![]() If anything, we get a little closer to the evolving image of Baxter Dury - something he openly tackles in I Thought I Was Better Than You. I'm not that attached to what's very permanent.” Did he enjoy the selective process? “I did and I didn't, because I switch off to what I like every other day. He’s non-committal in his reasoning, but one thing is for sure, he thinks Frank Ocean is a clever man. Dury’s choices don’t lean towards the permanence of Desert Island Discs, but more the ever-changing mood of a Discover Weekly. I guess it's a family trait - the avant-garde wordy types.”Įach of Dury’s Nine Songs selections come with their own story. There’s a valve missing in my head, so words can leak out very readily. I find too many words sometimes offensive, and I try and pull back from that. “My wordsmithery is compensation for my lack of singing. There’s room for the ideas to be relatable as they take on multiple meanings - he’s a poet indulging in the abstract. I Thought I Was Better Than You invites you into the wandering mind of Dury questioning his identity. ![]() There has to be a foggy abstractness to a song for it to work.” A documentary narrative starts to make it less mysterious. “You don't want to over-document in a song because it burdens you too much. ![]() It’s clear that Dury doesn’t want to be seen as a concrete figure that you can fully understand. Our protagonist is noncommittal with his phrases, both lyrically and conversationally. I thought I'd do it a bit badly, by the nature of the kind of music I make, so I wasn't pretending to be that.”ĭury’s lyrics indulge in the disgusting, provocative, and loose seductive meanings that Virginia Woolf called a stream of consciousness. I made it sound very candid, but also more mysterious, in a way that people who do hip-hop really well do very convincingly. I used what I may have felt growing up, you know, we were these bohemians - West London, urban, multicultural things - and our accents and everything were all a bit of a mutation” he explains. “It was a lazy reference, because I didn't know what else to do and I thought I'd appropriate it in a faux hip-hop way. On his new album I Thought I Was Better Than You he asks, “Who am I?”Īs his seventh studio album - and latest since the release of his memoir Chaise Longue - the songs reflect the chapters of Dury’s life, portraying the bohemians, the avant-garde types, the sausage-meat-thighed-men, the famous father and the Aylesbury boy himself, in all their faults and glory. In fact, he beats you to any assumptions of his image. There’s a stark contrast between the outspoken Renaissance protestor and the man sitting in front of me, but Dury is entirely aware of it. What version of Baxter Dury was I expecting? “I think I project a bit of a dangerous character, that people are either relieved or disappointed I'm not.” I tune into a Zoom with Baxter Dury - no middleman, no waiting room - just a smiling Dury in his flat on the Thames.
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