Dury’s new album has been described as “a 10-song gaze into the black hours and the characters and behaviours that swirl around them”. Who is Jonathan Wright to argue?
What we can call, for want of a better phrase, rock music even now has a problem with the ageing process. It’s not that rock musicians don’t continue performing long past middle age, or that their back-in-the-day war stories get any less fascinating when related on BBC Four documentaries, or indeed within these pages, it’s just simply that most musicians make their best records when they’re younger.
But there are exceptions, those who get better with age, like fine wine or esoteric cheese. Chief among these over the past 10 years has been Baxter Dury (48), a man who seems to react to the passing of time by becoming, as a performer, more monstrous, more lascivious, snarkier. All of which might become tiresome if it weren’t for the way this invention and projection of a larger-than-life persona has been accompanied by a sense that it gives him cover to show his vulnerability, too. Here, the subject matter of Night Chancers, his fifth LP in a decade, including his work with B.E.D, helps. It’s an album largely concerned, to quote Dury himself, with times “halfway between heartbreak and getting back on your feet, when you’re rebuilding, not necessarily successfully, your outlook on life”.
So it is on the title track that we find Dury being left alone in a hotel room in the early hours of the morning “with the crumbs of my spare thoughts” after a girl leaves him there alone. In a room adjacent, a party rages. For all the life going on all around him, Dury cuts a desolate figure.
Not that we should see the album as especially biographical or introspective. At other times, Dury leaps on the opportunity to get in your face and to play characters. The sheer relish with which he intones the words “murder shoes” in Slumlord, for example, is mildly disturbing. The creeping sense of eavesdropping on nasty musings in Carla’s Got A Boyfriend scarier still.
Musically, the songs, while featuring strings and lush textures, are essentially straightforward. Dury, new writing partner Shaun Paterson and longtime producer/collaborator Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, John Grant, Arctic Monkeys) don’t bother too often with complicated or tricksy sections.
Instead, these are tracks built on grooves and beats that let the words, and some songs are close to monologues, cut through. Indeed, there are moments when
