Baxter Dury returns to the sleazy obscenity-strewn neo-disco of Miami for a comic critique of Shoreditch hipsters in Return Of The Sharp Heads.
It took me a while to appreciate Baxter Dury. Perhaps I was put off by the idea he was a nepo baby trading on his dad’s reputation.
He’s so much more than that, as I now realise.
I first encountered him watching the film of his father’s life. And his own boyhood. Baxter, the small boy photographed on the cover of New Boots And Panties, is one of the principal characters in Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll.
Watching it with him was a poignant and sometimes uncomfortable experience; talking to him afterwards a fascinating one. Yet I never delved into his music at the time.
Or maybe I did, and it didn’t make much of an impression.
That changed as soon as I heard Miami, his hilariously sleazy send-up of toxic masculinity, with it’s disco bassline and sweet synths, and its even sleazier video of the titular “Mr Miami” bragging with ever increasing absurdity of his prowess while performatively groping a beautiful woman.
“I’m like a shopping tycoon,” he boasted. “Full of promise and cum. I’m the sausage man… I’m a salamander… I’m a river of dead fish.”
Now he’s back, doing it again, in a cutting but equally hilarious critique of Shoreditch hipsters (even though we know they’ve moved to Clapton and Homerton and Hackney Wick), with their moustaches and sockless loafers and “Ozempic hips.”
Return of the Sharp Heads – featuring vocals from his regular female foil JGrrey – bodes well for his forthcoming album Allbarone, a collaboration with producer du jour Paul Epworth.
It was exactly a year ago that Epworth approached Dury after his set at Glastonbury to suggest working together.
“Sharp Heads is an abstract subconscious rant, criticizing anyone that is from Shoreditch or thereabouts, as I talk from my ivory tower in west London,” says Drury, who has crossed town from his dad’s manor.
“In that process emerges my own character. It doesn’t always make sense but it makes sense to me.”