Dexy's rebellious soul

FOR God's sake burn it down!" This was the snarled command which introduced the first window-shattering blasts of white soul brass on the first track of the first album by Dexy's Midnight Runners - perhaps the strangest, and certainly the most contrary, group to emerge from the smouldering ruins of punk.

At a time, the tail end of the 1970s, when much of the British music scene was dominated by powdered young men standing motionless behind primitive synthesisers, the seven-piece Dexy's Midnight Runners delivered muscular rituals of catharsis, led by the uncompromising melodrama of singer Kevin Rowland's soul-baring vocal style.

The group, which has reformed to promote this month's release of a greatest-hits package, Let's Make This Precious, is perversely best remembered for its transatlantic Number One hit of 1982, Come On Eileen.

Infectiously catchy, disguised as a singalong knees-up, heard everywhere from pubs to supermarkets, the song was, in fact, a pronouncement of defiant outsiderdom that was the group's favourite, if not only, theme. Not for the first time, parody was mistaken for appealing literalism and posterity was distorted by mass success.

Formed in 1979 by Rowland and Kevin Archer, the band achieved that great pop trick of seeming to emerge with no ragged edges or beginner's uncertainty.

Dressed in leather blazers, sta-prest trousers, donkey jackets and woollen commando-style skull caps, they looked like a gang of off- duty gas fitters - confronting the style-obsessed flamboyance of the New Romantics with an image of no-nonsense authenticity.

On their first album, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels (1980), the group set out a manifesto which merged macho intellectualism - the chorus of the opening track, Burn it Down (formerly Dance Stance) is a list of iconic Irish authors - with emotional honesty. It was all intensely male (fiddler Helen O'Hara didn't join the band until 1982), angst-ridden and driven by the need to first question and then express the pure source of awkward personal feelings.

THE group became a self-professed brotherhood: ascetic, self- policing, hooked on discipline and seemingly trusting nobody outside their soul fraternity. Above all, this granted the group the appeal of an ideology and a gang. The immaculate closing track There, There My Dear, on Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, just about summed it up: were you a pop intellectual poseur, hiding behind fashionable references, or had you studied and felt enough to find the enlightenment of true emotion?

"Keep quoting Cabaret, Berlin, Burroughs, JG Ballard, Duchamp, de Beauvoir, Kierkegaarde, Michael Rennie - I just don't believe you really like Frank Sinatra ..." This was impressive stuff.

And more followed: "If you're so anti-fashion," Rowland challenged on the same track, "why not wear flares? Instead of dressing down all the same?" It was a gauntlet thrown down to the sophists of the burgeoning Style press, for whom image was all. The group took to issuing statements to the music press (they distrusted the interviewing process as dishonest) on the back of their singles covers. There were six of these in all, delivered to the world just as Dexy's found their new image of hooded sweat tops, tracksuits and boxing boots - 1981's "ascetic athlete" phase.

"We're talking about soul as an emotional force," states one such memorandum. "When you hear the record, does it convince you that everybody involved in the making of the record truly believes what they're saying? For us soul goes much further than just records. We believe there are soul books, soul films and soul life, we take strength from our soul."

On top of this, the group started physical training together - going for runs as a team and for regular fitness workouts. Their identity was transforming into caricature at breakneck speed.

Yet the early concerts by Dexy's Midnight Runners - their Intense Emotion Revue (1980) and Projected Passion Revue (1981) - were breathtaking pieces of pop theatre, with all the philosophising and bombast of the group's ancillary rhetoric more than justified by the sheer power of the music.

BUT perversity, as ever, would be Rowland's chosen catalyst. When the group reappeared in 1982, with what would become their best- selling album Too-Rye-Ay, the trademark horns had been swopped for banjos and fiddles, and the boxing boots and sweat-tops for dungarees and moccasins. It was a kick in the teeth to those of us who were just getting used to carrying our copy of Harpers Queen in a Lonsdale training bag.

In many ways, this new folk direction seemed like Rowland's ultimate denial of conformity, but it would be as nothing to the moment in 1985 when Dexy's Midnight Runners reappeared on the cover of their final album, Don't Stand Me Down, with image number three - out of the dungarees and into the kind of bland business suits favoured by junior politicians.

The idea, of course, was to use "ordinariness" as an act of anti- fashion antagonism within the arena of pop. The record also contained little playlets between some of the tracks - painfully awkward exchanges between Rowland and other band members, filled with paranoia and tense, conversational cul-de-sacs. Recently rehabilitated as a "classic", critics at the time were dumfounded; the fans, mostly, were disappointed.

Since then, Kevin Rowland made a dramatic reappearance on promotional posters in the late 1990s, making public his supposedly hitherto concealed life as a transvestite. What to believe? Worse, once the sniggers had died down, it wasn't even interesting.

Gossip had been circulating for some years that Rowland had hit the usual problems attendant of sudden, but short-lived fame - debt, drugs, and so forth; that he was living back in his home city of Birmingham, crippled with depression, dressed in a monk's habit.

His solo ventures - notably The Wanderer (1988) - were strictly for die-hard fans and pretty much complete flops.

Subsequently rumoured to be living on the south coast, Roland has maintained his soul credibility despite the difficulties of the past decade. As with Jonathan Richman, or indeed Brian Wilson, he is a performer who may yet reclaim the spark of his brilliance to enjoy a new relevance. With anyone other than Rowland, the forthcoming tour might seem nothing more than a footnote - the standard practice of groups from the 1980s cashing in their pensions now all their fans have got babysitters. But there is something more in Rowland - a clumsy kind of genius, perhaps, and this latest outing may just ignite to astonish us all.

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