Baxter Dury, son of Ian Dury, there, that’s that out of the way first as I am sure that he is fed up of being compared with his Dad, inevitable though it is. My copy arrived yesterday and I played it today knowing only the opening track, Miami, which has had a lot of plays on Radio 6 over the last month or so, in fact, it’s the reason I bought the album. It turns out Baxter had his heart broken last year and this pretty much seems to be a break album, but a very short one clocking in at only 29 minutes, I have 12″ singles that last that long.
The album version of Miami is rather more sweary than the radio friendly one and is a little more sneery and sinister as a result, but damn good, here it is for your listening pleasure:
Miami
Like it? It’s a grower, honest. So the rest of the album, the tracks are short and to the point and some barely feature a Dury vocal at all. One track that does feature a vocal but has about the sparsest lyrics of any song ever and somehow manages to be quite brilliant is ‘Letter Bomb’. It’s one minute and forty two seconds of pop genius with an extremely dark subject matter, don’t believe me? Try it for yourself:
Letter Bomb
In a recent interview he says, “It’s about letterbombs, to be honest. I just wanted to shout it out.” But not long after he admits it was inspired by an earlier romantic split. “A very harsh speaking girl I went out with once, and when we split up she said ‘babe, it’s in the post’. I said ‘what’s in the post’ and she said ‘your feelings babe.’ She was right – boom, uggh!”
If it was 1978 a 7″ vinyl of ‘Letter Bomb’ would sell by the bucketload, really, it would.
‘Prince of Tears’, which is allegorical in a way I think, in a straight forward sort of way, has a video I really like, although the track is another grower really.
Prince of Tears
| A1 | Miami | |
| A2 | Porcelain | |
| A3 | Mungo | |
| A4 | Listen | |
| A5 | Almond Milk | |
| B1 | Letter Bomb | |
| B2 | Oi | |
| B3 | August | |
| B4 | Wanna | |
| B5 | Prince Of Tears |
This is the first Baxter Dury album I’ve ever bought and there is certainly enough here to make me want to go through the back catalogue a bit more. I have heard some of the tracks from previous albums but never in more than a cursory way.
Rating: 8.1
ooops, my bad!
