Baxter Dury Tickets

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.

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.

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.”