Released: 2020
Baxter Dury’s sixth album The Night Chancers arrived at the beginning of the decade, exactly when it shouldn’t have. With the kind of gold toothed panache that only a natural raconteur posesses, it featured a whole cast of seedy characters both real and imagined, nearly all of them ensconced in one dirty exchange of fluids or money, or both, with some other.
Dury took to the mike as a twenty first century Billericay Dickie, but just as his finest work to date met an unsuspecting public, everyone was sent indoors. What would these people do, now that what they wanted was behind closed doors? The answer was that of course they found a way, they always do. They didn’t wipe their feet, wash their hands or give you your change, but you still invited them round for a nightcap, on you.
A simple funk, Slumlord was lyrically brilliant as if to make up for the track’s rough edged minimalism. Dury rhymed like a street poetry messiah, languidly bending his tongue round inspired couplets, a glazed face prince with “Charm dripping like fresh honey/I’m the milky bar kid/Soiled trousers/Shiny cheekbones like graveyards in the sun/Murder shoes/Dirty eyes sizing up.” It arrived exactly when it shouldn’t have done, which in a strangely apt way was exactly when it should.
The Voice Of Unreason 