When I last saw Baxter Dury, it was during Dark Mofo in Hobart — a setting whose nocturnal weirdness felt oddly perfect for his particular brand of dry, late-night storytelling. Over the past two decades Dury has cultivated a voice that feels entirely his own: part romantic observer, part social commentator, part unreliable narrator of the strange situations people find themselves in after dark.
With a new album circulating and a long international tour beginning in Australia, I caught up with Dury as he reflects on songwriting as theatre, the awkward realities of musical inheritance, and why the stage remains the one place everything makes sense.
There’s something unmistakable about a Baxter Dury song. The wry observations. The faintly louche characters. The sense that the narrator is both inside the room and somehow standing outside it, watching everything unfold with a raised eyebrow.
When I mention that he has built a distinctive voice over the years — something between social commentary and dark comedy — Dury immediately shrugs off the idea.
I mean, you just do what you can. There are other worries in the world, you know what I mean? People are still buying tickets.
It’s the kind of response that captures Dury perfectly: dry, pragmatic and quietly funny. The voice in his songs often feels exaggerated, almost theatrical, but when asked whether it reflects how he really sees the world he gives a characteristically slippery answer.
That’s quite tricky. Sometimes and sometimes not. It’s not a documentary. It’s an act — entertainment, ultimately. Songwriting isn’t a real language. It’s sort of made up… like Game of Thrones.
That sense of performance — songwriting as something closer to theatre than confession — seems central to what he does.
Dury’s lyrics are often very funny, but rarely in a straightforward way. When I suggest there’s a comedic element in what he does, he agrees — but only up to a point.
There are elements of comedy in there. But I try and manage that so it’s simultaneously dark as well. I don’t want to make comedy music.
Instead he aims for something slightly more ambiguous.
I’ve got a sort of dark and optimistic outlook. So those things should sit quite close together.
It’s a balance that gives his songs their peculiar tone: amused but melancholic, observational but faintly absurd.
At one point I suggest that many of his songs explore the strange emotional territory of middle age — looking back at life with a mixture of regret and amusement.
Dury immediately punctures the idea.
I didn’t realise I was middle-aged.
Then after a beat and a wry smile:
Maybe everyone just views things through the lens of their own mortality.
Musically the latest record feels minimal but expansive — danceable grooves with a cinematic sweep. But if you’re expecting a carefully planned artistic manifesto behind the sound, you won’t get one. He says:
We just wanted to make some dancing music that was quite atmospheric, There wasn’t a huge meeting about it.
The record was made with producer Paul Epworth, whose influence helped shape the music. Dury says:
He was quite heavily involved in writing the music. It was both of us really.
Beyond that, the process is intentionally fluid.
There isn’t really a process. It depends what album you’re making and who you’re working with.
That unpredictability, he suggests, is the only way to keep things interesting.
You need to re-stimulate yourself every time you approach an album. Otherwise it would feel too much like a normal job.
Dury last visited Australia on a tour that included Hobart’s famously eccentric Dark Mofo festival.
That was quite a weird place. Very satanic. I didn’t know quite what was going on. I was a bit jet-lagged.
The festival itself was chaotic in the best possible way.
It was fucking crackers place.
But his favourite Australian memory wasn’t the festival at all. Instead it was a quiet afternoon at an animal sanctuary outside Hobart.
I sat there all day with a bag of grain among some joeys and some really peaceful kangaroos. I saw some koalas. That was probably the best moment I had in Australia.
Dury’s songs are deeply rooted in British observation and humour, which raises the question of whether they travel well internationally.
You have to tell me. I think like all places you have to go there and show your respect. We’re not a pop-package band, are we? It’s more about going and looking people in the whites of their eyes and performing.
From there the relationship develops — or it doesn’t.
You go there, people invest in you, and it grows from there.
Eventually the conversation drifts toward the subject that inevitably follows him everywhere: his father. I ask if he is sensitive to being asked about his father and he politely says yes.
I get a bit bored by that. If I’m here just to talk about someone else…
It’s not irritation so much as weariness.
Still, he acknowledges the strange position he occupies — both proud of his heritage and wary of how it’s interpreted. He acknowledges the interest though, but it is clearly tempered by another issue:
There’s a real anti-Nepo thing now, isn’t there? For a reason that people may have, may have arrived via privilege than hard work or discovering what who they are, without being, being afforded some sort of entitled thing. So I think that it’s a funny old path. I mean, I worked hard and I’m good at what I do, yeah, but I don’t want to sound awkward about my heritage, because I’m very proud of it, yes, but it’s, it’s in a modern terms, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of a bit damn to talk about it. I think that’s just because the way that people treat it and stuff, I guess. But, and also, if you worked hard and you doesn’t matter how much people admired the person before you, and I’m really grateful for that, but you’re into your thing.
But for Dury it’s simply part of the background.
You’re into your thing. Someone else did that other thing.
If there’s one subject he becomes unexpectedly candid about, it’s ageing in music.
Ninety-nine percent of people get worse. You disconnect from what you were originally passionate about.
The challenge, he believes, is simply staying curious.
To stay valid to yourself musically you have to struggle to do that.
Artists, he suggests, often fail because they try to remain frozen in the moment that first made them successful.
Don’t know if you progress musically. I think you just do things differently, and your youth influences the way you see something or the way music works, and then, as you get older, you’re looking for different ways of maintaining your interest. So I don’t know people don’t necessarily get better than just different in fact, 99 even maybe a higher percentage than 99 you get worse because you disconnect from what you are originally passionate about, musically So, and you also disconnect from culture and stuff as you get older, you get a bit more, you know, people naturally more conservative, yeah, the enemy of being creative. So, so to try and keep yourself valid, to yourself music is that, I think you really have to struggle to do
If you’re a young punk band and you’re still wearing the same jeans when you’re sixty you look like a knobhead.
Despite that realism, Dury clearly enjoys the life he’s built.
I love performing. I’m very comfortable with it. You know, I’ve got a good band, good people, everything. It’s a nice experience. Yeah, we’re good. You know, we’re quite good at where we keep ourselves quite sharp on stage and we feel like we’re good.
His stage presence — elegant suits, dry charisma, faintly faded-diplomat energy — is partly character and partly projection.
After a gig, he quickly switches back into something quieter.
You can’t always be 24/7 showbiz. You know, you’ve got to find a moderate way of a sort of different tempo between forming and existing. A lot of time I’m reading a Kindle within 40 minutes of finishing a gig, because I find reading quite preservative. You know, your mind needs to calm down. And being on that kind of adrenaline schedule can be quite destructive, if you believe it. Yeah, so you mustn’t you just, you gotta calm yourself down and keep yourself.
The adrenaline of performance fades quickly.
And perhaps that’s the real trick of Baxter Dury’s career: understanding the difference between the theatre and the person inside it.
As our conversation winds down, Dury sounds content with the rhythm his career has settled into.
You make an album, then you tour it. You’re sort of on a two-year cycle.
For him, the process isn’t exhausting — it’s simply the structure of the job.
I’m surrounded by nice people. Most of it is really pleasant.
Which feels oddly fitting for a songwriter who has spent years chronicling the small absurdities of human behaviour.
Because Baxter Dury’s music has never really been about grand statements or dramatic reinvention. It’s about observation — noticing the strange theatre of everyday life and turning it into something wry, stylish and quietly revealing.
Or, as he puts it with typical understatement:
It’s not a documentary. It’s an act.
And judging by the audiences still showing up around the world, it’s an act that continues to hold their attention.
Australian audiences have already seen how that translates live. Backseat Mafia caught Dury as part of Dark Mofo in 2022, where his set leaned into atmosphere and attitude rather than volume, holding the room through tone, timing and presence. It’s a reminder that his performances rarely hinge on spectacle; instead, they draw you in through the space between lines as much as the lines themselves.
The Allbarone Tour promises a set shaped around this new material, but Dury’s back catalogue has always slipped neatly into the same world, bound together by voice and perspective rather than era.
Go HERE for tickets (Australia) and HERE (NZ)
You can get ‘Allberone’ here.
Feature Photograph: Arun Kendall
