When Baxter Dury was a kid, his dad would go on tour and leave him in the care of the Sulphate Strangler, a giant, malodorous drug dealer prone to violence.

Sleeping on a rotting chaise longue in the front room of a damp Thames-side flat in Hammersmith, the boy would awake at all hours surrounded by the Strangler’s sleazy menagerie of closing-time companions. “Night chancers,” he would call them.

Baxter’s father was Ian Dury, the Essex new waver who sang and lived the hedonist’s holy trinity: Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. Night Chancers is the title of Baxter’s seventh album.

“You grow stronger, don’t you, out of the ashes,” he says today, a greying man of 50, a half-smile playing under huge sad eyes.

He’s Zoom-ing in from that same Hammersmith flat where he learnt, to quote his new memoir, Chaise Longue, that “booze, money and drugs feel so good when you are 14”. It’s probably had a lick of paint since the geezer who sang Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick succumbed to cancer in 2000.

Baxter released his first album two years later: a minimalist suite of vaguely grotesque character sketches titled Len Parrot’s Memorial Lift. He roped in some of his dad’s old band, the Blockheads, plus members of Pulp and Portishead, but his nervy falsetto seemed designed to distance him from his old man’s gruff bark.

Music was “not an obvious choice, because Dad was quite a dominant figure and that’s what he did,” he says. “Also it felt potentially a little bit cheesy. Music heritage is quite flawed, traditionally, so I was being careful.”

His penchant for outsider characters is “an interesting way of writing songs via a kind of theatrical, storytelling perspective; sort of inventing someone’s view,” he says. “It also deflects from being too personal, I guess. So it might be a way of laundering some of your more personal thoughts.