Live – Baxter Dury | Joshua Idehen at Brighton Dome

Baxter Dury & Joshua Idehen at Brighton Dome, 21st November 2025

Touring with latest album Allbarone, Baxter Dury sauntered down to the seaside to take over Brighton Dome on Friday night. With the stage presence of a prowling coyote and a now extensive back catalogue of elegantly crafted tunes, Dury is a tough act to open for. However, Joshua Idehen proves more than capable of taking on the role, a showman with a different, but no less engaging, performance approach.

Idehen receives a decent greeting as he arrives on stage but, suggesting that the room can surely make more noise, informs us that he’ll be leaving the stage and when he comes back on we should react as though Dolly Parton has just walked on to sing 9 To 5. It has the desired effect, and he has the crowd in the palm of his hand from thereon in. Asserting that ‘depression cannot hit a moving target’ he instructs everyone to dance and join his refrain of ‘shimmy off’ directed at the ills of the world. Having caught his sets earlier this year at The Great Escape and more recently at Simple Things Festival, we’re happy to recommend a dose of his soulful positivity to anyone who cares to listen.

Joshua Idehen

So onto Baxter Dury, an artist managing to project a sense of disenchantment and disaffection, while simultaneously producing songs that are at times packed with humour and pathos, and at others with reflection and poignancy. Kicking off with Alpha Dog, Hapsburg and I’m Not Your Dog, we get an instant introduction to Allbarone’s tracklist followed by a look back at the excellent Night Chancers album. The set is then littered with tunes old and new; the grimy Miami inevitably getting a huge response (who’d have thought that the line ‘I’m the sausage man’ would induce one of the biggest cheers of the night), but it’s interesting to see new songs Schadenfreude and title track Allbarone receiving equally big reactions and setting the dancing pit wider and with added bounce. It’s always hard to predict how lesser known material will fare, but it seems that Brighton is more than happy to hear it all from Aylesbury Boy (I Thought I Was Better Than You) to Oi (Prince of Tears) and encore inclusion Mr W4 (Allbarone).

Across the years, Dury has developed his own distinct brand of spoken lyrics delivered with ennui and contrasted with haunting backing vocals and pulsing synths; his physical performance taking the character of a misunderstood lounge lizard as he slides and jolts across the stage. He makes what he does look easy but make no mistake, Baxter Dury is a very clever man – that old saying about it taking a lot of effort to look effortless falls pretty close to home here. One last shout out goes to the production team at the Dome – the sound and lighting was absolutely on point. A Friday night well spent.

Baxter Dury