Baxter Dury at Tramlines Festival Review

Heat like this is what killed this site’s coverage of Bilbao BBK Live. But even if bedridden and fighting the summer season, we must haul ourselves to the Sarah Nulty stage at Tramlines. It is worth it for the sermon-like, love-filled performance from Baxter Dury. He promises he loves his audience and they, in return, share their adoration for The Night Chancers mastermind. His set is well-placed in the midday. Enough time to walk back from I Monster, grab a spot in the crowd, and wait for the master of the stage and his talented instrumentalists. Dury has more than a handful of tremendous songs in his repertoire, and with Allbarone just a few months away, it is a real treat to hear where he is fitting those new tracks. The end of the set, is where.

But the start of this Dury-starring thrill ride is a barnstormer from beginning to end. Dury often takes a pose that makes it look as though he’s set to throw his hands at the audience. Whether that to channel the rage of I’m Not Your Dog or the desperation of Allbarone, that is up to the man on stage. He conveys the mood brilliantly. An amazing showman who contrasts the fear, the anxiety in the face of intimacy, which comes through his lyrics. He blurs those feelings into a storied look through the lens of heartbreak, but also as part of a counter to the love he displays for the audience. Asking Sheffield to scream, telling the crowd how much he adores them, it creates a necessary ballast to those friendless, fatigued chancers which appear in his very best songs. Dury could have carried on for another hour had the festival let him, had John Grant not been in need of more legs on T’Other Stage. Let Dury stun for longer, as he will on his upcoming tour in November.

Until then, we have the memories of his Tramlines performance. He litters the set with some of his very best storytelling examples. In the build towards new material, Dury’s keen to show those classics like Slumlord are as influential, still relevant. He has no trouble doing this in a set which provided newcomers with a taste for his sound, and those who had seen him before a continued, high bar for his live performance. There are few better showmen than Dury, whose disregard for the creases in his jacket have him throw some truly unique moves into the mix of a very strong Tramlines set.

Sitting on the grass after the set, waiting for the rest of tonight’s entertainment, it’s hard not to consider Dury a highlight of the festival scene as a whole. Any time he appears on a lineup, be it Glastonbury Festival last year or Tramlines this year, the expectation of him raising the bar for his work is met with glee. He is a man whose love for performance is matched by the quality of his cultural commentaries, a loved-up man in a desperate and displeasing world. The band backing him are just as crucial to this, massive, whirring cogs in the Dury-shaped machine. A slot at this time in the day serves the purpose of introducing a large crowd to what a regular tour could offer. What Dury offers as an artist, and this has been the case for some time, is a shot of hope where there is no right for that feeling to be.