Baxter Dury - Prince of Tears (2017)
Baxter Dury had a sorry 2016: his heart got broken and he spent a few months crying in his flat. “I got the fire brigade round to put out sandbanks around my emotions,” he quipped recently. So ‘Prince of Tears’ is an adult break-up record. It’s also a Baxter Dury one, which is to say, it’s despairing, comically cutting and never dreary. Musically, this is also a long way from the trill singing voice he employed on his folky debut album ‘Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift’ in 2002. Famously he’d only sung publicly for the first time a couple of years before at his father Ian Dury ’s funeral. He performed ‘My Old Man’ , a song the Blockheads singer had written about his dad. These days, five albums in, Baxter ’s much more comfortable living with the family influence, delivering sing-talk lines in that most recognisable of London ways. The album opens with Baxter in character, on the rebound and full of fake bravado: “I don’t think you realise how successful I am / I’m like a ship