Baxter Dury: Chip off the old Blockhead

He may have been a handful as a child, but Ian Dury's son Baxter eventually made his father proud. With his first album out this month, he talks to Glyn Brown

Baxter Dury seems to be living in a ridiculously lovely house in Kensington, west London. I say "seems to be" because when I arrive and tell him it's outrageous, he quickly assures me it's a short-term let, offered by the father of his pregnant girlfriend. "Bit of a result, though. Wicked gaff, innit?" He does not, however, hugely enjoy the neighbours, who regard him as riff-raff. Well, they'll eat their words, come the revolution – or the release of his album, which looks to be the sooner.

Baxter is the son of Ian Dury, who needs no explanation other than to underline his role as one of the English music scene's true originals. Baxter's album, Len Parrott's Memorial Lift, isn't as wired and bawdy as his dad's output. Instead, it is by turns wistfully melancholic, playful, lo-fi psychedelic and distantly music-hall. Though it brings to mind Syd Barrett, The Kinks, and the English eccentric Kevin Ayers, it is without doubt original.

The background to it is a life more or less soaked in rock'n'roll. In fact, Baxter almost came into the world to the sound of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B Goode". "Well, that was the idea. Mum vetoed the attempt."

We've adjourned to a local pub, where Baxter – whose speaking voice sounds like Damon Albarn if he had gargled with a bucket of shale – is smoking and knocking back a pint of orange and soda. "I was born in a vicarage in the middle of nowhere, a commune full of artists and musicians. Dad's band Kilburn and the High Roads used to rehearse there, and they were all set up to play at the appropriate moment. But the realistic side stepped in – y'know, if you're on the point of giving birth, you don't really need a bunch of grebos playing some dodgy old music downstairs. And this was at a stage where they probably weren't that good."

Which would be when, exactly? "Oh, about 1970, '71." Come on, you must know when you were born? "Yeah, so I'm 29." No, that makes you 31, but never mind. Artistic licence.

Baxter's parents separated, as he puts it "when I was nothing", and he and his sister Jemima grew up with their mum. From the sound of things, Baxter was quite a handful. He was expelled from school – "well, I was kind of asked to, y'know, not bother any more" – numerous times. Finally, Dury senior stepped in. He brought Baxter, then 14, to live with him, fixed him up at a tutorial crammer after years of comprehensives and, as a final touch, put him in the care of a Led Zeppelin roadie and Blockhead minder called the Sulphate Strangler. Which sounds cool.

Baxter lights up a Marlboro. "What happened was a combination of mum finding it difficult to control me and the Strangler, whose name was Pete Rush, happening to be staying in a spare room at Dad's. Dad had to go off and do a film with Polanski or something, and I think he thought, as a good social experiment, let's see if these two can make each other grow up. And it kind of worked. Me and this guy bonded. He was six foot eight, covered in tattoos. He'd drive me to tutorial college every day, then cook me pie and chips when I got back. I was invited into his world, and I saw a few weird sights at a young age. He became my best mate."

After what passed for school, Baxter mucked around at sundry jobs, but his heart wasn't in any of them. Finally, he addressed himself to music. He'd always played in bands with mates, but now started writing in earnest. He got a deal with Universal/ Island fairly quickly, and is the first to say that wasn't totally fair. "I was quite unqualified. I got a deal really prematurely, probably because of Dad, who he was."

Still, a certain responsibility comes with following such a father. "It would be appalling to be Ian Dury's son and turn out something mediocre, to turn out bullshit, yeah. It's a situation that's either there for your advantage or, if you were really crap, it would be to your massive disadvantage. If you weren't being honest and doing your own thing. But because, hopefully, I am, people are really optimistic about it. There's no sycophancy, it's all, 'Come on, son'. People are glad you're doing something different, but still in the same kinda vein."

Did Ian hear Baxter's songs? "Bits and bobs. I was always, like [at this point he rears back], wooh, playing it to Dad, oo-er. Fear of – not failing, but you wanna impress. What you don't realise is, your parents are inbuilt to love everything you do, so everything I played, he loved straight away, loved it. So proud." The voice is barrel-deep and ultra-gravelly here. "He was full of support."

Then, in March 2000, Ian died of cancer, six years after Baxter's mum died of the same thing. So Baxter's first public performance was at his dad's wake.

"Y'know, you're zoned out. You've been to a funeral which is huge, almost comically so. On purpose, to make it not a downer, but silly – we had horses and carriages, we had motorcyle outriders, all the way to Golders Green crematorium. After, everyone ended up at the Forum in Kentish Town. And the first person to kick off the musical events was me, playing Dad's song "My Old Man", with the Blockheads behind me. It was bloody scary."

People were rooting for you, though. "Still don't make it less scary. But once you've done it, you realise, that was amazing, and I got up and did it again 20 minutes later. I had all these lyric sheets in front of me, and I was shaking to bits."

And then, on with life. Universal had been sending Baxter's songs to Rough Trade's Geoff Travis: "Because it was pretty obscure stuff, and Geoff was always favourable to such things." Baxter was offered a deal, and given a couple of years to get his album together. "I spent most of that time learning to do the job properly."

The result is Len Parrott's Memorial Lift. Which is in part, he says, about "projected fears and things that I find horrible". For example, the track "Fungus Hedge". "It's a lament, about the irony of someone who'll probably end up dying from the amount of drugs he does, yet he's still worried about where his drugs are coming from." Or the fantastically entitled "Gingham Smalls", who "lives in a trench in a battle in his head". What's that all about? Baxter fiddles with his cigarette packet. How much of all this, I wonder, is about you?

"You don't... so much exorcise stuff as report back about what makes you feel uncomfortable. It's about people who've had difficult lives, people I know, fictionalised. But that makes it difficult to talk about the songs in detail."

They are, though, ineffably British, not to say English. "I love the eccentric side of British music. It works best when something characterful hits something musical. Dad, for example, could impose a narrative on a song and make it work, and that's an incredible skill to have and I've no idea how he did it: every word in its right place. Mine are much vaguer notions."

Next thing will be touring, about which Baxter has a few anxieties, "But nervous is good, innit? Nervous inspires you to get your head down and get on with it. But I had pretty much a superband on the album [including Pulp guitarist Richard Hawley and Blockheads bassist Norman Watt-Roy] and they've got their own projects, so I need to sort out a touring crew."

He's also keen to get on with another album: "Something a bit more upbeat. I've got the songs, a few stompers, a few change-rattlers. The sort of stuff that gets played in the dole office to cheer people up."

The man himself is a cheery fellow, a genial bloke who acts like a geezer, though one listen to the album reveals deeps of sadness and poetry that seem intent on coming through. Before Ian died, he was due to write the introduction to his chum Robbie Williams's book of collected photos. In the event, Baxter did it, and a couple of lines spring to mind: "Dad and Robbie. Short haircuts, freelance smiles, and both with the balls to ferry their dreams to grander ports." Be nice if the same thing turns out to be true of Dury the younger.

"I'm just buzzed up about it," he's saying of the album. "And I'm happy with the record label. It's all cups of tea and everyone's jolly."

'Len Parrott's Memorial Lift' is released on 12 August on Rough Trade Records. Baxter Dury plays live at the Metro Bar, 19-23 Oxford Street, London W1 (020-7437 0964), on 21 August