Dexys Midnight Runners: Young Soul Rebels

By Richard White

Dexys Midnight Runners were one of the most misunderstood and overlooked groups of the 1980s. At the centre of it all, their front man and originator, Kevin Rowland, had a reputation for maintaining control and domination over Dexys at all costs.

In the first comprehensive history of the band, author, Richard White, has conducted in-depth interviews with former members on the experience of being a Midnight Runner. Shedding light on the Dexys legend, including the fractious period of writing and recording the classic Come on Eileen, one of the biggest selling singles in UK history and its parent album Too Rye Ay.

While celebrating their achievements on record and on stage, this book also uncovers aspects of Rowland's working methods in the studio and the latest Dexys re-invention, championed on a triumphant tour in 2003.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omnibus Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2009
• ISBN: 9780857120663

Richard White

Richard was born and raised in country Australia. Throughout his adult years he experienced recurring depression. To the neck and rising is a blending of personal reflection and observation of King David as he penned Psalm 69. Richard has a degree in Biblical Studies and many years of pastoral ministry experience. This is his first book. He lives in Melbourne with his wife, Jenny. They have 3 children, 4 grandchildren and counting.

Book preview

Chapter One

I’m keeping it simple these days. In a group. Wanted to look good. Wanted to make good music. That’s the culture we’re from… If I’m gonna go on stage or on TV I wanna look good. This is the kind of thing I dreamed about when I was a kid.

– Kevin Rowland, 2003

IT seems that every group is ultimately defined in time somewhere on record. Yet for Kevin Rowland, the grooves that captured Dexys Midnight Runners’ gloriously contrary and combustible world on vinyl were often simply not enough. How could they hope to support the full emotional weight and expressive strain of their defiantly individual art? With so much occurring and so much to absorb, the sheer content was often overwhelming. All manner of references could compete for your attention. In an attempt to comprehend exactly what it was you’d just heard, the instinctive urge was to re-spin Dexys’ recordings. While the wheel of musical rejuvenation had yet to come full circle, an oddly appropriate place to let the needle hit that opening groove and kick off proceedings comes at a juncture offering hope of a creative rebirth. If not a unique proposition, one new, early Nineties composition found Rowland offering a perspective on his past.

In one of the earliest versions of ‘My Life In England’, his poetic, autobiographical narrative on childhood, Kevin Rowland sang of his return to Wolverhampton from Ireland after living in County Mayo until he was four years old. His family had left the West Midlands shortly after his birth on August 17, 1953.

I can remember singing songs like, ‘I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler, I’m a long way from home,’ he said during BBC Radio Two’s Dexys’ documentary in 2004. Those kinda songs. And I remember singing songs at primary school, and it just seemed like an easy thing to do. A very pleasant thing to do, I loved doing it. And people seemed to like it. It was very simple then. Got a bit complicated later.

After being inspired by watching Billy Fury on television as an eight-year-old, Rowland later made an abortive attempt at learning the guitar. Having finished primary school, he relocated to Harrow, north London as a 10-year-old in 1964, joining St. Gregory’s Catholic secondary school. He told Melody Maker that as a devoted 11-year-old altar boy who regularly attended mass, he’d sat an early entrance exam in the hope of setting himself on the path to his dream vocation as a priest.

Recalling the taunts aimed at his Black Country brogue while confused by his schoolboy colleagues’ London dialect, Rowland would swiftly adopt a similar patois. He later frequently pinpointed the physical attention he received from his peers. In the song, thoughts later returned to his birthplace, and what became a teenage passion for Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, paying homage to club legend Derek Dougan. Rowland revealed to music writer Paolo Hewitt in The Fashion Of Football that his first awareness of the club came as a six-year-old, on their winning the League title in 1959. Although not yet wholly enamoured of football, he’d considered supporting one of the capital’s clubs. Vowing his allegiance to Wolves, he sang of watching his team playing Arsenal, standing on Highbury’s North Bank in London. And while boxer Sonny Liston had figured in the song as part of Rowland’s childhood dreams of America, he’d also caught sight of the legendary Muhammad Ali after sneaking into Wembley Stadium for the second half of the 1966 World Cup final.

Given the fact that his father was a builder and having decided on manual labour as a more virtuous vocation than office work, the prospect of enrolling at Willesden School of Building in 1967 excited Rowland. Following subsequent expulsion from its strict environment, he finished his academic career at St. James, Burnt Oak.

As a 14-year-old absconder, Rowland relished the delights of London’s West End. Visiting record shops in Soho, his friends encouraged staff to play obscure soul records. Rowland later admitted he’d often been in trouble with the police before leaving school, following a spate of court appearances for various criminal acts, including shoplifting and theft, which continued into adolescence. I suppose my youth was okay but there was a lot of it that wasn’t so marvellous and I can honestly say that there’s nothing I regret growing out of.

Leaving school at 15, in February 1969, he undertook a job with Dunn’s clothes wear company. Fascinated by the sartorial etiquette of a gang of Harrow mods, Rowland’s scholarly attention turned to an obsessive education in clothes. Subsequently assuming the pseudonym of King Rollo, he joined a local mixed sex Harrow gang called The Young Kingsbury Team. Buying exquisite clothes and shoes was crucial. Resplendent in Harrington jackets, Ben Shermans and Mohair suits, Rowland revelled in this clothes-obsessed, fast-paced underground movement. In the late Sixties world of colourful expression and hippiedom, he and his sharply dressed adolescent contemporaries thus adopted a reactionary look whose roots could be traced to their middle-aged, conservative American counterparts.

While enjoying a sense of belonging to a movement, its subversive appeal continued to excite Rowland’s fascination. His adoration for this Ivy League apparel, incorporating Sta-prest trousers, button-down shirts and brogues, would prove enduring. As a result of a September 1969 Daily Mirror interview with a similar teenage gang, the term ‘skinhead’ was coined. Both Rowland and future Merton Parka and Dexys Midnight Runner Hammond organist Mick Talbot insist it was an inappropriate description for this cult soul and dancehall ethic. It wasn’t about football or violence, Talbot maintained in 2003, enthralled with its attendant seven-inch singles culture, but clubbers with a love of reggae and soul music.

By the time he was 15, he told Jack magazine, he’d developed a confidence in his own tastes, eschewing the dictates of fashion. It’s a much misunderstood thing, Rowland told Gary Mulholland. My generation were the ones dancing to black music. With Jamaican ska becoming popular, a 16-year-old Rowland and his compadres enjoyed looking their best, going to clubs and attending dances where Laurel Aitken, The Ethiopians, Toots & The Maytals, The Pioneers and The Wailers found steady rotation. You could dance to records but you would never go to see live groups, Rowland later explained.

While white bands held little sway amongst this listening and dancing fodder, Rowland admitted, It was always at the back of my mind that I’d like to do pop music or design clothes or become a hairdresser, but how could I have told my friends that? He would later train as a Vidal Sassoon stylist. I always thought I’d like to get into pop music but when I was 16 I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling my mates that, as groups were nowhere as far as they were concerned.

Rowland grew his hair as an overground skinhead explosion ensued in late 1969. Skinheads would proliferate on the football terraces the following summer. His zealous passion for football reached a crescendo during the UEFA Cup final second leg between Wolves and Tottenham Hotspur in 1972. His vehement anger at the opposition fans had frightened him. My life was changing and that was it, he told Hewitt. I stopped going and I started to change and do my own thing, which ended up being music.

Following varied work as a printer’s apprentice, with his dad’s own building firm and a stint at C&A, Rowland decamped to Butlins for a summer season’s work in Clacton. Later roaming Scotland and finding work in Glasgow and Aviemore, Rowland relished his freedom as a nomadic wanderer. Moving to Liverpool, he told Gavin Martin his existence had veered between extremes. At first I was living with this group of people who were sort of like hippies. Well, they weren’t anything else, dirty and dropping acid and listening to Hendrix all day. Having worked as a boutique shop assistant, he had also been close to marriage.*

On reaching 21, he jacked in employment as a sales rep with a company car and returned to Birmingham, where he took a job in a city centre shop. Rowland still considered that his other childhood dream, of becoming a pop star, was conceivable.

Despite everything, there’d be the occasional clear moment when I knew I had talent and could be good enough to be a pop singer, he informed Jon Wilde. I had nothing to lose. He’d later describe his subsequent musical career as a last-ditch attempt to prove that I wasn’t completely worthless. Kevin’s elder brother, Pete, was heading a country & western social club group around local Birmingham venues by 1974. With their guitarist handing in a six-month notice, Kevin was told that if he mastered rudimentary guitar he could join the group. He duly did so. There would be no looking back, as he swiftly assumed his brother’s lead vocal duties. During an approximate 18-month tenure, Rowland solicited social club crowd approval with inventive stage theatrics. Among the group’s covers repertoire was the Jerome Kern Showboat standard ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. Venturing into Birmingham clubs at the time, Rowland often grew frustrated at watching Northern Soul devotees, resplendent in high waisted, generously flared trousers strutting their stuff. I don’t know what it is about it, he later told Jamming! I used to go and watch them in 1974 when I used to go to clubs, stand there and watch them and I used to get really angry. I just hated it!

Rowland later emphasised his intuitive flair for making pre-emptive strikes in the sartorial stakes, tapping into prevailing mood swings and trends. I know what’s going to come into fashion, he would explain, what people will be wearing. A skill, he claims, that was in operation during the period subsequently coined New Romanticism.

It’s probably very true that he did [pre-empt] that. He knows that things go in a cycle, Dexys evangelist and former freelance Melody Maker/ NME journalist Paolo Hewitt insists. And he’s always been fascinated by that culture. In his ‘high fashion’ conceit for a nascent Midnight Runners image in late 1978, Rowland appeared to draw on certain elements of the ambiguous, androgynous David Bowie/Bryan Ferry school of expression, a hangover from the early to mid-Seventies. Kevin was very image-conscious. He understood pop music, and he understood the way you use clothes to really subvert things, Hewitt adds. Rowland had clearly been captivated with the colourful sophistication of Seventies glamrock act Roxy Music, being enthusiastic for early classics like 1973’s ‘Beauty Queen’ and ballad ‘Just Like You’ from the band’s Stranded album.

Yet this admiration for Ferry’s ‘stunning’ sartorial style soon led him to suspect the motives of the music media. I started to understand that not all the press were paragons of taste when Bryan Ferry was ridiculed for wearing what I thought were amazing clothes in 1973-74, he informed David Hutcheon. This journalistic assault, including press jibes like ‘Byron Ferrari’, clearly affected Rowland, who was later fearful of suffering a similar reception. I think I was afraid of them getting at me on a personal level.

When Ferry was wearing a tuxedo, Kevin understood instinctively that what he was doing was going anti-rock culture, Hewitt affirms. "And then you look at the NME and they really started to take the piss out of him, as they did with Kevin."

In a comprehensive 2001 web interview with Plan B magazine’s current editor-in-chief Everett True,* he stated: We [Dexys] looked good and because we looked good, people say the image took over. What are you talking about? What’s wrong with looking good? It doesn’t mean your music isn’t any good? Yet Rowland would draw a discreet veil over this formative point of reference in interviews.

Acknowledging a wavering vocal debt to Ferry, Rowland would also admit his sartorial influence, telling Hutcheon, We knew that fashion thing was going to be massive and we wanted to be a bit like Roxy Music, a band that would look and sound fantastic.

During the summer of 1976, this dual passion for Ferry and fashion informed the ‘art-rock’ dalliances of Rowland’s next musical endeavour, Lucy & The Lovers. Guitarist Mark Phillips and girlfriend bassist Ghislaine Weston were recruited through advertisements in the Birmingham Evening Mail. Their nine-strong personnel was an early sign of the agenda Rowland would adopt two years later. The Lovers included two skimpily attired female vocalists. Informing Mark Ellen in 1982 that The Lovers resembled little more than a horrible, boring, pretentious arty-farty affair, Rowland could often be found on stage in make-up, expansive suit and slicked hair. He’d later wear frilly shirts and a tam-o-shanter for good measure. Yet Rowland later drew parallels between The Lovers’ look and a newly emergent agenda accompanying the outbreak of punk. I started to read about it and noticed the clothes we were wearing were exactly the same, he recalled in 1983. There were a lot of similarities.

Morphing into a five-piece group, Rowland, Phillips, Weston, backing vocalist Heather Tonge and drummer Lee Burton were suitably re-christened as bristling second-wave punks, The Killjoys in early 1977. Tonge and Burton departed. An additional guitarist, Supanova’s Keith Rimmell and more accomplished drummer Bob Peach entered the fray, bringing a notable improvement to their live pedigree. When The Killjoys started I was really interested in punk, Rowland, a recent witness to the inspiring sight of The Clash at Birmingham’s Barbarella’s, informed Jamming!’s John Tully, who later co-managed the group with used car salesman Dave Corke, who ran The Killjoys’ regular home town haunt.

When punk happened, Hewitt enthused, it was all or nothing. Someone said to me, ‘Do you remember when you told me there were no good records made before 1977?’ And I’m sure Kevin had the same opinion as me. The initial flame of fervour slowly subsided. There was little of exception to separate The Killjoys from the innumerable, like-minded groups playing the country’s live circuits.

All that punk stuff – it wasn’t like I imagined it was gonna be, Rowland told Radio Two. It was like I was always dirty, scruffy, carrying the equipment into a gig. By the time you went on stage you’d feel pretty lousy. And it wasn’t what I’d wanted it to be like.

Yet something of punk’s society-shaking ferment had already been effectively captured on the release of The Sex Pistols’ debut single ‘Anarchy In The UK’ in December 1976. Addressing its ominous times with satirical humour, ‘Anarchy’ left a deep, indelible mark on its generation. The Pistols were a good group and they did open it up for everybody, Rowland later told journalist Jim Irvin.*

Front man Johnny Rotten’s charisma captured Rowland’s imagination. For both men, anger was an energetic release. Rowland’s came couched in a suitably Cockneyfied, semi-venomous sneer, his sentiments towards prince Rotten immortalised on The Killjoys’ two-and-a-half minute debut dispatch, ‘Johnny Won’t Get To Heaven’. Signing with Lee Wood’s independent Cambridge label Raw Records, its release coincided with a time Rowland later described to Jamming! as punk’s most intense euphoria in mid-July. Backed with the churning riff of ‘Naïve’, the three-chord bluster of ‘Johnny …’ signified all that punk’s predominantly limited musicianship would allow. I’d already written the song – ‘it could be me, it could be me …’ Rowland revealed in 2004. I suppose there was some jealousy there, maybe. Firing his opening salvo towards the music press, he proudly eschewed both the NME and Sounds. The NME journalist Gavin Martin later applauded Rowland as Rotten’s post-punk, voice of protest successor. Sounds announced that record sales for ‘Johnny …’, according to Raw, had reached the 10,000 mark, a major success for a small independent group.

Undertaking their first Radio One session for John Peel on October 18, the band demonstrated an unassuming grip on the art of noise. With ‘Naïve’ climaxing in a growling, snarled vocal coda and with glistening, razor-wired ‘Recognition’ and the churning ‘Back To Front’ also recorded, ‘At Night’ found Rowland dispensing further food for thought on the music media’s questionable powers of influence. While this lyrical strain in The Killjoys’ modest oeuvre accounted for some of Rowland’s preoccupation with the Fourth Estate during the early Eighties, he assured the NME in 2000: But I didn’t come into music thinking, ‘I’m gonna fuck the press.’ I was thinking, ‘Great! I’m gonna do interviews!’

Filmed that autumn, The Killjoys were captured in German director Wolfgang Buld’s documentary Punk In London. Rowland offered his own interpretation of punk’s creative credo as 1978 unfolded. The original idea of punk was to be different and say what you wanted, when you wanted and how you wanted, and not to copy everyone else. While Rowland admitted to John Hess in February that The Killjoys were strictly bandwagon jumpers riding on punk’s coat-tails, a new, more colourful agenda was soon proposed. The audiences are fed up with the black leather scruffiness that’s been the fashion. They want a change – there’s going to be one heck of a reaction against punk.

Later boasting of a frequent image overhaul on the group’s behalf, The Killjoys were now resplendent in white shirts, replete with blow-dried coiffures and offset by jodhpurs and boxing boots. Instead of doing fast songs we did slow ones, but we still kept the name The Killjoys, he explained to Jamming! five years later, and that’s why the audience hated us. A brief London tour itinerary included dates at The Speakeasy, The Nashville and The 100 Club. There’d be punks at the front row because they’d heard the record [‘Johnny …’] and the name, Rowland recalled in 1983, and we’d come on and do Bobby Darin’s ‘Dream Lover’, Fifties rock’n’roll and country & western! They would also incorporate covers of Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ and Buddy Holly’s ‘Rave On’.

Although a typically tiresome line of enquiry, Melody Maker asked why they favoured such a ‘retro’ musical policy. This early example of Rowland ‘re-interpreting’ bygone material and attempting to connect with its emotional content would find a more successful (and coherent) outlet as the year progressed. Yet it had already provided traces of an irascible, new-wave crooner surfacing from beneath the punk veneer. Recorded on February 13, their second Peel session provided ample evidence. The jagged ‘All The Way’ featured ringing Buzzcock chords, while the misleading, anachronistically titled ‘Spit On Me’ was an inverted Fifties rock/doo-wop effort featuring boisterous communal backing harmonies. Even a French chanteuse quality surfaced on the slow-tempo, low-key ballad ‘Ghislaine’, which featured Weston’s amorous Gallic tones.

The session’s significance rested on ‘Smoke Your Own’. Returning to the thorny subject of the music press, Rowland made reference to punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. Having already questioned pseudo intellectual and philosophical tastes on ‘At Night’, this lyrical thread was also addressed on the chorus.

By early 1978, 19-year-old Black Country guitarist Kevin Archer’s tenure with The Negatives found him yearning for something more substantial. We wanted it to be a serious group, but it wasn’t, Archer told Everett True, and it was old-fashioned. Meanwhile, Pete Rowland had been scouring clubs at the turn of the year for new groups to manage. Kevin’s brother came to a pub where I was practising with a group, Archer recalled. Kevin then saw us and liked one or two of the songs. Archer and Rowland struck up a conversation. Following Keith Rimmell’s departure, The Killjoys swiftly sought a replacement ahead of an imminent tour. Archer enjoyed his brief tenure with what had become a popular Birmingham outfit, including supporting Nico at the Camden Music Machine and a Raw Records anniversary shindig in Cambridge in May.

With ambitions for landing an album deal and recording contract, the group prepared material for their debut LP; their final session at London’s Riverside Studios had produced a new work, ‘Definitely Down On The Farm’. Previously aired at the Mayfair Suite in March, Melody Maker applauded its moody, Velvet Underground dynamic. Unfortunately, the sole master copy of The Killjoys’ swansong vanished. A scheduled London Marquee show was subsequently shelved as press reports in June disclosed news of the group’s disbandment. Rowland later admitted to Uncut that the group had revolted. Growing despondent in the wake of his bandmates’ departure, ending The Killjoys clearly hadn’t been part of the plan. I would probably still be going now with The Killjoys only the others left, he told Jamming!

Old-fashioned musical differences were also given for their demise. There were a lot of good ideas going about for that band, but it didn’t work because there were too many people wanting to do different things. Weston, Phillips and Peach subsequently formed new band, Out Of Nowhere, that summer. Yet The Killjoys experience had proved a vital education. We learned a valuable lesson there, Rowland conceded to Jamming! We thought, ‘We’ll make it as The Killjoys, and then do what we want.’ We learned the hard way that you have to start out with what you want to do. Insistent that he’d set his sights on a new musical direction and stage presentation as early as January, Rowland asked Archer to join him in a new venture.

Espousing their determination to swim against the tide, the duo’s defiant musical gesture would eventually strike a chord within Britain’s disarmingly diverse late Seventies UK music scene. With punk and everything, it had swept a lot of things away, Rowland told the BBC’s Young Guns Dexys documentary. But I knew that people would want to dance again.

* In 1991, he’d meet his long-lost daughter Alethea Jane England, conceived during a relationship he’d had whilst living in the city.

* Extract from Everett True interview with Kevin Archer and Kevin Rowland published on tan gents.co.uk website (2001).

* Extract from Jim Irvin interview with Kevin Archer and Kevin Rowland in ‘Regrets? I’ve Had A Few’, originally published in Mojo, September 2000 (full version available on www.rocksbackpages.com website).

Chapter Two

IFELT that somewhere inside me I could do it, I could be in a group and I could be great, Rowland told Everett True in 2001. It had been my childhood dream and I’d abandoned it over the years. I felt not very good about myself, and I felt a desperation to do something, to prove myself."

Compelled to react against a post-punk ‘subculture’ with low aspiration thresholds, a 24-year-old Rowland turned to the healing powers of soul music. In mid-1978, I started listening to a few old soul records. They sounded so fresh and alive, so punchy and innocent and honest compared to the overproduced groups around. It was inspiring.

Stressing the need to be a purposeful unit with a clear sense of direction, the group would feature a brass section. They would sound great. Most importantly, they would look like no one else. I thought about the line-up, and the type of stuff we’d play, the clothes we’d wear and everything.

Archer had found the final part of the equation particularly appealing. At the time, everyone was looking the same. It was a bit post-punk, he told True. Everyone used to wear punky kind of clothes, black. That’s how it started.

He was getting on a bit in punk terms I guess, teenage fan and later music journalist Peter Paphides observed, and the point finally came where he wanted to build the type of band that could play the music that he heard in his head. It was time to go for it. He was one of those artists who try and re-create those unique sounds they hear in the real world.

Rowland initially made a strong case for the existence of a foundation building ‘blueprint’ during the group’s formative period. We planned the whole thing, he insisted to Dermot Stokes in mid-1980. We accepted that we’d probably be quite successful and we thought out how we’d deal with that and would we do this when we got that and so on. And it’s much easier for us now because we made all those plans.

A lot of planning went into Dexys, Rowland told Jon Wilde in 1999. But so much of it was accidental and uncertain. A year later, he reiterated how opportunistic the group’s formation had been. We weren’t strategic about it, I certainly wasn’t, Rowland told Irvin, but I think we thought we were going to be a successful group, it’s gonna be good, we were certainly good enough to make it.

Archer could certainly see it happening. I got a positive feeling from him. I knew we’d be more successful because the whole thing was a good idea.

During June and July, Rowland and Archer advertised in the Birmingham Evening Mail for speculative recruits to join a nine-piece ‘new-wave soul band’, comprising keyboards, drums, bass, saxophones, trumpet and trombone. The response was encouraging. Eighteen-year-old keyboardist Pete Saunders lived in the middle-class district of Moseley. A teenage heavy rock fan, he had swiftly embraced the British take on American R&B and blues, enthralled with Alexis Korner and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Spending two years in a theatre group at Birmingham’s Cannon Hill Arts Centre, the pianist was invited to pen material for a musical version of King Kong, before performing at the Edinburgh Festival.

He recalls his initial audition. I got this hippie bloke to drive me out into the Black Country, to Oldbury, and we unloaded this Hammond organ in Kevin’s front room. He owned the house, which was quite unusual in those days for a 24-year-old bloke. Rowland placed ‘Big Bird’ by Atlantic artist Eddie Floyd on the turntable. I’d never heard it before, and he said, ‘Do you like music like this?’ and I thought, ‘Ooh.’ And I said, ‘Are you into blues?’ I thought, ‘That sounds quite like the music I like,’ and I played along to the record so that he could see I could play. Then he played ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’, with the two of them [Rowland and Archer] singing in harmony.

Conceived during the dying embers of The Killjoys’ existence, the song’s lyrical content provided a clue to its punk origins. Archer had been impressed by an early rendition of the song at Rowland’s Oldbury abode early that year. I just showed it to Kev in my bedroom, the other members of the band didn’t see it, Rowland later told author Johnny Rogan. I showed him on the guitar and it was funny that I already had that soul thing in my head… Rowland and Archer spent endless hours perfecting a startling dual lead vocal approach. The emphasis on sounding unique was as strong as the songs. We really wanted a vocal style that set us apart, Rowland told Irvin, and we were aware that all the good groups had a sound that identified them.

Floored by the duo’s