CULT STAR BAXTER DURY ENTERS HIS BRAT ERA

A collaboration with Adele's producer has reinvented the Miami singer. He talks to Martin Robinson about being 'the original nepo baby'-and why the Last Dinner Party aren't his biggest fans

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Brat summer is over. Welcome to Bax summer? "I f***ing hope so," says Baxter Dury, deadpan and dapper as ever - besuited but with the laconic manner of someone who's just got out of bed-in the bowels of The Social in Fitzrovia, musing on his new record, Allberone, which he's about to debut to a select crowd including Jarvis Cocker.

"But I don't know. I love that Charli xcx record, and in fact I played it to the producer Paul Epworth, and went, I wanna make things like that.' Most people thought I was delusional but he worked in a flavour of brat."

Wait, so Baxter Dury, the man behind the sleazy hit single Miami - the story of "Mr Maserati... the sausage man" - the one which crystallised him for the wider public as the English Serge Gainsbourg, one of London's most beloved guttersnipe sons, the self-confessed "nepo baby" of punk-poet icon Ian Dury, and a songwriter of lacerating wit and brutally imaginative slurs... this guy has gone all high energy pop? "Yeah it's pop," he says. "Just with some weird dude over the top."

The weird dude is himself, the pop was provided by Epworth, the super-producer behind all-time mega-selling records by Adele and Florence + The Machine. A proper music biz A-Lister who Dury says approached him after his show on the Park Stage at Glastonbury last year. "We knew each other a bit socially, and we always say, 'Let's do a record together', just as a formality," says Dury. "But I came off stage and he was like, 'We should work together', and there was a shift in his eyes."