or anything anymore. They just own it and just do what they want. Now, everyone’s following them, and they don’t have to rely on BBC Radio 1 or anything,” he says out of admiration.
While Baxter Dury may have looked backwards for lyrical inspiration on I Thought I Was Better Than You, he’s a progressive artist in every sense. Most musicians become jaded two decades into their careers and fall into the trap of taking the easy route to appease their fanbases rather than themselves. He might be 51 with his days of hedonism largely in the past, but Dury is determined to keep evolving with the times and take influence from the younger generation.
I Thought I Was Better Than You is out now through Heavenly Recordings.
