I Thought I Was Better Than You

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I Thought I Was Better Than You

I Thought I Was Better Than You

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£6.275 FREE Shipping

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I Thought I Was Better Than You could almost be a concept album, Baxter scratching closer to the surface of himself than ever before, using voice, music and instruments as way of expression, freeing himself of complication through play and creativity, and making a record that sounds good. Baxter Dury, your instinct is always right, don’t change a thing and question everything. Dury’s UK tour will begin on October 10th, 2023, in Brighton before ending on October 18th at London’s Roundhouse, one of his biggest headline shows to date.

Baxter Dury is the son of Ian Dury and his wife Elizabeth "Betty" Rathmell. [1] As a young boy he appeared on the front cover of Dury's album New Boots and Panties!!. [2] He left school at the age of fourteen. [2] Well, nothing and everything has changed. I mean, things grind on slowly, and yet they’re excitingly different. I just heard on the radio they’re talking about nuclear weapons and I went, “Oh, turn that off…” I can’t think of all the details in between, the peaks and the troughs, you know. Everything’s changed… musically, geographically. You don’t change that much though, do you? You just learn a few devices. You probably sort of set your tone by the age of 12. You know what I mean? In all honesty, there’s always a uniqueness when you do something for the first time and it’s slightly contrived for a while after that because once you learn something or you admit or confirm that you’re good at it, you sort of get worse at it… maybe. You’ve talked about “being trapped in an awkward place between something you’re actually quite good at, and somebody else’s success.” With ‘somebody else’ being your dad, is that something you’ve had to wrestle with during your own solo career? Does he ever get cynical? Cynical at what’s happened to where he came from? “There’s a sort of pastel-jumpered culture here. West London is slightly deprived of what it was”, he says. But when it comes to music, he’s anything but. He understands there is more to the pastel-jumpers, the indie kids, and the art schools than meets the eye. “I mean I’m pretty open-minded and encouraging. Especially music. If it’s a kid making music I’d never, ever say anything about that. I’m never dismissive about anyone else’s music I find it a bit too cruel”, he admits. It’s the dark, sullied heart of these half-lies and the shimmering soul of these half-truths that makes Baxter’s world a fascinating one to get a brief glimpse into; always surprising, the scene within the story with new arrivals of destabilising detail and brain-derailing character profiles that work so wonderfully well when captured in these socially relevant oddities, these acidic snippets of history as it happened, or has happened, or will happen.

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The rambling, rummaging, dialectical comments that litter the album are open-ended ones, purposeful within the framework of how Baxter may view the world, but pointless in a way as those questions don’t really answer anything. “If you’re interested in how the world works, then you see it in a weird way. It’s nice to comment on it” he confirms. A staple vocal presence that compliments even intensifies the rogue, open spaces skulking throughout each moment belongs to Madeline Hart, but new collaborators have cruised through the doors this time with Eska and JGrrey’s vocal abilities (on Pale White Nissan) also feature on the album. “They were kind of people around the manor really. We did it in Deptford and Deptford is an entirely different experience from where I’m from. It’s the other side of the world”, Baxter remembers. “Some of those characters who had lived there all their lives were just part of the process. It was nice coz it’s got a bit of a different personality to it than the snug, West London pomposity fraternity that I belong to. It adds a bit more realness to it”.

The album itself is produced by Paul White. In Baxter’s words “a freethinking dude, very relaxed, and a peaceful dude to be around”. It was White (Danny Brown producer and half of Golden Rules) who gave Baxter a kind of permission to create the record, whilst also becoming an architect hired to build the correct kinds of structures and platforms for Baxter to bounce off. “I had a lot of songs but he can make beats breathe and feel quite natural. He’s good at just letting things be. He doesn’t overthink it”.In October 2017 Dury previewed the releases of his first album for Heavenly Recordings with the release of the single "Miami" alongside a video produced by Roger Sargent. [5] This is your seventh solo record, counting only your studio full-lengths. I imagine a lot’s happened for you in those 21 years since the release of ‘Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift’, do you still recognise and relate to that version of Baxter Dury, personally and artistically? It’s the mark of a clever musician to steal what’s required, a thief that knows its place, a kleptomaniac that doesn’t overstay their welcome in the palace of delightful, musical trinkets, to then convince everyone that what’s been stolen belongs rightfully to them, because otherwise there’s an instant whiff of something off lingering in the air like hotdog and doughnut fat falling through the tray, feeding itself through the ventilators located down some narrow alleyway behind a humongous retail park. You do indeed get a sense of being able to see it right away because you can see when people are wearing the wrong-sized pair of shoes. They look really uncomfortable.

The discography of Baxter Dury consists of six studio albums, one collaboration album, one compilation album, one extended play and fourteen singles.

If anything, Baxter represents the flipside of the conversation where, sometimes, the weight of a surname can be a challenge in itself. “I think anyone that follows in their parents’ footsteps, especially musically, it’s 99% perilous and you’re never gonna survive - mostly because they’re an obvious mutation of their parents and maybe they sort of deserve what they get in a way,” he says. “But if you do survive it then that journey alone is difficult enough. And either the music’s good or it isn’t, and people aren’t stupid enough to think that it’s inherited. I don’t really listen to The Fall. I’m sure they’re good but I’ve never listened to them so there’s nothing about anything I’ve ever done [that comes from that],” he says. “I guess I’ve become confident enough to just talk like the way I do on record, and the traces of hip hop are probably invisible to most people but they’re meant to be in honour of that more than they are The Fall. It’s more Biggie Smalls than Mark E Smith. Maybe the most genuine aspects of life, a life according to Baxter, the beat of incredible disingenuous confidence, of confident vulnerability, can get misconstrued as solely that – as solely a box of puzzle pieces from different puzzles that don’t flow as one, that fail to fit homogeneously. But they can all be assembled into pictures of utmost honesty. Baxter can emote remotely with a special kind of spectral humility from his nonsensical riverbank, and in turn, birth a brilliant array of truths, but so much more interesting, and inspired than wiping his snotty nose on his stripy shirt sleeve in the name of such well-worn wank mantras as ‘I’ve got a heart too, y’know?’ It makes one wonder if Baxter, always the wordsmith, never short on a lyric even when, off-duty but on-record, finds it difficult to decide what works, to remove himself after one line is a line too many and a mess has been made of the flow of it all once the mark has been overstepped. “I don’t prioritise me at all. I’m an afterthought” he reveals about the nature of his presence, and impact when a song is hot. “I get the vibe of the song right first, and I think that, to me, is the flow of it. The melody of it and how it sounds. I just need to weave in and out of it naturally”. I Thought I Was Better Than You confronts what was once too much to be confronted. Some side of the self too raw to reveal and commit to the cuttings of a record. Too emotionally mountainous, too psychologically dislodging to really indulge, and divulge with people. But along came a need for a new vibe that really enticed Baxter into believing that the canvas before him was a blank slate with a few anecdotes, childhood snapshots, uncertain truths, and certain fictitious tales on the edge of both sanity and society to spray against it.

But what makes the tale so intimate, so intellectual, so inspired, is how it doesn’t rest, nor relax for an instant in what can often be an insipidly repetitive, even vacuously unimaginative attempt to associate one figure (dad) with another figure (son), and forget that the latter has reached fantastic peaks distinctly on his own. There was no dad there to get the record deal, no dad to write the songs. Your son Kosmo wrote on the record as well, which I thought was really cool. How does the relationship with your son differ from the one you had with your dad? Maybe they were rhetorical, but either way, they raise certain images, and ideas, in the mind about who does what, about what goes where…yet still “it doesn’t really answer anything. It has no real, deep social commentary that’s valid to anyone. It’s a kind of Pinocchio nonsense”.

Recommendations

a b c "Baxter Dury, son of Ian, talks to David Peschek". The Guardian. 12 August 2005 . Retrieved 10 June 2020. About him, and also not about him, it hovers a lens maximised to inspect at the predictably bohemian elite prowling around the subterranean art dens that only enable entrance with a membership, whilst also questioning why he all of a sudden finds his vulnerability with its boxers around its ankles and a cig between the lips, wincing at existence, fixating with fitting it, yet always somehow falling out of something. There are moments of it” he confirms. “But the moments go into contemporary, real-time. Talking about myself and then I’m off again. It’s pretty beat poetry, 1960s pretentiousness”. Baxter Dury unveils first single from new album 'Happy Soup' - audio". NME. 22 May 2011 . Retrieved 13 June 2021. a b c "Rough Trade Records". Roughtraderecords. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007 . Retrieved 10 June 2020.



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