In the last week of October, the middle-aged Baxter Dury and the boy Baxter Dury were brought together. The 45-year-old man released his fifth album, Prince of Tears, his best so far. The five-year-old boy, meanwhile, appeared on the cover of New Boots and Panties!!, by his father Ian Dury, released in 1977, but re-released in a bells-and-whistles deluxe edition the same day Prince of Tears came out.
You wouldn’t listen to Prince of Tears and conclude that Baxter was Ian’s son, but once you know they are related it becomes hard not to hear generational echoes. The opening song, ‘Miami’, is the kind of wrong-un character study that the elder Dury used to engage in, but updated for a colder age, in which the drugs and the delusions have changed. ‘Miami’ fancies himself a coked-up Florida gangster, rather than an East End bovver boy.
Across the brief span of the album Dury captures not just latent violence, but also many different shades of maleness, including, on ‘Oi’, the strange combination of resentment and nostalgia and victory that comes with remembering school bullies: ‘Do you remember me?/ You broke my nose once/ It fucking hurt/ I’ve been thinking about you/ Wondering if you’re in prison/ I went to live on the river and got into media.’ They’re strange little stories that seem like disconnected scenes from an unedited movie. It’s a really terrific album, as much Serge Gainsbourg as East End music hall.
‘I see the songs as being like The Sopranos, the scenes where he goes to therapy and you have amazing singing fish, and weird little things that mirror events that are true, but have been abstractified,’ he says. ‘Or like a Coen brothers film.’
The chap eating smoked salmon and scrambled eggs in a café in Kensal Rise, the gentrifying west London district in which he lives, isn’t much like Miami, except for the geezery voice.
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