The best opening lyric Baxter Dury ever wrote
The power of a good opening line can never be understated. Everyone from Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Joni Mitchell has previously pondered that very notion.
People view lyrics very differently. For some, the lyrics are the most important part of a song, as they help provide deeper insight not only into the artist who wrote them but also those who find themselves listening. They establish a connection between creator and consumer, and succeed in making what can often feel like a lonely world, less so.
Then you have people who view lyrics as a tool to further enhance the way a song sounds, but not necessarily provide any more depth to it. You hear this a lot in both punk and shoegaze, as punk bands in the modern era tend to write songs about mundane topics to try and inject a sense of irony into the angry instrumentation. Meanwhile, with shoegaze, you have artists who make the lyrics barely legible, using them instead like another instrument to help layer a track.
For these people who don’t necessarily care too much about how well lyrics hit, the opening line isn’t really something they stress over. However, when you have artists who see their words as an extension of themselves, they will pine over that opening forever and a day in a bid to make sure it’s perfect.
The creative process is nothing more than a series of starts. You start with a note, with a word, with an idea, and once you have said starting point, you also have something you can build upon. The building upon element of that process is the easy part; it’s stumbling upon the start, which can often prove tricky. The opening line remains one of the biggest hurdles wordsmiths find themselves confronted with, but when they eventually jump over it, it’s a truly magnificent thing.
One of the greatest writers in modern music is Baxter Dury. This is an artist whose existence revolves around words. No, disregarding the poetry embedded within music for this writer, every single syllable he utters is one of decadence that adds another level to his music and plays like Shakespearean sonnets put to sound.
Interestingly, Dury’s mindset when it comes to writing goes against everything I’ve just said. While I might romanticise the struggle that is the first line, Dury admitted in an interview with Far Out that he doesn’t take his words too seriously. He attests that what we hear in his music is a blend of real and fiction, of carefully contrived and barely considered, a mosaic of jargon that winds up as poetry.
“You know, when we talk about songwriting and stuff, and they go, well, this and that, and what does it mean? I go, I don’t fucking know,” he said, “I sort of grab at stuff, and some of it’s real and some of it’s not. I mash it all up, and as long as no one gets too offended, I sort of censor it, and then I put it out there.”
I’m not sure I believe Dury here. If he didn’t consider his words all that seriously, then how does he come up with some of the profound, beautiful and often funny lyrics that his fans celebrate him for? Throughout his discography, you will stumble upon what sound like incredibly carefully constructed songs, as they come packed with meaning, whether Dury intends to dance around such topics or not.
So, in a maze of these words, which are Dury’s best openers? In this humble writer’s opinion, they come on the track ‘I’m Not Your Dog’, which has an opening that captures Dury’s humour and skill as a writer by using the power of subversion. The song opens with anger, an anger which is captured in one line wonderfully, but then our perception of the track changes with the second. It’s truly a testament to doing a lot with a little.
“I’m not your fucking friend,” he declares in the opening line, before following it up with, “Trying to be though.” They may not be the kind of words that avid music fans would tattoo on them, but they capture who Baxter Dury is as an artist pretty wonderfully. They’re fun, they’re passionate, and most importantly, unpredictable.
