"I want to fucking kiss you on your Polish forehead!"
There is a point at every Baxter Dury concert when all subtlety is gone, the man wraps his jacket around his head and gets into the full screaming mode. This happened when I first saw him in Berlin a few years ago. This happened at the OFF Festival in Katowice in 2024. And this definitely happened at Progresja in Warsaw last Wendesday. What I have noticed, however, is that these days he gets into that mode right from the very beginning.
This makes sense, of course. We are a long way away from sophisticated, downbeat albums like Len Parrot's Memorial Lift or even Prince Of Tears. Hell, even 2020's The Night Chancers was subtlety incarnate compared to the electropop onslaught of last year's Allbarone. A good album, granted, one that can make a dance club explode.
No wonder, then, that it is the Allbarone songs that work best at a 2026 Baxter Dury concert. There is no foreplay, and he does not even do "Leak At The Disco" anymore. He gets into it straight away, no-prisoners-taken style. "Alpha Dog", then "Hapsburg". There are many in the audience who have only just discovered Baxter Dury, and the propulsive "Kubla Khan" is what they are here for. The third song of the set, the synthwave classic "I'm Not Your Dog", sounds almost elegant by comparison.
He does mix the old with the new but it is the Allbarone album that is played in its entirety (well, almost). Again, it works well within the context of the venue and his latest musical mindset (the chorus of "Allbarone" is positively ecstatic). The old stuff sounds uneven. While the magic of "Prince Of Tears" simply cannot be denied, the hookline of "Aylesbury Boy" becomes a bit of a mess.
I still love him, of course, and I certainly don't want to say that he was only good when he played small Paris clubs and had 4000 monthly listens on Spotify. That said, it sounded a lot more effective when he squeezed the paint out slowly instead of splashing it all over your Polish forehead the moment he got on stage.