More about: Baxter Dury

If you see Baxter Dury wearing a soldier’s uniform on stage in the near future, then don’t think about it too hard: he’s going on a tangent. After twenty years of being indie music’s most verbose, sex-driven lounge lizard, Baxter’s looking for a new channel for his music. The “Soldier of Hope” could be it. “I’m going to get rid of the rubbish ‘80s suit and start wearing Gulf War clothes,” he says drily. 

Soldier of Hope. It’s one of several epithets that Baxter produces during our interview, Multi-Media Tsar and Captain Cheap being two others. Titles such as these are a common occurrence in his music as well as his everyday speech, and many of them are bound up in the persona that the artist has nurtured over two decades of making music. ‘Miami’, still one of his most popular songs, is throbbing with them: “I’m The Sausage Man” he deadpans on one of several outstanding verses, “The Shadow Licker”. “I’m The Great Sleeper, I’m The Book-Keeper, I’m The Vicar, I’m The Main Course…” he continues.

“Mr. Maserati,” he spits in an overblown London accent on the same song, a lyric that is now being recycled as the title for his first ever compilation album, Mr. Maserati 2001-2021. Out in December, its accompanying artwork shows a deliciously tacky gold necklace font spread across a black cover, once again aping the seedy glamour of the music contained within.

Mr. Maserati indicates well the contents of the tin, but there were so many epithets to choose from. Out of all of them, why this one? Like everything else Baxter does, it wasn’t something he thought about too hard. “A Maserati is high-street aspitational, isn’t it? And I thought he was an umbrella man that could connect all the songs. It’s a cheap, aspirational man.” It’s the perfect name for the collection, which is a wrapping (and as you’ll later hear, potential swansong) of some of Baxter’s best. 

“It took me about four minutes,” Baxter says of choosing and ordering the tracks. “There were some obvious by popularity to some extent” (‘Miami’, ‘Cocaine Man’, ‘Other Men’s Girls’, ‘Prince of Tears’), “a few nuanced ones,” (‘Leak At The Disco’, ‘Oi’, ‘Carla’s Got A Boyfriend’),  “and a new one” (‘D.O.A’). “There wasn’t ever an argument,” he smiles benignly, “no one was like: ‘you’ve got to use the Egg Fluffer from 1989!’ or whatever.” He pauses for a moment, soon adding: “I didn’t have a song called the Egg Fluffer…but it sounds quite dancey!”

Truly, these tracks are some of Baxter’s best—and after twenty years and seven albums, there were plenty to choose from. First coming to music in 2002 with the fully-formed Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift (“I made that first one on the spot, I didn’t know what I was doing”), Baxter was soon flinging albums out every three years or so. Floor Show followed in 2005, Happy Soup in 2011, It’s a Pleasure in 2014, Prince of Tears in 2017, Delilah Holliday and Étienne De Crécy collaboration B.E.D in 2018 and, most recently, the fabulously corrupt 2020 album The Night Chancers. 

Through the past two decades, you can track the evolution of Baxter Dury’s Persona. In many of his songs, lazy guitars loop and synths pulsate as a (usually female) singing voice balances out Baxter’s hyper-masculine spoken-word poetry. Baxter himself calls his music “stagnant”, though we will respectfully disagree: there is definite world-building in each of these seven albums while each also shows a different side to Baxter’s songwriting and production qualities. It doesn’t matter what you tell Baxter though: after twenty years and a wardrobe of cheap suits, he’s is done with the Mr. Maserati figure. “Recently I’ve been tired of my own music,” he says without a trace of disappointment, “I couldn’t go and do the same thing ever again. I’m a bit bored of the character of me being this drowsy, drugged-up, drinky night man. I’m 50 and playing with this sexualised French music! It’s a bit cheap and a bit patronising.” 

“I am,” he concludes, “bored of it.”

With his recent single ‘D.O.A’—a wild-card track on Mr. Maserati that’s all about mournful keys and a new vocal rhythm—Baxter stars in an attached visual that sees him day-drinking in a near-empty strip club. Baxter considers the following: “Maybe this signifies the last point of that [character]”.

For fans of Baxter’s Gallic, testosterone-infused lounge songs, this is both bad and good news. Perhaps we won’t see more of his shiny suit, his growling drawl or themes of unsavoury characters, but the promise of Baxter searching for “a new person” to embody in his music is an exciting one. Besides, we’re not losing Baxter himself: the guy in his music has never much represented himself anyway. “I’m not even that druggy or anything,” he tells me, “so it’s a characteristic of the music rather than it is a lifestyle thing.”

Lockdown, the “woke generation” and his own son Kosmo have led Baxter to become “bored” by his own act. “There was a big revision in lockdown about race and sexuality and stuff and even I thought ‘agh! where are we and who am I!’ I don’t like the idea that I’ve been accidentally exploitative…I don’t think I have but I’m just sensitive to it.”

His son, with whom he lived during lockdown, not only helped Baxter to “back off” from the “crude elements” in his music, but was able to help his dad focus long enough to write Chaise Longue, a memoir about his time spent in the care of his own father’s friend The Sulphate Strangler. “I find I’ve run out of people to inspire me,” Baxter says, “but he does. He’s really clever” he says of his son, who studied for his A Levels during lockdown, earning three A*s. 

Kosmo, now his dad’s biggest inspiration, also helped introduce Baxter to modern-day hip-hop. A wildly diverse genre that Baxter has fallen hard for, he’s particularly enamoured by Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean and Tyler, The Creator, three artists he also namechecks as inspirations on ‘D.O.A’. 

“They’re 100% brilliant, these people,” he says, “and I didn’t realise they were that good. They were even more interesting than I ever began to give them credit for. Shit, this is as good as music I ever imagined existed!” He smiles apologetically, and adds: “It’s not like it’s not popular; it’s the most popular music in the world. I feel a bit clumsy going ‘by the way everybody; what about this guy?’” 

It’s clear that the passion is real though: He calls Frank Ocean’s songwriting “off the scale” and says of Kendrick, simply: “ he’s fucking unbelievable.” While he’s going to work to avoid appropriating music and cultures that aren’t his, it looks very likely (particularly when you consider the new tones that appear in ‘D.O.A’) that Baxter’s future music could travel down these avenues. 

He’s also interested in broadening his horizons, ushered on by the success and the enjoyment he got out of writing Chaise Longue. “You write a book, you go off on a different adventure, you go to Belfast and meet weird people—that’s fun,” he says of the new adventure he’s been having on book tours across the UK. There’s likely a television screenplay adaptation of Chaise Longue in the works too, which Baxter is keen to get involved with. He’d even like to try fiction (“but it’s fucking hard.”) 

He’s clearly considered the change deeply: “I think you just shift,” he says of his new ambitions and desire to try new sounds. “You need to entertain yourself. There’s a stagnant property in my music: I don’t think I’ve changed that much. I’m not that versatile and I can’t sing, so there’s not some sort of great journey for me.”  

It may sound as if Baxter spends much of this interview browbeating himself or fishing for compliments, but to sit and listen to him speak is something completely different. Since the pre-pandemic Night Chancers campaign, there seems to have taken place a significant shift in Baxter’s ambitions: this feels merely like him letting everyone else know what he has already decided: Mr. Maserati is dead. Long live Baxter Dury. 

This interview first appeared in Gigwise 2: The Back To The Future Issue. Buy a copy here. Mr. Maserati 2001-2021 arrives 11 February via Heavenly Recordings.

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More about: Baxter Dury