In the recently-released video for Baxter Dury’s ‘I’m Not Your Dog’—the song which opens The Night Chancers—Dury staggers across a deserted beach, weak and bleeding at the end of some vicious pursuit. Dury’s detractors would say he was hounded by the legacy of his father Ian. For some, Baxter still labours under that long shadow—styled to the nines to hide a deep abdominal rupture; a weakness, or literal lack of guts.
In fact, Baxter isn’t hiding anything. The Night Chancers is peppered throughout with wilful self-denigration, dismantling its own geezerish image in real-time. The album’s title track alternates recordings of a dog’s powerful bark and pathetic whimper. The Night Chancers is powerful precisely because it is wounded; naked.
There’s even space for queerness. ‘Samurai’ is a sexually-charged song with a potluck of pipe-climbing, sword-swinging imagery. The object of desire isn’t a damsel—it’s a fierce warrior. Again, Ian got there first (with ‘Superman’s Big Sister’—a kind of cuck-y, submissive fantasy which trembles at the power of the woman it’s describing). But this kind of thing didn’t start or end with Ian—it’s always been endemic in disco and funk, like it or not.
The path cleft by Baxter—droll spoken-word bouncing on minimalistic grooves—is close to Ian’s, albeit only superficially. It tells you something that ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ is compared just as often to Serge Gainsbourg or the Pet Shop Boys. And sure, Baxter inhabits different characters and personas across this LP, too; another fundament of his father’s work. ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ tells us, “I’m not your fucking friend,” before ‘Saliva Hog’ addresses us as “friend” about fifty times a couple of tracks later. But these perspectives and pieces are glued together by Baxter’s—not Ian’s style. A style all to its own. And that’s more than enough. Underneath our suits and shirts and skin everyone is the same bright red—it’s how we wear ourselves that defines us.
The Night Chancers is available for purchase here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe