Release Date 3rd December
We’ve had two decades of Baxter Dury’s louche sardonic music, twenty years – twenty years! – of late-night London snapshots, shuffling basslines, comedown disco tunes, all run through with seedy bleakness and a sweet love for humanity. This month Heavenly releases Mr Maserati, collecting tracks from across Dury’s six albums, plus a new song, D.O.A., which was co-written with his son Kosmo and which gives a gorgeous glimpse of what Baxter might get up to in the next decade or two.
“I don’t really think I warrant a ‘best of’ album,” says Dury. He’s wrong, though, and the selection here is stellar: the oldest song, Oscar Brown, is a wistful spooky slice of pop that can somehow put you in mind of The Carpenters and Spiritualized and haunted arcade games and a rotten sadness at the heart of England; a couple of years later we’ve got Cocaine Man, with its grim-sweet singalong chorus, a signature Dury surrealist wide-boy monologue and a half-submerged hook that does sound a bit like the Bloodhound Gang; Leak At The Disco, a provincial horror story from 2011’s Happy Soup, opens with Club Tropicana birdsong and a sweet guitar pulse and ends, after a shitty Chiswick night out, with Apocalypse Now helicopters; there’s the sinister bontempi-ish serenade of Palm Trees, and the poignant, daft and tender Oi; last year’s Carla’s Got A Boyfriend is funny and sexy and sad, with some of Dury’s finest lyrics and a frankly lovely Balearic Chris Rea guitar twang. What riches we have here! Baxter Dury’s career has snuck up on us: he’s quietly built a back catalogue of absolute beauties.