Dexys Midnight Runners 'Don't Stand Me Down'

Yeah, I thought I'd reminisce.

Browsing on itunes the other day, I noticed that 'Don't Stand Me Down' by Dexys is not on there. Pretty much any album you might want is on itunes, so how appropriate that a record that was all but unavailable on cd for twelve years since it's release should now be one of the last to 'go digital'.

I started listening to it again for the first time in a while.

I was a Dexys 'fan' when I was a kid, in as much as I bought 'Come on Eileen' and 'Jackie Wilson Said', but who didn't? They had no impact on my life at all until the mid 90s when my friend Lee (see recent 'Smiths' post) played me 'Too Rye Ay' and I fell in love with songs like 'Let's Make This Precious' and 'I Believe In My Soul', songs that were much more rich and soulful than I ever imagined Dexys were. As so often happens, I then made it my mission to locate and purchase everything Dexys had ever recorded. A trip to Andy's Records allowed me to acquire 'Searching For The Young Soul Rebels' and a couple of compilations, but had Dexys really recorded nothing since 1983?

In these pre-internet days, quests like this were difficult. I purchased Record Collector and found an advert for a Dexys/Kevin Rowland fanzine. I sent off a cheque and received the new and back issues of 'Keep On Running', a superb fanzine which alerted me to the existence of the great 'lost' Dexys album 'Don't Stand Me Down'. A quite ridiculously long quest followed and finally, after sending off another cheque (for £3. little did the guy know I would have paid ten times that) I received a second hand vinl copy of 'Don't Stand Me Down'.

This would never happen these days. I knew NOTHING of the record before I heard it. No leaks, no online streams, no audio clips, nothing. OK, so it was eleven years since it had been released, but still. I listened to it for the first time on my mum and dad's hi-fi, sat at the dining room table, wearing headphones, nothing prepared me for what I was about to hear.

Seven songs. Seven masterpieces. 'The Occasional Flicker' sets the scene. "Compromise is the devil talking/ and he spoke to me...", sung over a melody that was both soulful and groovy and then for the first time, the singing stops and Kevin Rowland has a conversation with Billy Adams. Kevin is still having trouble with his "burning problem", its not heartburn, its not a bit like that...its just a little matter of a burning.

'This Is What She's Like', all 12 minutes of it, is one of the greatest songs I have ever heard. Opening with an extended conversation, over no backing at all, Adams tried to get Rowland to tell us 'what she's like', instead he tells us all the things she isn't, and then describes her by singing wordlessly. The music is rich and powerful, strings and brass working perfectly together and the instrumental coda is perfection. The nearest we get to an answer is that things can be summed up by "the Italian word for thunderbolt".

Things slow down for 'Knowledge Of Beauty', a laid back ballad, with some gorgeous pedal steel guitar where Rowland sings about his love for Ireland. This is a man who people said couldn't sing and he sounds sensational, controlled and clear, full of joy and passion.

After 'One Of Those Things', a dissection of the music scene and an attack on people's lazy attitudes towards both music and politics at the time, the record heads for home with three moving love songs. 'Reminisce Part 2' a spoken word recollection of an early love builds into a beautiful take on 'I'll Say Forever My Love' by Jimm Ruffin. 'Listen To This' is a three minute, brass led, pop song with Rowland struggling to find the courage to say 'I Love You' but finally doing it and 'The Waltz' is a stirring hymn to Ireland, building into a frantic coda with Rowland repeating "here is a protest".

Nothing I can say about this album can adequately describe how much it means to me. I listened to it so much for the few weeks after I first heard it, recorded from vinyl onto cassette, that even when I listen to it now I still imagine I can hear the sound of the needle on the groove, the way I heard it first. There has been two cd reissues in the last ten years, the second because Rowland wasn't 100% happy with the sound of the first.

Every word and every note on 'Don't Stand Me Down' was worked to perfection. It is the sound of a man making the record he had to make at that point in his life and completely disregarding any worries about what anyone else might think. It is one of the most pure records I have ever heard. It is the strongest thing I have ever heard.

10.0

[copies of this album on vinyl regularly go for 99p on ebay. buy yourself one, listen to it with headphones and discover the most amazing record you will ever hear]