iJamming.net

FOREWORD

“I have to trust my own instincts. If I start writing music for the listener I’ll end up sounding like The Jam or someone.”

It’s early 1982, and Kevin Rowland has broken his self-imposed exile from the interview process to promote the new Dexys Midnight Runners single ‘Come On Eileen’ and album Too-Rye-Ay. Jamming! Magazine co-editors Tony Fletcher and Pedro Romhanyi are taking their allotted time in turn in what memory recalls to be a record company office, firing sometimes suspicious questions at the Dexys front man who occasionally responds, as above, with deliberately barbed comments about the biggest band in Britain, a group with whom he knows his interviewers are on first name terms.

Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, 1980: still one of the greatest debut albums of all time.

Rowland has, by 1982, well earned his reputation for being difficult and argumentative, and even this new-found co-operation – a sudden (and some claim desperate) decision to play the interview game and promote his new album by all means necessary – is of itself a typically contrary move. And while he’s thrilled that people are paying attention to Dexys once more, he obviously can’t help himself when it comes to dissing the competition. But it irks Pedro and Tony, for they consider themselves among Dexys Midnight Runners’ keenest followers; indeed, they’re part of a crowd who have been heard to discuss the idea that the new-look Dexys might just be the finest band in Britain.

The love affair had started in 1980 with the first Dexys Midnight Runners album Searching For The Young Soul Rebels (which Pedro insisted Tony purchase to delve deeper than the hit singles ‘Burn It Down,’ ‘Geno’ and ‘There There My Dear’). It had then gathered steam when that original group imploded over the failure that was ‘Keep It Part 2’ and a new Dexys line-up exhuberantly announced its arrival with the near timeless singles ‘Plan B’ and ‘Show Me’. But it really took hold in November1981, when the (flop) single ‘Liars A To E’ signified a bold turn away from brass to strings, and when Kevin Rowland brought this new-look Dexys Midnight Runners to the Old Vic Theatre in London’s Waterloo for three nights of what he called the Projected Passion Revue.

‘Liars A To E,’ November 1981, released to coincide with the Projected Passion Revue at the Old Vic. The single sleeve profiled the new-look Dexys, complete with ponytails and tracksuits, and printed the lyrics on the front. (The back sleeve featured a short essay.) It failed to chart.

This writer remembers those concerts as possibly the most enervating and inspirational he’s ever been fortunate enough to attend. This was the dawn of the 1980s, a time when the post-punk youth was only just weaning itself off the exhuberant pop-politics of 2-Tone, else acclimatizing itself to the synth-pop future of the Blitz Kid generation, or stubbornly buried deep in defiantly uncommercial indie experimentation. The Projected Passion Revue represented a complete rejection of all such business as usual. By seating his musicians around him like a double quartet, by mixing up brass and strings while mostly eschewing rock band instrumentation, by dressing the group in uniforms of track suits, by having that group bring pre-rehearsed actions and words and movements to a theatrical venue, and most of all, by singing his heart out to the extent you thought it might burst in front of you, Kevin Rowland showed that there was a different way to present live music than those methods which were tried and tested, and becoming very very tiresome.

Projected Passion Revue, 2007, features the three singles from 1981 and accompanying live recordings. Unfortunately, the Old Vic shows were not committed to posterity.

Pedro and Tony attended at least two of these Old Vic shows each and found themselves on something like talking terms with Kevin Rowland in the process. Still, all attempts at getting the Dexys front man to break his interview silence during this period proved fruitless; Rowland preferred to present his ca(u)se via the written word in print advertising and on record sleeves. A few months later, his ‘Old Vic’ Dexys line-up had morphed into the group that delivered the album Too-Rye-Ay and he embraced the media with a mass market promotion campaign that culminated in the fiddle-led, gypsy-clad band topping the charts in Britain and America alike with ‘Come On Eileen.’ The image of that Dexys may now cause us collective twinges of embarrassment, and that single may have been played out at one too many drunken weddings, but the album was, again, something beautiful, and fully deserved its success.

Too-Rye-Ay featured re-recordings of both ‘Plan B’ and ‘Liars A To E’ but, it could be argued, some of the originality and urgency was lost in the process. Kevin Rowland essentially admitted as much on his newly launched myspace page, when he asserted that the line-up that played the Old Vic “was the best of all the Dexys,” and his regret that he had neither recorded those three life-changing shows nor made an album with that band and that sound. (To which I should add my own sadness that he never got to extoll that group’s virtues in a printed conversation.) However, a new compilation, simply entitled Projected Passion Revue, gathers together those three interim singles from 1981 along with a BBC In Concert show to provide proof of what was and what could have been.

Too-Rye-Ay: took the Celtic Soul Brothers era Dexys back to the top of the charts.

The interview that follows could and probably should have been about that Projected Passion Revue line-up, because that’s the Dexys Midnight Runners that did, really, change our lives (in music). But by the time Tony and Pedro found themselves across a table from Kevin Rowland with a tape recorder running inbetween them, events had moved on. We found ourselves talking instead about Rowland’s constant use (and change) of image, about his famously difficult reputation, and about his ongoing desire to present Dexys Midnight Runners as anything but another rock group.

As ever, Tony cringes somewhat at his and Pedro’s questions, which scream of youthful idealism bordering on complete naivete; to a large degree, his sympathies are with our subject. Anthony Blampied, who typed up the interview in January 2007 from a photocopy of Pedro’s hand-written transcript Tony has kept since 1982, strongly disagrees. “Pretty depressing stuff,” he wrote as he returned the manuscript. “It reminded me at moments of R.D. Laing’s transcriptions of interviews with schizophrenics.”

In the years that followed, Rowland did indeed appear to go over the edge. After the 1985 album Don’t Stand Me Down (which some iJamming! readers consider the finest of them all) floundered commercially, Rowland released an even less successful solo album, The Wanderer, and there then followed drug addiction, financial ruin, a disastrous solo album of covers for Creation Records and a bizarre appearance at the Reading Festival. Perhaps now, a further decade later, it is time for redemption: Rowland has reconvened the Dexys Midnight Runners name (with which he also toured in 2003), made available a superb song (albeit only in demo form) called ‘Oh Johanna’ at his myspace page, and is making appearances around London as a DJ. The release of the Projected Passion Revue album will hopefully serve to remind that under the contrary, self-destructive personality there lies real, if sporadic, genius.

Don’t Stand Me Down, 1985: some consider it the finest album ever made. Kevin Rowland split Dexys Midnight Runners shortly thereafter.

THE iJAMMING! KEVIN ROWLAND INTERVIEW STARTS HERE

Dexys Midnight Runners Myspace page is here.
Full Dexys/Rowland/Bureau discography here.
Dexys Midnight Runners biography here.
Dexys.org here

When it’s December in New York – even a warm one – and you’re offered an all-expenses paid trip to Mallorca and mainland Spain at the end of January, you’d be a fool to say no. You might also forget that it’s winter even in the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, this four-day sojourn coincided with a rare storm front that brought such strong winds through the Balearics as to plunge the temperatures towards zero in Mallorca, hard work when you’re there for an outdoor concert at midnight; the same storm dumped snow across much of the country and left the cities of Murcia and Madrid both feeling much like northern England in February.

The Cathedral in Palma, Mallorca: only took 400 years to build.

As Brit readers probably know – maybe even from experience – Mallorca’s tourist capital of Palma is full of Indian restaurants, English pubs and British newspapers, but it’s also got a beautiful marina dotted with expensive and cheap boats alike, a delightful old town, plenty healthy food of its own, a stunning Cathedral and a thriving viticulture. In between the work, I visited the island’s two best wine bars, befriended the owners, tasted more local wine that I’d expected and learned enough about the island’s indigenous grapes to merit a separate future post.

Murcia I couldn’t get my head around. We were there on a Saturday, yet by midnight just about all the bars and restaurants were closed, the one exception being an indie nightclub that was not set to get going until 3am. Walking round the cold, wet, rather tatty city streets in forlorn hope of finding anything that would serve food, I felt like I could have been in any anonymous British city in the 1970s, except for the fact that I felt safe in my solitude. I finally headed back to the hotel in the hope of room service, which had finished hours ago; a 24-hour grocery I was sent to around the corner was closed. Rather than head back out across town to the club, I ended up going to bed hungry – and sober.

Running the Parks in Madrid: not a bad way to spend a January day

At least this gave me the energy to enjoy Madrid. (Unlike some of my friends who vowed that the Murcia indie nightclub – the name is 12 and 1/2 for anyone headed that way soon – was rocking hard from 4am until 6.) There’s something about the Spanish capital that I just love: the people have a sparkle to their eyes, a bounce to their step and a pride in their home town that is positively contagious. Madrid has history, it has architecture, it has parks by the dozen, it has football (of course), and it has a thriving, classically Continental café, restaurant and bar culture. To my delight, our effervescent hosts for the evening took us to yet another fantastic wine bar where my rather random choice of wine – Enate from the Somontano DO – so impressed the waitress that she brought over a complimentary tray of aged Manchego “to open up the wine.” (The fact that, by pure coincidence, she had also served as a translator for the band on a previous trip may have contributed to her generosity.) Sunday night turned into Monday morning with me clutching a glass of the bar’s best Ribera del Duero, which at all of €2.4 rendered it about a third the price you’d pay for anything similar in London or New York. On Monday morning, the rain didn’t seem to have stopped the people I was meeting with from smiling and laughing and acting like it was Friday evening all over again. Madrid, you’re the greatest.

I took this photo at Madrid International Airport yesterday: three major business/news magazines lined up in a row, all concerned enough with environmental issues to make the subject a cover story. I was intrigued enough to buy The Economist; it’s ‘Greening of America’ feature, apart from borrowing the headline from a Newsweek cover story of last year, essentially listed, albeit in much more detail, the same points I made this time last week, about how green policies are working their way upwards from the grass roots to the White House. The conclusion was optimistic:

“Whereas in Europe or Asia new ideas often flow from the centre to the regions, in America the states are the incubators of big shifts in policy. This means that change is coming – fast.”

If you have to go away on business, in January, it may as well be to the Mediterranean. Even if it is freezing cold. Back on Tuesday.

Is it 2007? Or 1987? The Coachella festival announced its line-up this week and keen observers immediately noticed that it included two bands previously considered disbanded. The Jesus & Mary Chain’s Reid brothers have apparently put aside their famed sibling rivalry for a crack at becoming this year’s Pixies (i.e. a money-making reformation machine), while Neil Finn, who has played on and off with his own brother Tim Finn over the years, has now gotten back with bassist Nick Seymour to reform the delightful Crowded House. Sadly, a true reformation of this wonderful trio is impossible: the group’s drummer Paul Hester committed suicide in 2005. A couple of Crowded House gigs I got to see back in the late 80s resonate among the strongest memories of all live shows. Here’s hoping the pair can get close to recreating that magic.

And now another band announces its reformation: Tim Booth has confirmed he will be rejoining James for a series of live shows this year, while the group’s wearejames.com web site goes a step further and boasts “a bunch of new songs.” The James reunion makes sense, more so perhaps than did James’ original disbandment, for Tim Booth’s superb solo album sadly died a death, and the other members don’t seem to have kept themselves much in the mainstream either. Apart from their late 80s period as Madchester stars, James have never been the most fashionable act, but they have made more great albums than almost any British band, and Tim Booth may just be the greatest living lyricist – certainly when it comes to his admittedly limited subject matter, love and spirituality. Read my interview with Tim Booth here.

James’ London headlining show at the Brixton Academy clashes with Coachella weekend – Friday April 27, which just happens to be my birthday. Looks like one way or another, I may be spending it away from home.