Born in 1971, Baxter Dury is a musician and author of the memoir Chaise Longue. The son of the Blockheads’ frontman Ian Dury and artist Betty Rathmell, Baxter released his first EP in 2002, 25 years after appearing on the cover of his father’s hit debut solo album, New Boots and Panties!! He has since put out seven albums of sharply observed experimental indie, including I Thought I Was Better Than You, released on 2 June. He plays at the Roundhouse in London on 18 October.
I have a ghostly, tunnel-visioned impression of the moment this photograph was taken for the album cover. I was quite a curious kid with hybrid interests, so I’m in flares and what look like football boots. There’s a fair bit of mythology generated around the shot because Dad was a bullshitter, and consequently so am I, but the recollection I have of that day is that he said: “I’m getting my picture taken. Come along with me.” Being bored, I went. I walked into the shot and said: “Can we go now?” There were four frames taken, and he decided it would become the album cover. That was that. It’s my only memory of being five, which is weird. (The images shown here feature the original album cover photograph retouched to include a portrait by Sir Peter Blake for a tribute album released in 2001 after Ian Dury’s death.)
We would have been pretty impoverished at the time. Dad made no money from music at this point. My parents split up when I was little and I was mostly living with Mum and my sister, Jemima, in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in a run-down house. Two Pakistani kids called Amjid and Ajmal who lived next door were my best mates, and they used to come over and we’d get Dad’s record on. We found the song Plaistow Patricia hilarious because of the swearing. But the walls were paper thin, so their dad would overhear the expletives and they’d get severely reprimanded. I hadn’t realised what subversive people we must have seemed. Devil people with our devil art.
I have amazing memories of my childhood, but we were on the breadline. Dad lived in London, near the Oval, in a council flat that didn’t have a toilet, so you had to use a local bar. He used to cut my hair back then. But after New Boots and Panties!! came out, there was a boom period when all the royalties came in and we behaved like there was an endless stream of money. Dad devoured the cash and at one point he lived in the Montcalm hotel. Jemima and I would get dropped off at the entrance and the concierge would freak out at the unwashed, feral kids running through their premises. We’d end up ordering loads of club sandwiches in Dad’s room. It was pure decadence.
When Dad was back from tour, he’d give me amazing presents like a Scalextric or a Nintendo computer from America. To have toys like that in the street where we grew up in Aylesbury was a shocking symbol of our differences. That’s when it started to feel like “us and them”. People started throwing stones at our car when we were travelling around. An ill will appeared. I started feeling like we were in two worlds.
I was mostly brought up by my mum who was artistic but gentle and conventional. She wasn’t in a pot-smoking fraternity like Dad was. He got up at 12 in the afternoon; she got up at a normal hour. But when I was about 13 I moved in with Dad. He was in a chaotic state of mind, one career had drawn to a halt, and he wasn’t in the healthiest state. I exploited that to do what I wanted. He did have one girlfriend who made sure I ate vegetables, though. It was an issue at the time, but now I appreciate it.
As well as the girlfriends, there was a cult of traumatised men in our house. Dad caught polio when he was a kid, and was sent to hospital in the 1950s. He was taught to survive in brutal, Victorian conditions, and saw real emotional bloodshed from a young age. But he learned to surface against all the odds and became a 5ft 4in pop singer. Because of his defiance, others often looked to him for guidance. The Sulphate Strangler, for example. Essentially he was a big overweight bloke with asthma, but when you give someone a nickname like that, you perceive them differently. He was homeless, so Dad let him live with us, but it wasn’t totally altruistic. Dad was going on tour and needed someone to monitor me. The Strangler needed somewhere to live, so he became a cheap nanny. This is not to say I’ve inherited some kind of trauma from the Strangler or Dad. In some ways, I think it was one of Dad’s experiments. He wanted to make sure I didn’t do that, but he wanted me to know what it was like to be like them.
I kept away from music for a long time. When Dad died in 2000 I was beginning to write songs, and then I met Geoff Travis from Rough Trade, who probably didn’t care much about my lineage. He was a purist indie guy who liked weird music. That being said, when I did my first gig there was a wall of photographers – I knew that was disproportionate for where I was at professionally at the time. Having connections gets you attention quicker, but you’ve got to have something else, otherwise people are just aware that you’re shit quicker. You have to have substance and something to say to stick around. Otherwise it’s nothing.
Dad went out of this world like he came into it. He designed his death like a control freak: I sang his song My Old Man on stage at the Forum in Kentish Town at his wake, and at the funeral there was a procession of horses, and a carriage with “Durex” spelt out in flowers. It was over the top and very sad. To lose both my mum and dad by 28 was hard, but Jemima and I are pretty well-adjusted and strong at doing our thing. We owe that to our parents.
My son and I now live in the flat Dad bought in west London. When we moved in, our neighbours, who’ve been there for decades, were like: “Oh my God, no! They’re returning!” I was like: “No, wait! We’re different!” And we are. It’s a nicer era to be a parent than when I was young, because we’ve broken down the generational roles. I love being a parent, and I think I’m a good dad – a bit more hands-on and involved than the generation above us. Plus, in a very healthy way, we don’t talk about my career much. Kosmo doesn’t care about fame and the expectation of being arty. He finds it a bit dull. My dad, however, was relentless for a reason. He didn’t have any way of switching off from his work, because of his brutal past.
As a budget nepo baby, I’ve learned not to fight legacy. You have to shrug it off, but also love it, as it’s family. I wouldn’t have done this shoot 10 years ago – I would have felt awkward acknowledging the unnecessary propulsion of having a career via DNA. But I learned to calm down about Dad, because it’s actually a lovely thing. Of all the complications that I grew up around, being a musician and the son of Ian Dury is not one of them.
