Baxter Dury talks going dance on new LP ‘Allbarone,’ working with Paul Epworth, Fred again, more

Baxter Dury (son of British icon Ian Dury) just released his eight solo album, Allbarone, which he made with producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Bloc Party). Together they take Baxter’s signature style — louche, talky character observations by way of post-punk, indie and Serge Gainsbourg — into what he calls “mature art school rave” that has more than a little French Touch disco in it.

“I made a song with Fred again that was quite a dancey,” Baxter says of the album’s stylistic origins. “We played that live, when I started to experiment with a more up-tempo thing, you started to see how people reacted, and people got into it in a different way. That’s when I started to see humans move for the first time. But yeah, Etienne de Crecy is also an old friend, and a historically significant part of that French dance scene. We made an album together as B.E.D. Whether he taught me a lot, he showed me a lot.”

Baxter says though French touch was a reference point, “You don’t want to recreate something perfectly. You want my own naïve take on that kind of dance genre. The right kind of dance stuff that supports some kind of song structure. You could go into some sort of gnarly note world where nothing really, you could go really bonkers, you know what I mean, which would sound good at four o’clock in the morning at the Berghain. Some weird place, some sweaty, no less place. But there had to be some sort of link to what I was doing. And also what I was saying had to be accounted for, the narratives. There had to be space for that.”

You can listen to my whole conversation with Dury on the BrooklylnVegan Interviews podcast, including more about the new album, working with Paul Epworth, his time as a film student at NYU in the ’90s, Pulp, Oasis, hip hop, why he’s never played America and if that might change, and more.

You can watch a video clip of our conversation and listen to the full episode with Baxter below, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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