dexys midnight runners

[20] Karl Blau, ‘Fallin’ Rain’

karl-blau-2016

Before we start, a word on Brexit and Trump.

Not really. More pertinent questions: what’s a single? What is this? Who are we?

A single is a single, and we’re going to make the best of it. It’s also an ‘impact’ track these days, and pretty much any song that’s even marginally promoted outside the confines of its album. Look, these are confusing times.

This is a blog that’s been running since November 2005. Admittedly, it’s running rather sporadically now, but if I’m going to go through my favourite songs of the year, it’s still the best place.

We are me and my three daughters. Junior (J1) who’s 11 and has been doing this since she was flapping her babygro arms to Kanye West all those years ago; Junior 2 (J2) who’s eight and massively into Top Of The Pops 1982, smuggling Dexys and Haircut 100 CDs up to her room; and Junior 3 (J3) who’s six and opinionated.

Finally, Karl Blau is a honey-toned C&W geezer from the Pacific Northwest who, after years on the circuit, released the wry Introducing Karl Blau this year, a collection of covers that’s the best of 2016, pipping good old Dexys’ mind-bogglingly loose selection of ‘Irish and Country Soul’. They both did the Bee Gees’ ‘To Love Somebody’ but Blau wins there too by the length of a Hammond organ. This wildly extended version of Link Wray’s ‘Fallin’ Rain’ uses gently tinkling piano to evoke the raindrops and Blau’s own gentle commitment to convey the woes of the world. He’s a Nashville Isaac Hayes.

Over to our panel: J2 is measuring angles on her mum’s macbook, J1 is watching her. J3 is bouncing a cuddly tiger on my head.

J1: “It’s all right.”
J3: “It’s bad.” She pops on her headphones and goes to play the little Yamaha keyboard on the rug.

[1] Taylor Swift, ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’

Taylor Swift

Junior’s favourite bit is the line “hide away and find your peace of mind with some indie record that’s much cooler than mine” – as much for the delivery, of course, as the actual lyric. Taylor Swift has grown up, become caustic. When she called a boy “mean” on Speak Now, well, that was never going to cut anyone to the quick. But she has the arsenal now. Where once a chap could make “a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter” now he just bleats away on the phone while Taylor rolls her eyes, exhausted.

When this starts, with its curious forestalled guitar intro where ‘No Scrubs’ and ‘Long Train Running’ meet, Junior shouts, “Taylor!” That’s the crossover talking. I’ve mixed feelings – I loved Fearless and Speak Now but can’t begrudge her smart step into the straight-up pop market. She should be heard by everyone and this is a wonderfully joyous, barbed, free, sarky, emboldened record to pull that trick with. It does everything right, with glee.

So all hail Taylor Swift’s leap up from billion-seller to billion-and-one-seller. She’s really made it now.

Next up, Junior and I will tackle 1980 and get all tiresome about Dexys Midnight Runners. Although I think I said that last year.

[18] Roberta Flack, ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’

Roberta Flack

Speaking of Dexys Midnight Runners, good old Kev half-inched the intro from this for their ‘Reminisce (Part Two)’, didn’t he? Either he’s wracked with guilt about it and fessed up in the sleevenotes of the most recent Don’t Stand Me Down reissue, or, erm, I’m about to get sued.

Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger’s original version of ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ is a bit fairy fey, but it has a certain mystery. Roberta Flack draws that out, then draws the whole song out until it’s almost completely still, a beautiful ambient drone.

Junior’s mum says it makes her sad, but Junior herself thinks it’s about rolling your eyes. As opposed to “rose in your eyes”. So, while the rest of us feel an ache – or a creepy memory of Play Misty For Me – Junior hears Flack sounding exasperated.

[19] Van Morrison, ‘Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile)’

Van Morrison

It’d be difficult to talk about this without mentioning Dexys Midnight Runners. So let’s make this about Dexys Midnight Runners. Their version of ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ was the first single I ever bought, and hence a landmark in the History of Pop. As a callow child, I didn’t get the joke of the Jocky Wilson photo on Top Of The Pops, and also failed to knowingly snigger at Kevin Rowland singing, “real you see” instead of “Reet Petite”. And besides, maybe Jackie Wilson did once say it was “real, you see” or “real”, you see. We’ll never actually know.

What we can say with confidence is Kev says he doesn’t need “no tea” in his cup, while Van doesn’t need coffee. From this, we can extrapolate that it takes a whole lot less to get Kev “wired up”, but I guess we knew that anyway. The DMR version is a tight affair – no surprise with that crazily drilled band – while Morrison and co take it headlong and ramshackle. I’ve a sentimental attachment to the DMR take, obviously, but Van is out on a limb, giving it that extra lick of flame.

Junior flung herself around the room with celtic abandon from first “dup” to last. When I asked her for a more considered view afterwards, her mouth was too full of Rice Krispies to offer a clear assessment. It could’ve been “real you see” or “Reet Petite”.

[17] Dexys Midnight Runners, ‘Show Me’

Dexys Midnight Runners

The great lost Dexys Mk II are greeted with a beam from Junior, and she really couldn’t have done anything else: ‘Show Me’ hares in on a brass-boosted dragster, all off-beat claps and parping trombones, crazed yelps and underpinning organ. It brims with adrenaline – and some under-the-counter stuff – and is tighter than your current mortgage lender.

Mk II then. Mild-mannered, democratic frontman Kevin Rowland had kicked half of the peerless Soul Rebels line-up into touch, returning a year later as boxers not dockers. This is the collective that never made an album, but could have been the best. Some of their singles had a gypsy-fiddle makeover to reappear on Too-Rye-Ay, although ‘Show Me’ only survived in counterpoint as ‘I’ll Show You’ – the point where that second album really begins to fly.

This benefits from its one-off single status – it emphasises its economy, conciseness, tightness. The brass is irresistible, reflected in Junior’s trombone mime, and the whole giddy rush keeps us smiling as we skid over the thaw.

[19] Japan, ‘Quiet Life’

Japan

Quiet Life was the first LP I bought. Sure, there were a couple of cassette albums before that – both by Duran Duran, naturally – but this was my first 12” vinyl breakout, along with Dexys Midnight Runners’ Searching For The Young Soul Rebels in the WH Smith bargain racks. It was March 1983, four years after its release, nicely in keeping with Japan’s own idiosyncratic chronology. You see, I bought it on the strength of their superb cover of The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, which has just come out as a single – also four years after the event. And then there’s this, into the singles chart with a bullet, two years after its first appearance. They can’t have known if they were coming or going. In 1983 they were going.

Straddling Japan’s lurch from glam to Orient-obsessed electro-artpop, ‘Quiet Life’ veers in to the sound of helicopter blades – at least it sounds that way to me, and Junior agrees – and David Sylvian moans about – what? The break-up of the band, years before it happened? The changing state of the nation? His transitional football team? He was to take the quiet life to extremes afterwards, pootling around in the margins, crafting barely penetrable avant-pop, but still he carries on. So Junior identifies the blades, spots the handclaps, and sways to the slides, clips and ticks in the back of the car.

[4] The Special A.K.A., ‘Gangsters’

Centred around some ruffneck shenanigans involving stolen and mysteriously returned guitars in Paris, this is a boisterous yet eerie debut. Must be Terry Hall’s dislocated vocal and the air of fairground freakshow that would come right to the fore on ‘Ghost Town’, but it packs a sinister punch even amid the skintight bounce.

We did a rudeboy skank to it – although Junior suggested I was walking “like a monkey” – before segueing into ‘A Message To You Rudy’ where she pointed out what she identified as “trumpets, Daddy”. She wants a trumpet; that’s along with a piano, a guitar, some drums, a trombone and a violin. Basically, she wants to be Dexys Midnight Runners. And maybe they wanted to be The Specials/The Special A.K.A./whatever the hell they felt like being at the time, only with a yelp to replace the whine and ersatz soul to trump the ska. Well, this is a broad church.

Don’t call me Scarface!

[3] Jackie Wilson, ‘(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher And Higher’

Junior greets Jackie Wilson’s warm hug of a record the way everyone should – with finger clicks. Few love songs swing like this. It’s not long before she returns to trying to negotiate her scooter out the back door, but she has time to ask “Who’s singing?” “Jackie Wilson. Can you say ‘Jackie Wilson’?” “I can’t say it.” Jackie wouldn’t be impressed by her lack of application; he’s put his heart, soul and carefully teased quiff into this.

Most of my generation’s radars picked Wilson up as a plasticine hollerer on the revived ‘Reet Petite’, or perhaps on (the first single I ever bought) Dexys Midnight Runners’ Van Morrison cover ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ (“it was real, you see” – nearly, Kev) – but this and ‘I Get The Sweetest Feeling’ seem to have been in my back pocket forever.

The barely contained freneticism of the opening guitar strum is just about kept in check as Wilson gets ever more fervent. ‘…Higher And Higher’ is about the one “in a million girls”, but it’s just as easily a big walloping thank you to the man upstairs. Wilson bursts with passion, voice cracking as he sings with wonder that he never saw disappointment’s face again. It’s so infectious, you can believe it.

[1] Dexys Midnight Runners & The Emerald Express, ‘Come On Eileen’

It’s the last song of the night, the bride and groom are long gone and we’ve kicked our legs to ‘New York, New York’ and swayed to ‘The Power Of Love’. A familiar, skipping bassline starts up, with the fiddles in close attendance. The dancefloor is flooded with hardy revellers, linking arms in the auld tradition. One lad stands scowling at the side, he’s had a good night but this strikes a sour note yet again. Doesn’t he like the song? He bloody LOVES it.

How did it come to this? A visionary work struck an unexpected note with the public, sold way over a million and became the wedding/school disco standard, danced along to by a pissed-up crowd who’d normally claim to dislike it but find it a “laugh” in a champagne haze. It cheapens it, steals its wit, strips its pathos.

How did it come to this? Kevin Rowland was no callow youth; Dexys had already had one Number One, had already released the best album of the decade and had already tried a couple of styles and line-ups. 20 years later, apparently free of his cocaine mania, Rowland was in full confessional mode, claiming culpability for all manner of sins. He said he stole the raggle-taggle gypsy style of ‘Come On Eileen’ and beyond from former bandmate Kevin Archer, who’d formed the Blue Ox Babes and played Rowland some demos. Whatever, Archer didn’t have the extra spark to turn ideas into tunes. Rowland ran with it and the rest is history. Blue Ox Babes were painted as Dexys copyists in the press and the rest is, er, history.

‘Come On Eileen’ is hugely ambitious. Strings, tin whistles, banjos, pipes, and pianos should make a folk song, but end up with a rousing piece of power pop. Sheer bombast allows Kev to sneak in some racy lines, while at the same time hiding some beauties, “moved a million hearts in mono”, “beaten down eyes sunk in smoke-dried faces”. It was a revelation until it was a cliché. I guess that’s the way things go.

Of course I’d like my daughter to love my favourite single. She stood in front of the stereo, palms face down on the coffee table in “let’s see if this is all you’ve cracked it up to be” style. I could handle her snubbing Bowie, The Jam, Scritti Politti, even Girls Aloud, but this, this is different. She dances. All the way through. And she doesn’t link arms with anyone.