With his sharply observed vignettes and wry character studies of inadequate men, Dury remains in the shadow of his father Ian – but what a place to be
There is a certain irony in the fact that Baxter Dury’s fifth album is released on the same day as a 4CD super-deluxe box set version of his father Ian’s 1977 masterpiece New Boots and Panties!! Any child of a beloved rock star who choses to follow them into the family business is guaranteed a tough time escaping their shadow, but Baxter Dury has had it tougher than most, a state of affairs not much helped by the fact that his career has thus far evinced something of the leisurely hobbyist. All his albums have something to commend them, but they appear sporadically – six years separated his second, Floorshow, from its successor, 2011’s Happy Soup – and tend to clock in at around half an hour each. The sense of a man not overly exerting himself is hard to shake off.
Initially, at least, he tried to put clear distance between himself and his dad: Ian Dury covered a lot of musical ground over the course of his career, from disco to reggae to rock’n’roll to music hall, but one thing he never dabbled in was the kind of dark, smeared psychedelia found on his son’s 2002 debut album Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift. Nevertheless, his DNA proved too strong to be denied. You could hear it in his son’s dropped-aitch vocals, his penchant for character studies in which wry humour and bleakness vie for prominence, and occasionally in his lyrical imagery: “Ferrero Rocher prostitutes, Primark debutantes in boots,” he sang on the 2014 single Pleasure, a line that it doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to hear his father delivering with a leer. There seems something telling about the fact that the country in which Baxter Dury is most successful is one in which his dad made little headway: France, where Dury Sr’s career was apparently stymied by an inadvisable dalliance with the wife of his record company’s boss.
from Music | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2gJdwdQ
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