“Hey Mummy? Hey Daddy? Who am I? Who am I Mummy? Who am I?”
Baxter will always beat you to the punchline. He’ll answer his own questions and he’ll volunteer himself as the butt of the joke before you can. His ability to understand people’s perception of him (or who they believe he is) is what has kept his work consistently surprising and inventive for over two decades now. And while it’s his humour that draws you in, it’s his linguistic acrobatics that you stay for – a wild barrage of emotion, colour and off kilter scenes.
Baxter Dury’s latest album, I Thought I Was Better Than You, is a new era for him, and with this new era comes a new character. “Faux-confrontational,” Baxter calls him. Here, not only is he recounting his childhood, but he’s also reckoning with it. Instead of just swinging at his past blindfolded with a baseball bat, he talks openly about the toxic cocktail of being born into unfortunately fortunate circumstances, with a persuasive surname but no structure or sense of responsibility with which reap the rewards of it. “Really, it’s about being trapped in an awkward place between something you’re actually quite good at, and somebody else’s success.” That ‘somebody else’ being his dad, Ian Dury. As one of the album centrepieces – Shadow – agonisingly puts it: “But no one will get over that you’re someone’s son/Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean/But you don’t sound like him, you sound just like Ian.”
Dan Donovan: Daniel Donovan is an English keyboardist, composer, photographer and remixer. He was a founding member of Big Audio Dynamite and of Dreadzone.
Grantly: Having started out putting on underground parties in London’s Warehouses and the countryside of the home counties in the early nineties Grantly has been DJing for over 25 years. He is one of the resident DJs at Glastonbury’s Rabbit Hole where he runs the highly acclaimed Funkingham Palace dance floor.
He is also the founder of the ‘Little People’ Party collective and organiser of some truly classic underground dance parties in many corners of the globe. His DJ style is truly varied but is most at home in front of a late night or early morning deep Tech house crowd who are not afraid to experiment.