Regardless of the order the words are arranged, they fail to capture the strange alchemy that renders the base elements for Allbarone into such a deeply satisfying, simultaneously deeply daft and strangely profound cross-pollination of belly-laughs and tear-stained tragedy.
Allbarone’s foundations are in a chance encounter between Dury and in-demand A-list producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Bloc Party, Paul McCartney, U2 etc.) at Glastonbury. Some of the fruits of the collaboration sweettalk the rubbery funk of 2023’s career-best I Thought I Was Better Than You, passed the foreboding bouncers into a woozy exclusive rave. The title track (built on a ludicrous faux-Italian mispronunciation of a certain high-end chain pub brand, and dripping with futilely misdirected grasping for a human connection) is pure relentless high voltage dancefloor catnip, whilst “Schadenfreude” bundles the protagonist’s bitter thirst for a comeuppance for a formerly special someone with a shiny, contemporary, and ruthlessly efficient reboot of Kraftwerk’s machine musik.
It's a potent start, but Allbarone gets better,
deeper, more engaging and – crucially – stranger with each track, with
Dury’s half-muttered speak-song voice mutating into more and more
enticingly contorted shapes with each successive track. I Thought I Was Better Than You was audibly inspired by the writing process for Chaise Longue,
Dury’s superb 2022 memoir of an unconventional upbringing as the son of
legendary London poet of pub-funk Ian Dury (the fact that one of Dury’s
childminders was known as the Sulphate Strangler gives a fair idea of
the general laissez faire milieu). On Allbarone, Dury returns
to trawling the inner monologues and poorly managed impulses of
nocturnally orientated characters whose longing for status and something
at least slightly resembling love crashes into delusions.
Each figure holds an absurdly
inflated sense of own importance and personal brand-building boasts ("je
suis Kubla Khan" barks one protagonist, while another pitches
themselves as an “Alpha Dog”; a ‘nylon god’ is also featured), hiding an
often fragile ego, prone to crumbling at the first sign of rejection,
dishing out not entirely heartfelt excuses ("it was the other me") or
muttering vicious character assassinations of anyone perceived as being
more undeniably ‘alpha’ (witness the mesmerising onslaught of bile and
nightmarishly frantic scampering that powers up the brilliantly
disorientating disco-funk of “Return of the Sharp Heads”, with faint
echoes of kindred spirits Sleaford Mods).
At one point during I Thought I Was Better Than You, Dury bemoaned the inescapable fate of always and forever being compared to his famous dad. Allbarone
is the point where any suggestion of riding on nepo baby coattails
becomes acutely ludicrous: Dury undeniably shares the family trait of
loving the sound, texture, feel and taste of words and phrases, but the
scenarios depicted throughout Allbarone could only possibly derive from Baxter Dury’s vivid and potently odd imagination. Allbarone
even has sufficiently good manners to finish on its high point: with
Dury’s voice infused with a hallucinatory feel courtesy of a heroic
dosage of autotune, “Mr W4” marries status-hungry boasting ("making
money 24/7," the protagonist deadpans, suggesting it’s precisely not
what he’s doing) with deep lashings of melancholy: it’s far from Allbarone’s
only substantial merit, but it’s unlikely that any other album released
in 2025 can make the phrases like "roaming like a panther" sound
quite this poignant.
