“I’m a lot less sleazy than what is projected, but I like toying with that character”

Baxter Dury’s new album is populated with louche characters up to misdeeds. Only some of it is biographical, he tells Fiona Shepherd

Baxter Dury grew up in a household where soul, funk and jazz was the name of the game. Early rock’n’roll too – as one might expect, given his dad’s well-documented love of Gene Vincent. No Beatles or Bowie though – Dury discovered them for himself in his 20s when he was still working out what to do with his life, and following his father, the late, loved Ian Dury, into the family trade was not quite on the horizon.

Instead, there was a stint as a runner on Challenge Anneka (“best job I ever had”). Later, there were four months at film school in New York, just as Mayor Giuliani was cleaning up the streets like a corporate Travis Bickle. Dury is still a movie nerd; just check out the video for his current single,

I’m Not Your Dog – an enigmatic little number which tracks a lumbering Dury along a beach at twilight – and feel the filmic force.

Anyway, the point is that it might have taken Dury Jr decades to show the world that he is his father’s son but eventually the confidence he displayed as a five-year-old on the cover of his dad’s brilliant debut album, New Boots and Panties!! was poured into his own music career, along with all of that audio-visual education, and not a little of Dury Sr’s ability to spin a yarn.

Dury has been making and releasing his own music for almost 20 years now but it has been a slow-burn charm offensive. His first semi-public singing appearance was performing some Blockheads songs at his dad’s funeral in 2000, spurring an EP, Oscar Brown, in 2001. His 2002 debut album

Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift sounds like it could have been plucked from his dad’s compendium of character sketches.

“There’s a lot of DNA there, isn’t there?” he says. “It’s not surprising, but even though everyone says I sound like my dad, it’s not a barrier.”

Far from it, Dury has developed his own idiosyncracies over subsequent albums, carving pithy ditties out of behavioural observations, and setting up a deadpan call-andresponse dynamic between his half-spoken baritone drawl and the distinctly unimpressed blank tones of his female backing vocalists over stealthy, slightly sleazy synthesizers which always seem to suggest some sort of mischief is afoot.

“Song is quite an abstract form of storytelling,” he says. “It’s not meant to be too accurate. You need to allow songs to be quite mysterious. You might not relate to the detail, you might relate to a word backed up by a melody, but something will get to you.”