By Buster Guy, Second Year, English
As his band thump a blistering bassline through the many bodies drawn out to the O2 Bristol Academy, the self-dubbed Mr Maserati limbers up to defend his stage. Arriving, Baxter Dury paces to its limits, a panther at his perimeter who flourishes before us as he reaches the chorus, a peacock in the form of a middle-aged man.
Awareness and humility define the drama of his performance. It strikes me that Baxter is exactly the kind of person people can aspire to be – a kind of person his father, Ian Dury, was not. And I can’t help but ask myself: how has this come to be?
Baxter’s show invites you down this line of thought, his set containing a selection of self-chronicles which discuss his father’s impact on his early life. Vulnerably, he stares down the amorphous, lop-sided entity his childhood now represents, as something blocks his glimmering cockney eye from rendering it fully.
‘Aylesbury Boy’ attempts to piece together a familial throughline in a childhood surrounded by ‘lipstick on the collar’ and a father rather concerned with ‘speaking more lowbrow’, Ian Dury’s bloke-persona taking precedence over raising young Baxter. The younger Dury is now aged and able to recognise his parents were ‘just off chirpsing that alcoholic’. In fact, he was often left under the custody of the erratic and feared Pete Rush, known as the ‘Sulphate Strangler’.
In performance, he is a raconteur. He towers and boasts his chest to his enthralled company, stressing his exaggerated, child-like delivery even more than on record. His mad-dog dramatism transforms a swaggering strut into a poignant performance, acting out his turbulent childhood where he plays both reprobate father and resistless child.
It is without question that Ian Dury was a cultural linchpin to a disenfranchised and misrepresented London working-class. For this, he must be, and is, celebrated. Even critics surround and bolster the elder Dury as a modern poet of great skill, Fiachra Gibbons eulogising him as the ‘Renaissance Geezer’, a term which I sincerely wonder of what he would have made.
As a mouthpiece, however, Ian Dury can be seen to box his audience in, painting his culture with broad strokes and speaking of social experiences in their simplest terms. He spoke of bar-room shenanigans and laddish exploits, in lieu of stand-up comedy. Ian’s generation and his following were told collectively to point their fingers and laugh at various characters his wit chose to mock, and then move on. While unifying to the many, perhaps his flippantness forms a streak in his personality which translates to a lack of care for his partners, and his children.
But Baxter’s more-than-justified frustration at his upbringing features more as a soliloquy to the rest of his performance, which does not confront his father as much as it rewrites what it means to be a Dury. For it is biologically bonded that Baxter inherits his father’s voice, its drawl and charisma allowed to speak for itself yet again, with Baxter adamant on changing its meaning.
Baxter is instead an analyst: in every way, his persona takes responsibility. The electric single ‘Schadenfreude’ is a humorous study into his own pathetic psyche seething with insecurity. Speaking of somebody who socially snubs him, he ponders ‘A busy stage will solve my pain / And you'll be another ghost / That never knew how much I thought about’, admitting the validation his career allows him – upon reading that this character’s show has been panned in the media, he wickedly announces ‘I still got Schadenfreude’. He knows himself, and presents his flaws to us on a platter, rather than directing us elsewhere.
Nevertheless, if there was ever a man to deliver the fragility of the male ego with a sexual, superstar brilliance, it is Baxter Dury. The disco masterpiece album Allbarone on which his tour hinges is a complete reversal of the Ian Dury prototype – introspective and vulnerable lyricism, celebrated with vicious and pounding music. He isn’t only comfortable in misery; he revels in it.
In this, there lies the main similarity the father and son’s personas share – a tongue-in-cheek hubris. As performers, they are caricature-ish figures, but Baxter’s clownlike drama allows him licence to be both mean and kind. His insults are associated with his mock-playing of a privileged, ‘toxic male’, gesticulating with a narcissistic, melodramatic rage, the discarded remnants of what male insecurity wishes themselves to be. In ‘playing-it-up’, he makes fun of himself, and the fickle, much-distracted modern consciousness. He invites us to join him in a kind-of collective, self-absolving experience. By acting braggadocios, he reveals himself to be more humble, more introspective.
Role-playing is something Baxter has slowly honed throughout his career. In a recent interview, Dury told Lauren Laverne that his first taste of his current profession was performing Ian Dury’s ‘My Old Man’ at the father’s wake aged 29, only after which he decided to pursue music.
Somewhat poetically, the death of Ian birthed Baxter-the-artist, whose early work like Len Parrot’s ‘Memorial Lift’ and ‘Floor Show’ aligned itself with noise rock, sulking and merely ‘expressing’. Now having dealt with the vestiges of his confusing childhood and maturing, his social reflections take precedence in his music and his life. It speaks volumes that Baxter keeps his family life private and proudly declares how dear his son is to him in interviews, while Ian slapped a seven-year-old Baxter on the front cover of his 1977 album, titled New Boots and Panties!!
The show concludes with his collaboration with Fred again.., professing ‘As I look around / All I see is fragile hearts… / And you are my friend’ to an entrancing house-beat. He smiles and says ‘I love you Bristol’ more times than my adrenalized self could manage to count.
Dabrowka Nowak
His music, his persona, the show itself are all cathartic strippings of a hardened exterior to reveal genuine empathy and compassion. And I am certain that Baxter loves you.
My verdict: a Dury is out, a Dury is in.
Featured image: Epigram / Buster GuyAre you a Dury fan?
){kind=link}