Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 29/08/05
Label: Rough Trade

It's sometimes claimed that pop stars have a tough life and, of course, we have every sympathy for them. However, surely more brutally and convincingly handicapped are the offspring of our rock'n'roll heroes, who are unwittingly faced with a barrage of life-limiting constraints from day one. If you're not branded with the most humiliating name this side of Jim Kerr's son Wang - see Zowie Bowie, Dweezil/Moon Unit Zappa - then you're unlikely to be taken seriously because you just don't have the bravura talent to match your illustrious parentage - see Julian/Sean Lennon, and, er, Jordi Cruyff, who was not, strictly speaking, a musician, to be fair.

So it is that Baxter Dury, the intriguingly gifted son of London's Lord Mayor Of Rock, Ian, returns with his second album, following 2002's spaced-out and ace "Len Parrot's Memorial Lift". Fortunately - certainly for Baxter - because his father was Ian Dury, you sense he can immediately be given his props, so cool, influential and genuine was his dad. Let's be realistic here. You can only begin to imagine how different it might be if confronted by a record from the children of, say, Prince or Madonna.

Crucially, and as his debut demonstrated, the similarities between father and son are really in name only. In fact, the most profound influence Ian appears to have had is not in shaping Baxter's music, but in providing him with an extravagantly stuffed wallet, a magnificent record collection and, seemingly, a nefarious coterie of slacker, trustafarian mates, who have nothing better to do than eat drugs and look at each other as if gazing at a painting in a Whitechapel art gallery. Private view, naturally.

This is no bad thing. "Floorshow" is at turns self-obsessed, slightly paranoid, rather twitchy but always very murky and not just sonically speaking. Written, played and mumbled, generally, by Baxter, the torpid, grey musical textures are deeply painted by Jason Pierce's Spiritualized cohorts Mike Moody and Damon Reece and depict some of rock's greatest names playing through a sound system seemingly experiencing its first cocaine comedown.

As his debut writ large - "Oscar Brown" robbed the chorus of "Oh Sweet Nuthin'" - Baxter loves the Velvet Underground. This is seen again here, most notably the opening "I'm Waiting For The Man" clatter of "Francesca's Party", and the lilting confusion of an echo-swamped "Lisa Said". Elsewhere, comparisons to the Kinks, The Beatles - see the flash Harrison guitar licks of "Cages" - and David Bowie are obvious, with the locomotive chug of "Sister Sister" hypnotically reworking "Heroes".

Amidst a roll-call of junkie's, sickness, lewd sex, decadent vagueness and shrugging defeat, it's only on the frazzled barrow boy narrative of "Cocaine Man" that the imposing spirit of Ian Dury can be seen. Baxter's father should be very proud of the fact that, for most of "Floorshow", his son sounds absolutely nothing like him.

    by Ben Gilbert