WHO has a worse problem than a one-hit wonder? An unjustified one-hit wonder. A group with a history, a following, and a bulging back catalog in their home country who are known elsewhere only for a single song whose success they are frustratingly unable to repeat. Spandau Ballet suffered from this stigma. So did A-ha. But no one was less deserving of this fate than Dexys Midnight Runners. America knows them for one song: a fiddle-and-banjo-fueled, knees-up staple at weddings, wakes, and bar brawls. But there was so much more to Dexys than that. "Come On Eileen" caught them in the middle of a constant evolution. The Dexys of 1980 were an enraged, Stax-style soul revue with a bludgeoning horn section who dressed like New York dockworkers. By the time they'd reached their third album, the horns were gone and the band were clad in preppy attire. Every musical phase, every visual transformation, sprang from the feverish, churning imagination of Kevin Rowland. A lightning rod for controversy and, on occasion, a laughable figure, Rowland took himself and his band deadly seriously. When he was unhappy with the quality of the band's debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, he made off with the master tapes, refusing to return them until the label acceded to his demands. Unhappy at how he was portrayed in the British music press, he stopped doing interviews and had his hapless label pay for advertising space for him to pen essays about his various philosophies. Ironic that such a driven, obsessive, humorless figure would end up being best known for a silly sing-along song, but such is the fate of the unjustified one-hit wonder.
JB: You know that Adam Ant lyric from "Goody Two Shoes," the one he addresses to a guy who's kneeling, crying words that he means, opening someone's eyeballs and pretending that he's Al Green? That's about Kevin Rowland. The image conjured up is one seared into the memories of British Dexys fans: Rowland, wild-eyed and unsmiling, clad in black, haranguing the audience over an endlessly repeating brass riff about soul and passion and some revelation he was forever trying to explain to us but could never find a way to express. We hung on his every word, or more accurately, every yelp, because the music was so consistently brilliant and so consistently different. The debut album, 1980's Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, was a blast of anger and contempt that crucified hipsters and anti-Irish jokes while lionizing sixties soul footnote Geno Washington, the subject of Dexys' first U.K. number one. Too-Rye-Aye emphasized strings over brass and uplift over outrage. The contentious Don't Stand Me Down is a six-song epic featuring more monologues than actual singing. The 27-years-late follow-up, 2013's One Day I'll Soar, is a stripped-down, affecting album that sounds like it was made by a man who's lived a long, hard life. There comes a time when you're happy not to hear any new music from your idols, no matter how much time, love, and money you've invested in them over the years. It's not like that for Dexys fans: We're in it for life.
LM: Rowland and my aunt Eileen are of Irish descent. So, I'd always believed, was Dexys and the knee-slapping, jig-inducing "Come On Eileen." I was shocked when I learned that Rowland and Co. actually hail from Birmingham, England—the same hometown as my beloved Durans, who would never be caught dead in Dexys' "Eileen"-era overalls. Decades and countless listens to "Come On Eileen" later, I still have no idea what the lyrics are beyond "Poor old Johnny Ray," but I have to hand it to Rowland: He penned the most well-known song in this book.
KEVIN ROWLAND: I had nothing to lose. Nothing. I was going nowhere. I could have ended up in prison. That is not being dramatic. I miraculously escaped prison. I don't think I would have survived. Music saved me. I was the kind of guy who would get into a lot of trouble, a lot of fights. I felt I was a fuckup, and there was no way I was going to take this music thing lightly.
We started with a blank canvas. I remember waking up in the summer of '78, two or three weeks after [Rowland's punk band] the Killjoys had broken up, and thinking, Hang on a minute, let's start something completely fresh. Let's dream it first. I literally did just that. I dreamed, "It's going to sound great, it's going to have a brass section, and we've got to look great." I felt hemmed in by punk at the end, and I just thought, Everything had been leading me to this. This is going to be more than a band.
It wasn't about aping soul. I know we said "soul" a lot. Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. We probably shouldn't have done. I think that limited us slightly. It was more than soul; it was soulful, it was pop. I think we just thought it was really cool to say "soul" at that time because nobody was talking about soul in 1978, so we saw the potential to be a bit radical.
It happened a bit too fast. Christ, it happened really quick. We did a tour in March–April [1980]. It was called the Straight from the Heart tour. It was fantastic. We really felt we were building something. You'd go on stage to about 400 people a night, and they didn't know anything about it except for the first single, "Dance Stance." We'd probably recorded "Geno" then, but it wasn't out. We'd win the audiences over every night—by the end of the show, they were all on our side. Then we had the number-one single, which was great. But then we did shows, and the album hadn't come out yet, so most people, all they knew was "Geno," and they'd come along to the show wanting 10 "Geno"s. But we had some versatility, some variety, different moods. I found that tour a bit of hard work.
We didn't really have much experience, we didn't have experienced managers, and we were going out on these tours and no one was looking after the money. We signed two 50-page contracts: one publishing, one recording. I started to read the front page: Hereafter… thereby… whereby… wherefore. In the end, I just said, "Give us a pen." That's show business.
I was a bit uptight. I don't think I was angry—I probably was. I was always trying to stop smoking. I was always two days on, two days off. I was forever withdrawing from cigarettes. I was probably angry about that. I probably wrote a lot of these songs when I was two days off the fags.
Before "Come On Eileen," we were on our uppers [U.K. slang for "going through hard times"]. It had been two years since the previous number one. We'd changed labels, and the records had done all right but not great, and at least one hadn't done anything at all. We weren't exactly flavor of the month at the record company. There was talk of them dropping us, and a lot of other people like Adam Ant had come through. I always want what I haven't got—or I used to. I was hankering after pop success at that point. I'm not saying we wrote it with that in mind. Oh, that I would be that clever. But we did write it, like everything we did, the best we possibly could. We worked our arses off. Every detail counted.
We weren't trying to make a happy song. I liked songs that reminded you of the summer, like the Beach Boys, like "Do Anything You Wanna Do" by Eddie and the Hot Rods, like "Concrete and Clay" by Unit 4 + 2—good songs that sounded good in the summer. And ["Come On Eileen"] really worked. It's got so many different rhythms going on. It's got the [sings intro] bom-bom-bom, bom-bom-bom. It's got the banjos, and then you got the piano. We worked really hard on it.[1]
We really enjoyed it when it was going up the charts, but I must admit the tread-mill of going around touring everywhere and doing promotion I found exhausting. You're going to America and you're doing an interview while you're having your breakfast. I'm not very good as a pro, and I wasn't prepared to schlep around America. We did two three-week tours, and after that I was like, I want to go home.
We did the demo for the next album [1985's Don't Stand Me Down], and when the manager came round to my flat and I played it for him, he made that noise, that intake of breath, like "Oooh, are you sure about this? You could lose everything you've got." And I was thinking, What the fuck have I got? I just felt like I was an arm of the record company. I felt I had to keep a smile up because everybody I knew was going, "You should be really happy. Things are going so well for you everywhere." And I was thinking, Yeah, I should be happy, shouldn't I? What's wrong with me? I didn't think I deserved it. I thought other people would be jealous of me, and I thought the band would be jealous. I just got really paranoid and withdrawn, but I had to keep on smiling, or thought I did. I didn't even have a car. I was in Birmingham. I would get on the bus and the driver would say, "Can you come back to the depot and meet everybody?" That happened in taxis too. I didn't want to disappoint people, but everywhere I went, it just seemed relentless. I liked it on the way up, the first couple of months, but the workload coupled with pressure, and suddenly, a whole organization developed around us, all depending on you and all smiling at you.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Don't Stand Me Down divided critics and ended the band as a U.K. commercial force. Subsequently, the album's cult following has blossomed, and it is revered as a neglected classic. The group called it a day in 1986. Rowland released two solo albums, The Wanderer (1988) and, 11 years later, the notorious My Beauty (a.k.a. the one where he wears a dress on the cover). After Rowland's protracted battle with cocaine and numerous attempts to reunite the band, Dexys started playing live again in 2003. Rowland announced a new album in 2005. Seven years later, that album, One Day I'm Going to Soar, was released to acclaim. The band has been successfully touring Britain since the record's release, including a stint in London's posh West End. They play the entire album every show.
ROWLAND: Not that I don't think ["Come On Eileen"] is a classic. It probably is. I'm not ready to look back. I'm just always thinking about now, and I'm grateful for the money. Not that we had the most amazing deal ever, but we get money from it, and it's enabled us to be where we are now. If I hear it, it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's a really good song, and we're glad that it's been successful. But we're known as one-hit wonders in America, and that's not something I'm happy about. I know it's better than being a no-hit wonder, but over here [in the U.K., in case you forgot] we're known for a lot more. All right, the main thing we're known for is "Come On Eileen," and some would know us from "Geno," but there are quite a few people who know about our albums and what we're really about and who follow us now. We've had a great response to [One Day I'm Going to Soar], and, God willing, that's going to change things for us in America. But who knows? I haven't got the highest expectations.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs Named After Girls 1. "Louise," The Human League 2. "Christine," Siouxsie and the Banshees 3. "Charlotte Sometimes," The Cure 4. "Stand Down Margaret," English Beat 5. "Joan of Arc," Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark
Notes
[1] "BIG" JIM PATERSON, Dexys trombonist, "Come On Eileen" co-writer: "I can't understand how people can dance to it. It's an awkward tempo—the slow-down, stop, speed-up thing. How can you keep up?"
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