In the age of the single download, Jeff Harford rediscovers the album.
Baxter would later say of his father, "My dad was a 5ft 4in disabled guy with a mockneyesque collaboration of weird things".
Though said with affection, the inference is that little of what the public saw and heard of Dury represented the real Ian. His music was equivalent to the Jack-The-Lad posturing of a self-proclaimed hard man, designed to deflect attention from the effects that polio had on his slight frame.
While later albums would dial back this abrasiveness, New Boots And Panties!! makes no attempt to pander to the faint of heart.
Dury talks in the language of the street, painting vivid pictures of the larger-than-life, seedy types that populate his world, placing himself among them as a sharp-dressing charmer with a voracious appetite for the things that sustain him - namely sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll.
The "weird things" brought together on the album are a combination of pub rock, disco and music hall. Dury's partnership with multi-instrumentalist Chaz Jankel mixes dance-floor classics (Wake Up And Make Love With Me, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) with full-tilt rockers (Blockheads, Blackmail Man), carnival tunes (Billericay Dickie) and even a rockabilly ode to a hero (Sweet Gene Vincent).
With so many outlandish personalities on show, the glimpses of Dury are easy to miss but on My Old Man he takes time to acknowledge a less fanciful character, signing off with "All the best mate, from your son".
And on If I Was With A Woman we see his guard slip further.
"Look at them laughing," he sings, perhaps recalling something of what he experienced growing up in the school of hard knocks.
