How does the tale of Baxter Dury’s greatest album to date, his masterpiece, begin? Serendipitously…
It was Sunday June 28, 2024, and Baxter had just stepped from a rapturously received set on The Park Stage at Glastonbury Festival. After towelling himself down, a familiar figure approached him backstage.
It was Paul Epworth, the lauded producer/songwriter whose creations have draped themselves across the airwaves of the 21st Century more successfully than any other Briton. You’ll know his work from huge global hits with Florence + The Machine, Glass Animals, Paul McCartney, U2 and, most significantly, Adele, amongst many others, but you won’t have heard very much from him since his own solo album, Voyager, in 2020. Because what does the producer with the Midas touch do when he’s already turned so much to gold? He waits for a passion project to emerge, something or someone about which he can be truly, deeply enthused. Baxter Dury’s Glastonbury performance had flicked that very switch within him.
“I knew him a bit from a circle of mates, but only had had a beer or two with over the years,” says Baxter. “He was sort of this mythological character, but he said he really wanted to work with me. Seeing us triggered something in him, he thought that he could produce music for me that would be more direct, more energetic.”
They agreed to meet back in Epworth’s North London Church Studios in late November, not long after Baxter had finished touring his last album, I Thought I Was Better Than You. Their first day in the studio working on this new eighth solo Baxter Dury album was an eye-opener for Baxter, though, and not just because of the comfortable surroundings of The Church which has hosted the likes of Frank Ocean and Adele (“incredible place, all this glistening fruit and catered sushi, I felt like the bloke from Trading Places, stuffing it down my sleeves.”).
“I played Paul some new songs,” recalls Baxter of their first working day, “he drank some kind of Japanese drink, didn’t say anything about my songs, and instead just proceeded to make an entirely different kind of music. Those other songs became the elephant in the room, we never mentioned them again.”
Well, thought Dury, this might be a challenge. “But then I started listening to what he was doing. That’s when I realised, ‘Oh this is much better. This is more like what I always wanted to do but perhaps wasn’t capable on my own’. I hate it when I think I might be making Harrods hamper music – a little bit of this nice thing, a little bit that – that’s my biggest fear, becoming a variety show band, but what Paul was doing was miles from that.”
Together they dreamt up Allbarone’s nine-track tour-de-force, stripping everything away and building Baxter’s most melodically direct, futuristic collection in intense three-hour daily shifts throughout December and January. “It’s more than genius really,” says Baxter of Epworth. “It’s like he’s telepathic or something; he sees music in a shape and form that nobody else I’ve ever met does. He doesn’t care what you think: he just wants to make it brilliant, otherwise it goes in the bin.”
Each day, Dury would take Epworth’s “conceptual riffs, this intense dancey stuff, and I’d trot off to write my vocals.” Most days, he had a new canvas that he had to add his lyrical paint to. The speed of this work was the pressure that Dury now realises he needs to create his best music. “It was rapid. We’d go back and forth, responding to what the other had done and I think that allowed our strengths to surface.”
It would’ve been easy for Dury to perhaps deliver something more similar sonically to his other albums, but this daily challenge to create something new instead suited him better. “I could’ve pedalled the same thing that I’ve learnt to do, but it was actually a relief for me to focus on the stuff that I might be better at. The album is not experimental, but working on it was an experiment for me as we were inventing things as we went along rather than coming in with set ideas. I now realise that that’s what I need.”
The sharper edges of the music also provoked some of Baxter’s most incisive, biting, and routinely hilarious lyrics. Listening to the desperate sexual/romantic longing of the title track (named in tribute to a well-known chain of “posh wine bars for people on apps”) or the night-time Shoreditch satire of ‘Return of the Sharp Heads’, with its depiction of “big fat Olympic, Ozempic hips”, it frequently occurs that while Baxter Dury is most celebrated for the delivery and originality of his lyrics, he’s nonetheless still underrated for the nuance, the clear-eyed observation and self-knowledge contained within his writing. There’s no one really operating at his level, the Serge Gainsbourg of our time, writing dual lines for himself and his female vocal foil (most often JGrrey) that can both shock and awe. “It’s kind of a character arc that goes through the whole thing, two personalities,” he explains. “It’s very critical of people, this album, whoever they are, maybe some bloke with a moustache and sockless loafers in Shoreditch or a fat old Chiswick gangster lording it up in a really comfortable middle class part of London, the pathetic contradiction of his life [‘Mr W4’]– but as the portrait of the people you’re singing about emerges, you realise you’re actually talking about yourself: just the same old entitled knobhead in a grey nylon suit.”
One of the most arresting tunes on the album, ‘Mockingjay’, with Dury’s signature move of declaring himself the central character in the song (think ‘Miami’), comes from a surprising inspiration. “I was watching one of those Jennifer Lawrence Hunger Games films,” Baxter says. “It’s called Mockingjay, and it’s about a rebel, a romantic revolutionary type. And the song is applying that character-type to everyday people now. Instagram people who post their revolutionary intentions on Instagram stories, knowing that’s as far as it goes. I’m not saying people shouldn’t do that, but I can inhabit that pathetic romantic character in a song. Maybe that stops me being the person in real life.”
The pace of the daily work with Epworth meant that necessity was the mother of Baxter’s invention, forcing him to quickly think of vocals and lines that could match the music. One example that Dury is particularly proud of is ‘Schadenfreude’, a title so obviously brilliant you can’t believe it’s never been coined before in a pop song (it hasn’t). “I wrote that as Paul was writing this incredible dance backing track, one of my favourite songs I’ve worked on,” remembers Baxter. “I had to find the counterweight really quickly and this is the image of life disappointments, of feeling guilty about that, came to me. Schadenfreude.”
Baxter Dury is not prone to self-congratulation or the prideful boast. He does not humble brag. He describes his accomplishments with the air of a man awaiting the other shoe to drop. Nevertheless, even he knows that Allbarone is the album of his career so far. Push him hard enough, he’ll almost say so himself.
“I don’t want to say it’s contemporary,” he summarises. “Because I sound like a cunt using that word. But it does sound really contemporary. It doesn’t sound like a Harrods hamper band made it. It doesn’t sound like a band made it all. Which is what I wanted most of all. It’s just something that’s brand new for me. It’s quite exciting, really.”
Which in Baxter Dury-speak is as good as proclaiming “I’m top of the world!”
Words: Ted Kessler.
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