Chaise Longue

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The album itself is produced by Paul White. In Baxter’s words “a freethinking dude, very relaxed, and a peaceful dude to be around”. It was White (Danny Brown producer and half of Golden Rules) who gave Baxter a kind of permission to create the record, whilst also becoming an architect hired to build the correct kinds of structures and platforms for Baxter to bounce off. “I had a lot of songs but he can make beats breathe and feel quite natural. He’s good at just letting things be. He doesn’t overthink it”. Baxter Dury was introduced to the world as a five-year-old urchin, standing alongside his dad on the cover of Ian Dury’s classic 1977 debut album New Boots and Panties!!. Dury’s gifts as an audaciously witty lyricist and charismatic performer made him a household name in Britain. His parental skills, however, left a lot to be desired. Maybe they were rhetorical, but either way, they raise certain images, and ideas, in the mind about who does what, about what goes where…yet still “it doesn’t really answer anything. It has no real, deep social commentary that’s valid to anyone. It’s a kind of Pinocchio nonsense”.

The aftermath? The aftermath was an acceptance on behalf of a young Baxter that ‘I was marginalised by his need to do what he wanted first, and then be a father later’.This is many different things containing many diverse themes. In parts a book about making sense out of imagined realities. But equally it’s a book; a confessional book , a psychological travelogue, a psychoanalytical constellation, a fascinating piece of work.

Fast forward to now. I ask Baxter does he have any children, and he laughs, somewhat ruefully, as if he fully knew he’d be asked. “I have a son, and we have lived together for years. He’s now 18, we live in the same flat that I write about in the book, and he’s an entirely different species. Can he fry an egg? Actually, he’s completely useless in the kitchen, but there’s a different appreciation of parenting now, isn’t there? I’m much more dedicated to my son, but I think society has attended to or balanced that because everything in that area has changed, or mostly, anyway. Dad was someone who felt awkward in a parental role – he probably cooked twice for me in his life. That was odd but it didn’t feel wrong.” What about those fabulous singles Baxter has put out? Liam…sorry Leon is one of the best pieces of music he has made; what a relief it can be king of the roost’s groove in a way that Miami was, that bruised, bloodied swagger unable to resist the tingles of the neon night, the madness of escapades in ultraviolent drama. “Leon’s pretty autobiographical. Some urban mythologising stuff. It’s also used to sort of…not expose any inadequacies but just to sort of say – awkward moments. It’s about awkward moments. But it’s a real moment. It leans into truths” tells Baxter.Dury, Baxter (15 January 2010). "Baxter Dury: 'My dad was lovely, bubbly ... and annoying' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 17 October 2017. Do you see the album as a companion to the book in that sense? There’s a sizeable and profound, preliminary period in your life that can be sourced and started, in this book, in these stories, aspects of your life that can maybe be sonically mirrored in the compilation which covers a 20-year period. When the spot was burst against the mirrors of the blank generation. When Year Zero had more of a future than Rotten would proclaim. Who couldn’t sing, but could say everything. Or like me, readers react to the kinds of images and respond to the ideas about a torrent of themes that correspond to our own disgruntled lives (mum and dad, new friends, first taste of drugs, first taste of danger). To our own pulsating brains. To our internal lines of questioning. Why it was so suddenly essential and right to publish this recovery, and intimate recitation, this exposé of the fascinating flood of diary entries that right certain personal wrongs, that help colour in certain lines, that assist in joining up one lost dot to another, to ”Clean up some of the muddier facts about it. A dinner party expert about talking about myself, because I think people like me, orphans of a mad world become…appointed, sort of delusional people that go on about their own lives”, says Baxter. Ultimately making one end meet the other end, sitting one tooth of the jigsaw into the mouth of another and assembling the picture with us, watching it happen along with him.

Two decades into a career surely deserves its own monument. The Best Of is the best way to achieve this desire. Baxter Dury is no different. But because it’s Baxter Dury, it’s different in every excitable way you can entertain. By Ryan Walker. Methods of parenting and education have progressed in recent years, especially compared to some of the more casually experimental routes inflicted on children of artistic professionals in the 70s and 80s. One experience that would take some beating is that endured by Baxter Dury. I Thought I Was Better Than You could almost be a concept album, Baxter scratching closer to the surface of himself than ever before, using voice, music and instruments as way of expression, freeing himself of complication through play and creativity, and making a record that sounds good. Baxter Dury, your instinct is always right, don’t change a thing and question everything. The discography of Baxter Dury consists of six studio albums, one collaboration album, one compilation album, one extended play and fourteen singles.

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If the whole point, if the very definition of a Best Of is to produce a litany of things, without fluffs and clutter, to remind us why we fell for the artist in question in the first place, then Mr. Maserati, over its twenty-year time period, puts that definition into perfect practice. It’s an album that encapsulates a spectrum of settings and states of mind, because as Baxter moves the world moves with him. The evolution of an artist is represented in the journey that takes us from a to b, from one to twelve, as it’s the most efficient way to represent a substantial whole: “The work evolves, doesn’t it, as you evolve,” he says, thinking about that career. “We evolve and things change.” Maybe the most genuine aspects of life, a life according to Baxter, the beat of incredible disingenuous confidence, of confident vulnerability, can get misconstrued as solely that – as solely a box of puzzle pieces from different puzzles that don’t flow as one, that fail to fit homogeneously. But they can all be assembled into pictures of utmost honesty. Baxter can emote remotely with a special kind of spectral humility from his nonsensical riverbank, and in turn, birth a brilliant array of truths, but so much more interesting, and inspired than wiping his snotty nose on his stripy shirt sleeve in the name of such well-worn wank mantras as ‘I’ve got a heart too, y’know?’ Not for Baxter. A bohemian through and through. Etched into his helix, like father, like son. Or so they say. But Baxter as the assumed anomaly in the family able to be observed, and understood right here, as one with a unique palette of colours to identify a line and fill in those blanks. To be what dad was not but concurrently become what was always going to work best for a peripatetic young man, constantly unsettled and restless. An exponent of rebellion, betwixt by worlds run by mum and dad, polarities that didn’t agree with a Baxter. unwilling to believe and indifferent to the notion of being able to synchronise, satisfyingly, with his surroundings. Or his surroundings, wherever they might be, whoever might be behind him, unwilling to synchronise with Baxter. Yet worry not, the classic Baxter babble is intact, no matter how replete the tunes are with it, the words that bounce up and down and off all points of the song, in moments of tranquility or restlessness, remain ever-entertaining. “I think some of it goes off on that thing, the flow of it has to be free-form I think as well. When I write it, I try not to over-consider it”.