The self-proclaimed Nylon Panther is back and this time he’s shown up with a wingman. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s worked with an electronically-inclined accomplice, with 2022’s ‘Baxter (These Are My Friends)’ with Fred Again opening him up to a younger audience, while several forays with French touch pioneer Étienne de Crécy endeared him yet further to the French, who no doubt recognise some faint similitude between him and the late Parisian lounge lizard Serge Gainsbourg. This time around, Grammy and Academy Award winning record producer Paul Epworth is at the controls, and the meeting of minds between a pair of West London geezers makes for Dury’s most cohesive adventure since Prince of Tears.
And it’s since that 2017 album that he’s really been stretching this very meta creation to accommodate more truth and more fibs, a persona so lurid and so gritty that it’s easy at times to forget he’s a nepo baby – and not just any common or garden nepo baby either – lest we forget. Rising out of the shadow of the great Ian Dury is no mean feat, which is no doubt why someone of Epworth’s calibre wants to be involved. These days Dury Jr. can fill the nearby Hammersmith Odeon by himself and command three-page spreads in The Observer, which is certainly more illustrious than the picaresque loser he likes to portray.
That said, it’s the blurring of lines between the real Dury – whoever that is – and the characters he inhabits that makes him so fascinating, as well as an artist for our times. His recent memoir Chaise Lounge gave us more of the unreliable narrator in literary form, though one wonders if Dury distances himself, turning himself into a kind of roman-à-clef, in order to protect himself. After all, there are myriad ways to process a corpse on your sofa or having someone called The Sulphate Strangler looking after you during your childhood. These can be regarded as scars or grist for the mill, a by-product of a truly bohemian upbringing.
And so he’s a panther on tracks like ‘Return of the Sharp Heads’, eating whatever presents itself in front of him and showing no mercy, and on the title track he’s as damaged as a Romanian rescue, licking his bits for us all to see. That track, a tech-trance tale of public tears with drops and risers, sees the protagonist texting and calling the object of his affections in the hope she’ll meet him in a soulless wine bar establishment that now rhymes with Peroni (Allbarone seems to expand throughout the album to become its own state, embodying the corporate hellscape of modern living). Burnt out from touring, Dury sheds a tear under the fluorescent light of the Piccadilly Line train that he ends up taking home alone after a breakdown in the garden of Allbarone. It’s all there in the song with the veneer of make believe washing away in the downpour.
There’s more than a modicum of personal experience in ‘Schadenfreude’ too, one assumes. It’s as deliciously bitter as it is original: as Ted Kessler pointed out in The New Cue, nobody – at least in the English speaking world – has snagged it for a title before. The characters he hides behind such as Mr. Maserati, the coked up wide boy from ‘Miami’, are less grotesque here, with a song like ‘Mr. W4’ even offering the odd moment of empathy in amongst all the piss taking. Allbarone, then, is arguably the rawest and truest manifestation of Baxter Dury yet. Having a hype man suits him musically, and in a funny sort of way, Epworth’s presence seems to offer some moral support as well.
