It was the last great debut single of the 1970s, a scorched-earth soul song with an upstart attitude. Before a note sounded it had made a statement: radio interference, a snatch of Deep Purple, then the Sex Pistols, then The Specials, then an earnest young man’s voice declaring, “For God’s sake, burn it down”.
Dexys Midnight Runners’ Dance Stance was a declaration of culture war delivered by a second-generation-Irish Wolverhampton/London/Birmingham transplant who sounded like Jackie Wilson on uppers. He came mob-handed, backed by what looked like a gang of stevedores wearing woolly caps and donkey jackets.
The single sounded exuberant but felt revolutionary, a reclamation of Celtic soul that namechecked a litany of Hibernian writers – Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Seán O’Casey, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien and Laurence Sterne. For an Irish kid, hearing such names blasting from the BBC in the age of Margaret Thatcher, H-blocks and hunger strikes seemed radical.
“It was written from anger, from rage, from hearing Irish joke after Irish joke around where I was living – Smethwick, which is a real working-class area just outside Birmingham,” says Kevin Rowland, Dexys’ leader, who has just written his memoir, Bless Me Father: A Life Story.
“I just thought, This is f**king ridiculous. The people telling those jokes were not the f**king brightest tools in the box by any means, and they would be laughing at the Irish. And they weren’t just Irish jokes; they were anti-Irish jokes.”
The cover of Dexys’ debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, released in the summer of 1980, featured a photograph of a 13-year-old Catholic Belfast boy carrying all his belongings, forced from his home because of “civil unrest”.
“The cover of that album at that time, especially in Birmingham – probably more so later in 1982, when we started to bring more Irish influences, with Come on Eileen, or singing a little bit in Irish at the end of The Waltz – it felt subversive, because there was such hostility.
“No one wanted to hear anything about Ireland, especially in Birmingham so shortly after those pub bombings, which were horrendous. So it felt like almost sneaking it in. I just felt a f**king need to do it.”
Much of Rowland’s book represents a coming to terms with his lineage, exploring that singular position occupied by second-generation Irish musicians in Britain in the post-punk years: John Lydon, Shane MacGowan, Elvis Costello, Siobhán Fahey, the Smiths. Has he compared notes with any of his contemporaries?
“Strangely enough I have done, I’ve talked to Johnny Marr a little bit about it, more on email than anything else. Siobhán Fahey” – of Bananarama and Shakespears Sister – “is a good friend. We have a good laugh. If I see her socially, before long I’ll start talking to her, like, ‘Howya! By God, ye’re a fine woman!’ We can go on like that for an hour,” Rowland says.
“The thing about those second-generation musicians, from John Lydon right through to Oasis, with most of our fathers working on building sites, there’s not an also-ran among them. They’re all at the cutting edge of their culture.
“It’s incredible, really. Look at the population of Ireland and the population of England: a disproportionate amount of significant players were second-generation Irish.”
A passage from the latter part of Bless Me Father takes a more metaphysical angle: “As I drove from Knock airport to Crossmolina, past all the barren, rocky fields, it struck me that Mayo is almost deserted – still decimated from the potato blight of 1845 to 1850. And it is haunted. There is no other word for it. I looked over the deserted fields where villages once were, and I could feel spirits crying out to be heard.”
Does he think our songs and stories come from expression of unresolved trauma?
“I don’t know if it has to come out in stories or music, but I think we’re definitely haunted by trauma. I never even heard about the Famine in childhood. My parents didn’t mention it. I probably was in my 20s when I found out about it. Absolutely zero taught in school. No mention of Ireland,” Rowland says.
“Growing up in England, it was impossible not to have a bit of an inferiority complex, because it was foisted upon you. We were obviously poorer than the English, and our dads were judged as scruffy Paddies.
“There was a study in the 1980s or 1990s about Irish people emigrating to England. I read it out as part of a speech for my dad’s 90th-birthday party. I think the British government commissioned it. An Indian lady did the study, and she concluded that something like 30 or 40 per cent of Irish immigrants were more likely to suffer from heart disease, cancer, alcoholism etc, than the Irish that stayed at home.
“That’s the irony, because they came for a better life. They fared less well than the host nation and less well than immigrants from other countries and Irish emigrants that went to America or wherever.”
Perhaps as a reaction to all this austerity, Rowland and his contemporaries deployed sartorial self-expression as a way of asserting pride and individuality. Yet he was riddled by self-doubt. Rowland grew up at odds with his father and his environment, a juvenile delinquent given to thieving and truancy.
Something miraculous happened when he assembled the first Dexys line-up. What was the click?
“It was the music and the clothes. I just had a vision. I’d been in all this trouble, I had all this stuff from my old man and was very much seen in the family as the one who was going nowhere, or to prison, and that carried on into my 20s,” Rowland says.
“And so all of a sudden, when The Killjoys” – his first band – “broke up I had it in my mind to form this soul band. I thought, people are going to want to dance again; people are going to want to go look good again.
“I didn’t know much about brass, but I knew we’d have a brass section. I felt on a mission, and the clothes were part of it, because style had gone out with punk. It became kind of standard. It lost its edge.
“And the fact that I’d trained in hairdressing, and by that time I was pretty good at it, I just thought, shit, my whole f**king life has been leading to this music, hair, clothes: put it all together.”
That newfound zeal was infectious. Dexys all agreed to sign on the dole to devote themselves to writing, rehearsing and playing gigs. They bunked on to trains without paying, practised in squats and arts centres, lifted gear. And somewhere along the way they conceived a look – a Birmingham version of On the Waterfront – that was as striking in its way as The Clash or The Specials.
“It was a good look,” Rowland says, “but it painted us into a corner. There wasn’t really anywhere we could go from there. If we’d started off with the wild stuff, the asymmetric hair and the big trousers, and then delved into that New York docker look for a couple of months and then something else, that would have been great. But we were presenting it as real, as opposed to, ‘These are some cool clothes we’re wearing’.
“And we were playing this music that had depth in the same way as Roxy Music. You listen to early Roxy Music – If There Is Something, on the first album – there’s real yearning going on there. The guy is singing from his pain. He’s pouring his heart out. The arrangement is incredible. And then we could have moved on.
“It was a bit of a dark period when the first band broke up, late 1980. Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran started to come through wearing what we’d been wearing, and all of a sudden they’re the new thing; we’re not the new thing. It was quite tough – so tough that I f**king buried it. It was only, like, 20 years later that I woke up and thought, sh*t.”
The disappointment didn’t prevent him from immediately conceiving a new sound, a post-punk take on Van Morrison’s album Saint Dominic’s Preview, wedded to a prototypal raggle-taggle look: dungarees, curly hair, earrings, hobo chic.
The Too-Rye-Ay album anticipated The Pogues, The Waterboys and even Elvis Costello’s and U2’s defections towards roots and acoustic music. The single Come On Eileen was huge, but the band apparently didn’t receive much money from its success.
The next album, Don’t Stand Me Down, one of the lost classics of the 1980s, cost a fortune to record and sold poorly. Rowland wouldn’t see royalties from his boom years until as late as 2014. From the late 1980s to the millennium he was as humbled as a star could be, spiralling from drug addiction to the dole queue to borderline homelessness. For years his earnings were attached and his debts were so grievous it looked as if they might outlive him.
“I was bitter for a long time,” he says. “But you can’t stay bitter. I dwelled on that shit for years, man. There was a long period of inactivity. We did an album in 1985, I did a solo thing in 1988; the next one was 1999, then after that it was 2012.
“The biggest thing was when I got into recovery from cocaine addiction, you learn to deal with your resentments. I had to work really hard at it.”
In the end, Bless Me Father’s real narrative arc is that of the prodigal son. After years of conflict and resentment, he finally made peace when his father had a stroke.
“I thought, we’ll never be close. I just accepted it. And then something happened. He had that stroke, and he just softened completely. I was able to hug him, and it was incredible.”
I ask if Rowland learned anything about himself from the process of writing the book. He pauses for a full 20 seconds before answering.
“I think one of the things I learned is that I used to beat myself up for some of the decisions I’ve made. We’ve talked about them: changing the look, not being more successful, not taking the opportunities that were there, not following up on things in a career way kind of way.
“But when I think about it, to be quite honest, given my background, it’s a bit of a miracle that I had any success in the music business. I did reach that conclusion right at the end of it: ‘F**king hell!’”
Bless Me Father: A Life Story is published by Ebury Spotlight
