Each issue, we crash someone’s personal space in a bid to find out why it means so much to them. This time around, musician Baxter Dury invites Huck into his London flat: an eclectic riverside property full of history and colour, where he spends most of his time dodging noise complaints from the neighbours.
Text: Jeremy Allen – Photography: Jackie Dewe Mathews
“There are quite a lot of gentle, posh folk living in this block, but we are the mavericks,” says Baxter Dury, talking from his roomy Hammersmith flat that overlooks the Thames. “Historically, we’ve been causing a lot of noise here for 40 years. We’re the noise subversives.”
The London-born musician has been living in the apartment for a few years now, but it’s a property that has been in the family for four decades. His father, Ian Dury, first moved here to spend more time with the Stiff label family, touring with the likes of Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe, as well as his new band, The Blockheads. As a kid, Baxter found himself split between a sleepy Hertfordshire vicarage with his mother (the artist Betty Rathmell) and the bohemian madhouse where he finds himself again today, following a brief relocation.
Dury’s new album, The Night Chancers, is a journey through London’s underbelly. The follow-up to 2017’s critically acclaimed Prince Of Tears, it’s a dissection of gurning carousers and temporary best mates, the “failed fashionistas”, “Instagram voyeurs” and “jilted Romeos” Dury meets on his itinerant adventures in the city. With world events moving quickly – at the time of writing, the coronavirus pandemic has cities locked down – we may soon come to feel nostalgic for the debased characters he writes about.
Dury acknowledges it’s a “weird time” to be bringing a record out. But it means he will get more time to finish the book he’s working on – an “unreliable memoir” that’s already overdue at the publishing house – as well as more freedom to write and record in the studio based out of his home. “There’s a rotating bunch of old, asthmatic-looking instruments made out of bakelite, which would probably be really dangerous if you left them on overnight. I have a Wurlitzer and a Rhodes,” he says, pointing out his two electric pianos. “And there’s an ARP synthesiser which belonged to The Clash. It was on ‘Bankrobber’, and things like that.”
Dury usually makes his albums at Hoxa in West Hampstead, though germs of ideas and musical flatbeds begin life here in the flat. His shelves a
