You know Dexys Midnight Runners: Their lone American hit, "Come on Eileen," remains an indelible touchstone of MTV's golden age, a piss-and-vinegar Irish jig both unmistakably a product of its times and utterly distinct from context. Skinny and scruffy in faded denim overalls rolled ankle high, singing and dancing with banjos and fiddles in hand, they helped usher in a new generation of UK blue-eyed soul.
And yet you don't know Dexys Midnight Runners at all. Throughout their brief but brilliant existence, the group were every bit as elusive and mercurial as their name promised, transforming from soul revivalists to Celtic folk ruffians to polo-shirted pop sophisticates in the span of three near-flawless albums. So it's particularly ironic, even poignant, that at the quarter-century anniversary of "Come on Eileen," the only label Dexys failed to transcendâone-hit wonderâis the cruelest and least appropriate of them all.
Singer Kevin Rowland and guitarist Kevin "Al" Archer cofounded Dexys Midnight Runners in Birmingham, England, in 1978, channeling their sound and sensibilities from the UK's northern-soul club circuit and its attendant mod culture (including the amphetamine Dexedrine, the rocket fuel behind many a northern all-nighter). The Dexys lineup swelled to eight by the 1980 release of their breakthrough single "Geno," a heartfelt homage to R&B cult icon Geno Washingtonâtheir acclaimed debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, followed soon after, evoking nothing so much as the classic Motown sound caked in the dirt and grime of working-class Britain. Rowland's extraordinary vocals also summoned sources spanning from the R&B mysticism of Van Morrison to the arch-romanticism of Bryan Ferry, but while the inspirations were myriad and easy to spot, the album was exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.
Rowland was also a world-class eccentric with kamikaze commercial instincts. When he insisted upon issuing the radio unfriendly "Keep It Part Two (Inferiority Part One)" as the third Dexys single, its inevitable failure forced Archer's exit. Rowland responded with the so-called "Dexys Midnight Runners Mk. 2," an even grittier and funkier lineup that bootleg recordings and archival releases like the recent The Projected Passion Revue reveal as the premier live incarnation of the group. However, this roster recorded only three singles, most notably the gorgeous "Liars A to E," none to chart successâso Rowland again shuffled the lineup, adding fiddle players Helen O'Hara, Steve Brennan, and Roger MacDuff, and beginning work on Dexys' 1982 comeback effort, Too-Rye-Ay.
Expanding on Young Soul Rebels via influences of folk, jazz, and gospel, Too-Rye-Ay recast Dexys as barefooted street urchins seeking salvation through the power of music. Catholic soul with a lowercase c, the record is Rowland's call-and-response communion with a spirit deeper and more meaningful than mere religion. Highlights like "Let's Make This Precious" and "Until I Believe in My Soul" notwithstanding, as career-defining moments go, Dexys could have done far worse than the closing "Come on Eileen." For all its infectiousness, it still seems remarkable that a record so profoundly against the grain of the prevailing Billboard wisdom would have ever entered the charts, let alone topped them.
Ragamuffin chic gave way to starched-shirt Ivy League couture with Don't Stand Me Down, a masterpiece of both rampaging egomania and heartbreaking fragility. Rowland's refusal to release a single from the album inevitably spelled its commercial demise, but what at first blush appears an act of pop-idol hubris on closer inspection seems more a self-defense mechanism: The songsâuncompromisingly complex meditations on love and country rendered in gorgeously muted huesâare so deeply personal that Rowland obscures their meaning by engaging in long-winded, hilariously mundane spoken repartee with foil Billy Adams (the Jerome Benton to his Morris Day). Never before was a collection of love songs so combative or so demandingâcritics and fans hated it, Dexys dissolved, Rowland retreated, and "Come on Eileen" entered the purgatory of Jack FM playlists, VH1 retrospectives, and "Where Are They Now?" features.
What goes around comes around, and with Rowland reportedly working on the first new Dexys material in over two decades and a two-disc 25th-anniversary reissue of Too-Rye-Ay on tap, their influence is more pronounced than ever, pointing the way for present-day British soul revival acts like Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, and James Morrison. A generation on, Dexys remain like no other band before or since; they wrought clarity from contradiction and forged innovation from their influencesâtheirs is music about music itself, its power and glory romanticized, challenged, and made real.
