IT was one of the first great albums of the 1980s, a landmark of second generation Irish culture and this Saturday the 30th anniversary of its launch is being celebrated with a major artistic gathering in Birmingham.
The creative genius behind Searching For The Young Soul Rebels by Dexys Midnight Runners was Kevin Rowland, born in Wolverhampton in 1953 to Irish parents, and the album addressed the second-generation Irish experience from the very first track, Burn It Down, which challenged the then prevailing British prejudice that the Irish were their intellectual inferiors by angrily listing a litany of Irish writers including Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien and Laurence Sterne.
The green-tinted image on the album cover is also Irish, a press photograph of Catholics being evacuated from Belfast at the start of the Troubles after their houses were attacked and burned by a loyalist mob. In the midst of the panic as people and their possessions are shepherded onto the back of a coal lorry stands a young boy in his best clothes holding a suitcase and staring calmly at the camera, cool amid the chaos.
Remarkably, he has since been identified as Anthony O’Shaughnessy and he will appear on stage at Saturday’s event to tell his story for the first time. In May 2006 an original poster of O’Shaughnessy on the album cover was sold by a London art gallery for £650.
A Celebration of Dexys Midnight Runners will also feature original band members in conversation with Gavin Martin, a former writer and film critic at the NME, originally from Bangor, Co. Down, and now the Daily Mirror’s music editor. Joining Martin on stage will be Dexys photographer Mike Laye, who will be displaying images from that period.
Also on stage, reading a piece about Dexys especially written for the event, will be music journalist Paolo Hewitt, author of Paul Weller, The Changing Man, The Jam: A Beat Concerto and The Soul Stylists: Six Decades Of Modernism, From Mods To Casuals. Live music will be provided by Stone Foundation and ‘very special guests’.
The band will be performing songs which were inspired by Dexys’ debut album as well as selected covers. Rowland, explaining his choice of album cover, said: “I wanted a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland.”
In an interview with the Guardian in 2007 along with friends Craig and Charlie Reid of the Proclaimers, whose first recordings he financed, Rowland said: “I’m Irish and very proud of it.” Of engaging with his Irish identity, he said: “It felt like, ‘you shouldn’t be doing this.’ On Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, that picture of the kid getting bombed out of his home in Belfast… it felt dangerous. Apparently, in Glasgow, the bouncers were threatening to beat us up. But it felt good to do it.”
Charlie Reid made the point that Rowland was the first to celebrate that culture, long before Jack’s Army or Riverdance. “In 1980, in Britain, the Irish were despised. Now everyone’s proud of that culture. Dexys led the way by championing Irish culture on Dance Stance.”
Searching For The Young Soul Rebels was ranked 98th in a 2005 survey by Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time. In 2000 Q magazine placed it at number 85 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever.
Burn It Down was a retitled rerecording of the band’s first single Dance Stance, which reached No 40 in the British charts in early 1980. The angry delivery of the lyrics reflect the punk sensibility of the time, although the style of the music is more the Northern soul style from which the band’s name is derived, a reference to Dexedrine fuelled dancing in the allnighters which were a feature of that music scene.
Dexys formed in 1978, split in 1986 and reformed in 2003. They had two No. 1 singles, Geno and Come On Eileen, the biggest selling single of 1982.
The band’s second album, Too-Rye-Ay was a hybrid of soul and Irish folk, featuring a three-strong fiddle section called the Emerald Express.
Rowland was born in 1953, the fourth child of Irish parents. His father had emigrated from Mayo aged 16 and worked as a labourer and carpenter before setting up in business. When it failed shortly after Rowland was born, the family moved to Mayo for a number of years. “I remember Ireland being green fields and me fighting with friends all the time,” Rowland recalled. The family moved back to England but struggled to settle, moving from Preston to Blackpool,Wolverhampton again and Harrow.
Rowland too was a restless spirit. “I was a very angry person for a long time and didn’t know why,” he later recalled.
Rowland was never motivated by commercial success, abandoning dancehalls for theatres so that fans would pay more attention to the music and eschewing a quick follow-up to the massive success of Come On Eileen, taking three years to release the band’s third and final album, Don’t Stand Me Down, which was savaged by the music press and sold poorly, “an outrageous injustice,” according to leading London Irish music critic Johnny Rogan, who felt it “represented Rowland’s finest work to date”.
Rowland recalls Craig Reid of the Proclaimers joking with him about phoning up for a venue at the time for tickets and asking, “What time does it start?” and the bloke replied, “What time can you get here?”
Rogan, profiling Rowland as part of his series on secondgeneration Irish musical heroes which ran in The Irish Post in 1998, wrote: “More than anything before or since, it articulated his troubled feelings about Ireland, past and present. One Of Those Things compared the banality of Radio 1 with the platitudes he heard people voicing about Belfast. The Waltz (originally titled Elizabeth Wimpole and Kathleen Ni Houlihan) went further, lampooning ‘tales of British democracy’ and ‘royal victories’, before concluding ‘your books of history were fairy tales’.
“More poignant was Knowledge Of Beauty, a song about his Irish heritage that lamented the sons of Eire now found in US and Britannia’s care.
“In expressing his own losses as a second-generation son, Rowland offered the musical lyrical observation: ‘For what use is anything if I don’t have the wisdom and warmth of my past generations’.”
On My Life In England, Rowland sings: “I can remember St. Theresa’s social/ where Kevin Barry rang out/ My mum whispered to me “Kevin/ In England that song is not allowed”/ I felt awake but at the same time romantic/ cut off and misty-eyed/ Their faces are so pained and melancholy/ with smoke clouds on the side.”
The writer J M O’Neill has been described as the laureate of the London Irish. Kevin Rowland deserves to be recognised as his peer in the pantheon of the Irish in Britain.