THE NIGHT CHANCERS

Baxter Dury’s new album (his 6th) is out, and a couple of weeks in and I’m still excited. I’ve listened more to his music than anyone else’s the last year or two. I like his intensely pretty disco/lounge/punk and his articulate, often comically sleazy stories of the after-dark and the sad-sack. “Isolated men running up sand dunes,” as Dury once described them.

It makes me laugh and makes me happy, his stuff does. When I was a kid, his dad, Ian, played one night in town with Lene Lovich and Nick Lowe and Wreckless Eric, and Rachel Sweet. It was the 1978 Stiff Records tour. I had a chance to go and didn’t. I was more timid back then. And it’s a serious regret. This bright new music, right down to its oh-so-casual appropriation of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, feels weirdly like a second chance.

Here’s a link to Slumlord, the brilliant first single: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbVIv7DrU8