BOOKS
BOOKS
Clevor boy: Baxter Dury with dad Ian and minder “the Sulphate Strangler”
AGED 14, Baxter Dury was expelled from his Chiswick school, prompting the deputy head to phone his father Ian at the squalid Hammersmith flat in which they both lived at the time. As Baxter remembers in Chaise Longue, his memoir of his complicated bohemian upbringing, it was a fairly short conversation: “Why don’t you fuck off, you snotty little maggot!”
Left partially paralysed by a childhood case of polio, Ian Dury grew up devilishly smart but deeply angry. A pupil of Sgt Pepper sleeve designer Peter Blake at the Royal College Of Art, he became a fixture in grotty rock clubland with Kilburn And The High Roads, before The Blockheads helped to make him a punk-era star, with barroom funk banger “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” going to No 1 in 1978.