Chaise Longue

★★★★ Baxter Dury

CORSAIR. £16.99

Penetrating reflections on growing up around his Blockhead dad.

Six albums down, here finally is the crucial piece in the Baxter Dury jigsaw: his unflinching memoir of a childhood torpedoed by his father’s success with Ian Dury & The Blockheads. Passed like a hot potato between separated parents, young Baxter is a predictable tearaway, who hospitalises himself regularly, and urinates on Joe Strummer from The Clash firebrand’s own roof. After his painter mum’s nearfatal car accident, he winds up at his dad’s Hammersmith flat, relegated to the couch (hence book title) once an ex-Led Zeppelin roadie known as The Sulphate Strangler moves in as his surrogate carer. Amid the rolling succession of nutcases and capers, Dury Sr looms large, a “pot-soaked Fagin” equally prone to control-freakery and tears, crushed by his own attentionseeking ambitions, but affectionately remembered with mature perspective. Fittingly chaotic and nonlinear, but razor sharp and side-splitting throughout, Chaise Longue is one rock autobiography not to miss – a Withnail & I-style cult classic in waiting.