The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘My father was like a pot-soaked Fagin’
How rock star Ian Dury left his son Baxter to be raised by a drug-dealing roadie called ‘the Strangler’
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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.
He was playing with his band in the basement when Baxter was born in 1971, showing up briefly to coo over his second child before heading back downstairs. What followed can best be described as “benign neglect” as Baxter and his sister Jemima bounced between households, his mother, the painter Elizabeth Rathmell, having separated from Dury when Baxter was three. Things got more chaotic after his father’s belated ascent to stardom, which meant being “shoved around between an assortment of managers, minders, girlfriends and roadies, some more begrudging than others”. Bullied at school, Baxter became a perpetually truanting, shoplifting, drug-taking, graffitibombing teenage tearaway, and at 14 was sent to live full time with his father, in a superfically impressive apartment, with a 60-foot balcony overlooking the Thames.
“Inside it was a s---hole,” Baxter notes. “The front room had a broken antique chair and a rotting chaise longue (which becomes Baxter’s bed). The television was on top of an old dessert trolley and a huge Union Jack which some sailors had stripped from HMS Belfast covered one wall.” A lady friend of Dury’s named Anthea Cocktail “liked to throw furniture, and on a few occasions herself, into the river after an argument”. Dury presided over Baxter and his misfit pals like “a pot-soaked Fagin”, getting them stoned and playing jazz records on giant studio speakers.
When a neighbour showed up armed with a hammer to demand a halt to the ominous sound permeating the building “like a hundred baritone witches”, he was escorted by the grinning Dury to a room where an Australian Aborigine, naked but for a loin cloth, was perched over a bath, playing a digeridoo. “The neighbour was trapped in a world only dreamed up in his worst nightmares and, now fully traumatised, froze. Sensing his vulnerability, dad squeezed him on the arm and whispered, ‘You’re OK, You’re OK.’”
Baxter would go on to forge his own intriguing musical career, and fans interested in the inspiration
behind the eccentrics who populate his albums such as The Night Chancers will find plenty of clues in these pages, which are filled with peculiar characters such as Spider, the Mole and, most discouragingly, the Sulphate Strangler, “a 6ft7 malodorous giant” whom Dury left in charge of his son whenever he disappeared for months on end. A drug-addled, drug-dealing, “professionally violent” Led Zeppelin roadie, the Strangler became a surrogate parent for Baxter in a world where “the clocks had turned upside down and I could live by night, unflustered by the petty inconveniences that frustrated everyday folk”.
Chaise Longue is a short, amusing, alarming and subtly sad memoir, punctuated by mind-boggling anecdotes related with nuance and zest, which just about make up for its wayward style. The narrative is framed by the deaths of Baxter’s parents, who both contracted terminal cancer in their 50s, with the material between haphazardly organised, jumping back and forth in time. “I never really went to school so this is a personal triumph of sustained effort,” explains Baxter. The many educational establishments from which he truanted may not be so sympathetic. When a deputy head of Chiswick School phoned home to discuss Baxter’s absences, he was given short shrift by Dury: “Why don’t you f--- off, you snotty little maggot!”
Mercifully, Chaise Longue is no Daddy Dearest exercise in parental character assassination. Baxter has a lot of confused affection for his complicated father, who was consigned to sadistic care homes as a disabled nine-year-old after spending 18 months bed-ridden with polio. “He was equally brutalised and smothered in affection as a child and had strong tendencies towards both kindness and cruelty as a result,” writes Baxter. “I accepted that I was marginalised by his need to do what he wanted first and then be a father later. His energy to succeed was a route to protecting himself against what he had suffered to get there. He was the solution to my chaos but maybe the source of it, too.”