It all started when Baxter Dury’s Glastonbury 2024 set finished. Stepping off stage, Dury was met by a friendly face: mythologised producer Paul Epworth (you know the credits: Adele, Rihanna, McCartney). He’d seen something in Dury’s set that he wanted to be a part of – hell, don’t we all: the sardonic, swaggering lyrics, feral beats and kung-fu dance moves. From Baxter’s POV, the performance cemented a blueprint for his next record, he wanted to make people move, make them dance.

What followed was not a typical collaboration. Recorded in intense three-hour daily shifts at Epworth’s Church Studios, the duo tore everything down and built fresh – nine tracks from scratch: impulsive, intuitive, electric. The result: Allbarone, is a potent portrait of modern British life, full of bite, bile, and beats. Dury’s lyrical eye is as vicious and precise as ever, while Epworth’s downtown, up-tempo production soundtracks tales of 2-4-1s at All Bar Ones, office clones who move like drones, and Instagram revolutionaries swapping manifestos for memes. In conversation, from West London to Western France, Baxter Dury and Paul Epworth reflect on their record, and turning ennui into bangers.

Paul Epworth: [I’m at this] mad chateau.
Baxter Dury: Fuck, that is insane.

PE: Look at this – just in case you get caught short.
BD: What is that?

PE: It’s a crystal cock. [both laugh]
BD: You’re not that far from Bordeaux?

PE: Not far – you’re a bit of a Bordeauxite, aren’t you, Baxter?
BD: I only recently discovered that that’s where I belong. Well, I belonged there recently. I really love it though. I love that whole tomato-eater way of life, you know what I mean? [Paul laughs] It’s all about that, isn’t it? It’s quite simple, really. You probably get some right dodgy bacon-faced ex-pat Brits there, don’t you?

PE: Yes, you do. [laughs] We got the ferry over, and it’s funny because we definitely felt a little different to most of the people on this boat. There was a lot of elderly walking clothing, you know? Which I’m sure we’ve got coming to us. I was wearing an Underground Resistance t-shirt, and this guy tapped me on the shoulder like, “Mate, mate, mate, check this out.” He pulled up his trouser leg and he had a “Mad” Mike Banks tattoo on his calf. [both laugh] I guess the rave generation are getting ready for walking clothes.
BD: One foot in the rave.

PE: Whey! [laughs]
BD: So, how do we focus this and talk a little bit about our music? We had a nice time, didn’t we?

“Those conditions prohibited me from flapping. I can sink a massive-sized vessel by flapping.”

PE: Yeah, we did. I was actually thinking about it last night, we were doing like six or eight-hour days and in the space of a month. We probably did it in… 125 hours?
BD: I always back-degenerate the conditions because that’s how anecdotally I survive. So in interviews I go, “Yeah, Paul was only there for three hours a day because he had to take his dog to therapy” – it’s just not true, actually.

PE: [laughs] We were both taking dogs to therapy, Baxter.
BD: Yeah, but I don’t admit that bit. As you say, you’re quite hyper-focused, and I’m the opposite, and in a way that kind of works together. But it was really easy, wasn’t it? In hindsight, I’m sure there was pressure, at points, but you’ve got big old experienced producer shoulders. You’ve met every range of egotistical person, so in a way, you’re probably at quite a cathartic stage of not really being that stressed. And we’re quite a shop-soiled option compared to some of the more glossy things you might have done.

“PE: I guess the rave generation are getting ready for walking clothes.
BD: One foot in the rave.”

PE: The truth is that there’s a different pressure when you’re working with someone who’s a friend, whose judgment you trust.
BD: Yeah, that’s true.

PE: You don’t want to let yourself down, and you don’t want to let them down, but it’s not for the ego and pressure of having to do something for your career, for the hamster wheel. And that is actually why we should all be making music, because there’s an integrity in it. 
BD: It’s freeing.

PE: My usual thing is to go and make some club bangers and they don’t go anywhere because I don’t finish them – they end up in a hard drive gathering dust. So this is a really good opportunity to have you guiding me.
BD: And it worked like that pretty quickly, didn’t it? I mean, you’ve got quite a kind of… How do I put it? For you to finish something or do something, you’ve got to go into a bit of a zone, which is slightly uncommunicable in a way.

PE: When I get into that space, there’s a phase of putting the bones of an idea together, which I have to do really fast, otherwise the idea will never exist. If I can just get that first bit together – that might be twenty minutes, it might be an hour – then take a deep breath and ask, “Is it worth pursuing?” And if it is, then you dive back in, like, “Oh, let’s see what happens if we push and pull this.” You were very patient with me, giving me a minute to get to this point.
Baxter: Well, in a way, I wasn’t really able to interrupt because we were at the mercy, or privilege, of your invite. [Paul laughs] That’s quite a good thing because those conditions prohibited me from flapping. I can sink a massive-sized vessel by flapping. You didn’t even notice it.

PE: I did notice the flapping, but I guess that I was taking you out of your comfort zone, dragging you, kicking and screaming. It required me to be like… I just keep going back to that Eno quote: “Art is the one place where we can crash our plane and walk away from it.” You can afford to take a risk and for it to be a total disaster, an experiment. Do you know what I mean? So you getting your disco pants on and stepping out of your Hammersmith miserablism [both laugh], you can afford to go, “Is this the right iteration?” I think there were a few things where we just went, “Ah, that’s rubbish.”  And they went into the hard drive, never to be seen again.
BD: In fact, there are loads of other brilliant ideas we did that, in the speed and the process, were just sort of discarded. We didn’t have the time to think about them much, but they’re brilliant as well. There’s something I heard this morning, except my computer crashed and when I took it to Apple, they wiped the whole hard drive. So I lost a quarter of a book and all my demos. They said, “You backed this up?” And I went, “What chance is it that I’ll lose the hard drive?” And they went, “Only one percent.” And then they wiped it. But I don’t worry about that stuff because you just start again, right? The book was a bit annoying, but I think the book is shit anyway, so it’s quite good. I’m quite spiritual about it. But anyway, the point was that just before that happened, I was listening to everything and it was really good. I really enjoyed the whole experience, to be honest. And not that I don’t usually, but because you were parenting it through in a way, and that was quite unique to me because I’d never really been with a producer in that way. It was quite a relaxing way of working. It allows someone like me to be better at what I do. I was quite comfortable with you doing the music. 

PE: You quickly relinquish control. I think once you took Allbarone away and came back with Jay’s vocal on it like, “I think I’ve got something,” we then stuck it down and then I went, “How about just putting spaces in here?” and we went, “Oh God, that sounds really great.” Suddenly, we had something approaching a realised idea of our weird mutant hybrid.
BD: That’s what you need, to find a shared moment of acceptance. 

PE: It’s suddenly the access point, isn’t it?
BD: And people like JGrrey were great when they came. Magical people. 

“I just sort of did what I do anyway, and you created a higher scaffolding.”

PE: I love the way she’s got one thing that she brings to it, then obviously Fab’s [Fabienne Débarre] got another angle. You’ve done it on all your previous records, the way you use different vocalists as palettes with which to paint the feeling and context.
BD: And that was all allowed to breathe naturally. So I just sort of did what I do anyway, and you created a higher scaffolding.

PE: [laughs] Techno scaffolder. What was interesting for me was learning how I needed to give you enough structure to work around to be able to find your spaces to inhabit in the tracks, because you have a wealth of different characters and such subtleties where your voice sits – tonally, and in your delivery. It means that you have to find out the who, the how, and how you inhabit it. Then it was me trying to make the space, but not wanting to close stuff off. There was a little period where I was like, “Ugh, I’m not sure what to do next.” And you were like, “I’m not sure what to do next.” We did this for a couple of days and then finally it was like, “Actually, fuck it. We’ve just got to go get a mic, do some things”. Then you did [Return Of The] Sharp Heads and stuck a load of stuff down.
BD: We also sort of went down a hole and had a little, not doubtful, but more explorative moment where we almost decided to record the whole thing live. So in that time, we re-recorded everything. It was more machine-y [not live], which was good. If you’ve got an open plan backing track with no beginning, middle and ending, the thing is, for me, in my OCD, or some sense of control, is that I need it to make sense musically and narratively at the same time – and with a person who can’t sing. People who can sing can tie that up really easily with a load of long notes and all that shit, they can forge a vocal thing over the top and it all sounds acceptable. Whereas with me, it’s quite a tricky route to make a song work.

PE: But the quality of your lyrical content got me out of jail on a number of occasions. Sometimes I listen to a song and I don’t even listen to the lyrics until I’ve heard it five times.
BD: And I’m not obsessed with people trying to listen to my lyrics either. It’s actually as much about the phonic shape of what I’m saying. I’m not trying to use some upsettingly clever words, ever. I hate florid music with over verbose stuff. I find it really made by cunts to be honest.

PE: [laughs] It’s got to have heart in it, isn’t it?
BD: That’s where it should come from. But your limitations are a good thing sometimes because they make you explore how you can make it more interesting for people to listen to, even though I literally sound like I’m talking a kind of mockney audiobook. It’s finding ways of making that exciting.

PE: Also, you find out what the story is, who the character is, and then you’ve got room to roam within that. You’ve refined that process into something you’ve got full mastery over. One of the things that I was definitely aware of, was making sure that I at least tried to pay attention to the way that you’ve written basslines for records you’ve done previously, that I really love. The feeling and the atmosphere. I was definitely conscious of trying to play into that stuff a little bit.
BD: Was it a different record for you to make? I guess you haven’t made one for a while.

PE: You know what? It reminded me of when I first started out as a producer, I felt like I was starting over.
BD: That’s nice.

“I hate florid music with over verbose stuff. I find it really made by cunts to be honest.”

PE: It was very much me at a computer. The difference is, now I’ve got so much more musical and songwriting experience, which was quite naive to me at that [early] stage. It was all done on a hunch. But to be able to go back to it and know what I know now was really exciting.
BD: Does it make you think about what type of things you want to do next?

PE: Yeah, more Baxter bangers. [both laugh]
BD: We should make more, constantly, swamp the market.

PE: I love working one-on-one with an artist, as long as that person knows that things aren’t going be perfect, we can always fix it later and get players in. Just sitting one-on-one, vibing and vamping ideas. It’s really just great fun – with the right person. [laughs]
BD: The studio you have is a paradise for that. All the people who work there are really focused.

PE: It’s a wicked little team. Everyone could feel the energy, it’s really inspiring for those kids, you know?
BD: Yeah, they were great. Essentially, this conversation is a sort of intense gush. But there wasn’t really much I could complain about as an experience.

PE: It was a perfect thing to happen and to click with. I needed to come in and get my hands dirty. Get my hands under the hood, get some arpeggiators out.
BD: You got my arpeggiators out, I’ll tell you that. [Paul laughs] When I first arrived, obviously we knew each other anyway, so I knew what you were like as a person, but I didn’t know what you were like in a work setting. We were downstairs in a small corner of your much larger studio, and I sat behind you as you were hunched over your rig trying to find something that might excite me…

PE: There’s also an insecurity with it where you’re like, “I hope I’m going to come up with the goods today.” I’m old enough now to think that we are just channels, and sometimes a channel is shut, no matter what you try to do. You’re also aware that when you’re trying too hard to do something, you end up doing things that sound a bit too much like something you’ve done before. Then you go, “That’s not the right thing.” But there’s an insecurity at first, there’s a quiet desperation.
BD: A lot of times you might see a producerial person – is that a word, producerial? It’s a good word anyway, I made it up – sat there and they might go, “This is an E minor chord, why don’t we jam on this?” There’s more of an invited, collaborative, “Hey, let’s jam on this” – or whatever. And that’s quite awkward, actually. I was glad, in hindsight, the way that you just went in and didn’t ask questions. [laughs] I’m not saying you were dismissive, you weren’t.

PE: You came in very clear. You explained how you were so excited by seeing people moving at gigs, and I went, “Yeah, Glasto was fucking amazing.” It was my highlight of the weekend. Knowing that you had that experience looking out from the stage, and I had that experience looking up at the stage.
BD: That day at Glastonbury began the whole album. It inspired the narrative, it inspired the sort of misery of the first song, it all occurred on that first day I was playing at Glastonbury. So the album, in that short amount of time that we had to make it, is all quite self-contained. That triggered all the events: walking off stage, seeing you, something else happened, which created Allberone, all from that little moment, walking off that stage. Everything involved in that album is contained consequently from that point on.

PE: I’d like to think there’s a point where there’s a full circle with you doing these songs at Glasto.
BD: What are you eating, by the way? You got a croissant?

PE: No, no, I’ve got some like mad little lemon cake.
BD: I love that. You got any tomatoes?

Baxter Dury, Allbarone, is out now.