Baxter Dury’s favourite Ian Dury song
Following in the footsteps of his father, Baxter Dury honours Ian Dury with every gobby, lyric-heavy new release. On his latest album, I Thought I Was Better Than You, Dury tackles the nepotism question head-on in tracks ‘Leon’ and ‘Aylesbury Boy’. Despite having a complex relationship with his late father, he still loves the music.
Baxter Dury’s music is very different from his father’s. Ian was best known for anthems ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’ and ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful pt.2’. Representing a distinctly British form of pub rock, Dury took on the new post-punk wave with a heavy dose of working-class humour. With his band, The Blockheads, he became one of the most defining voices of the 1970s new wave scene.
On the other hand, Baxter Dury creates R&B-tinged alternative music, merging flavours of electronic, indie and the New Wave his father dominated. Tracks like ‘Miami’, ‘Cocaine Man’ and ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ toe a line between spoken word pieces and danceable alternative music. While sonically very different, Ian Dury’s influence is undeniably heard in his son’s work.
It makes sense then that Baxter Dury’s music career was born as a direct result of his father. Dury’s first-ever live performance was at his father’s public wake, where he sang his favourite track from his discography.
“‘My Old Man’ was always something that I picked up on and it was the first song I ever sang when Dad died,” Dury said to The Line Of Best Fit, picking out the 1977 New Boots And Panties!! track, which he actually appears on the cover of.
“I sang it on stage at his wake, so it’s a real kind of rite of passage. Because the wake was at The Forum, it was in front of 1,000 people, so I stood up and performed that song,” Dury recalls, adding, “I demanded that I do it again because I enjoyed it so much and sort of ruined the moment, but yeah, that was quite weird.”
Naturally, his father’s music was a crucial part of his early musical education. “Obviously here was my exposure to music, as well as lots of other things,” Dury said in a conversation about his father. “There were some other songs where I really focused on what Dad wrote, that had a lot of swearing in them,” he continued.
He remembers those early encounters with Ian Dury’s music, adding: “We were brought up in a pretty poor area, in a place called Aylesbury. My two mates and I would listen to dad’s music, including some of the sweary ones, and their dad could hear it through the wall, because the houses were so thinly built, and they would get a whack around the head.”
“I wouldn’t get a whack, obviously, but that was the difference between us. We were the weird Bohemians then,” he remembers fondly, fostering an immediate and early connection to his father’s musical message.
In his 2021 biography, Chaise Lounge, Dury dives deep into his complex relationship with his father and the impact of growing up in such a tumultuous family situation. But as he picks out ‘My Old Man’ as his favourite track, one written about his grandfather, Dury is undeniably connected to his family lineage, as the song sings, “All the best mate, from your son.”
