'DON'T STAND ME DOWN' (Mercury 1985)
by CHRIS ROBERTS
"I OWN records that have the power to make me cry. Records to be by or with – truly precious possessions. It is the ambition of the Midnight Runners to make records of this value..."
Inspirational and provocative, Dexys Midnight Runners had already, by 1985, made the greatest album of all time not once but twice. Many were the dullards itching for them to fall at the third attempt. The commercial disaster that was "Don't Stand Me Down" gave the scavengers their chance to gloat, but this artistic triumph is one of the most unique and emotionally challenging albums imaginable.
Kevin Rowland, a poet/pugilist on record if guarded and monosyllabic in interview, was the central energy of every incarnation of Dexys, controversial, revered or reviled (this could look sombre on "Tiswas") he'd driven various line-ups of the band to a) distraction, b) implausibly abrasive and uplifting successes. Never merely two tone, but harder than a bunch of dockers, they'd carried their own brand of soul into the charts ("Dance Stance", "Geno", "There, There My Dear") and, on the subsequent “Searching For The Young Soul Rebels" (1980), displayed Kevin's ranting lyricism in embryonic delirium ("I'm just Looking", "Keep It"). They'd upset the music press by taking out full-page ads of polemic in lieu of playing the interview game, and rogered their record company by stealing master tapes from vaults. Their grail: perfection. Hardly a week went by without Dexys doing something considered 'outrageous' by one of the most conservative industries in the country. Rowland, however, worked to his own logic, and it generally paid to take the leap of faith with him.
"Don't drink, don't smoke, what you do... pretending that you're Al Green, goody two shoes." Adam Ant was not the only star of the time intimidated by Rowland's extremism (later, ironically, these two wrote together). Rowland adopted Plan B, coming up with 1981's Projected Passion Revue – accepted even by sceptics as one of the most searing live outfits ever – and then 1982's classic, "Too Rye Ay", and accompanying global hit singles. "Come On Eileen" was a trans-Atlantic Number One and the biggest single of 1982. The band were now The Celtic Soul Brothers, woolly hats and donkey jackets replaced by dirty dungarees and a considered dishevelment usurping the razor sharp "pure and precious" look. With its breathtakingly intense set-pieces ("Until I Believe In My Soul", "Old", "Liars A To E"), "Too Rye Ay" remains a landmark. "It was rubbish," said Rowland later. "It wasn't leading anywhere. I could just make money – so what? I have to have self respect." "Don't Stand Me Down" was the very definition of long-awaited, much-anticipated. Rumours were rife. It was (gossips said) the most expensive album ever recorded. It was about class war. Two hundred hours of tape were piled up. Sometimes it took Rowland a whole day just to find the right section he wanted to work on. The new image, in the heyday of and Culture Club, with Sigue Sigue Sputnik on the launchpad, was going to knock us sideways.
Finally, it arrived. There would be no single, and no promotion. An ad appeared – a picture of a clean-cut, mature guy in a grey suit, staring impassively at camera. Who? Where? Why? Dexy's were back.
All the reviews were fountains. Mine has long since been lost, but I remember people taking the piss out of me for going so over the top, so that's a good sign. Kevin granted me the first interview. Then he did some more. "Don't Stand Me Down" flopped badly, even when at edited version of "This Is What She's Like" was reissued as a rearguard action single (you cannot edit the unedited). Except for the extraordinary live shows (wherein a policeman ambled on stage and arrested Rowland FOR BURNING – hey, you shoulda been there), everything about the masterplan went horribly wrong. Dexys career, perhaps a microcosm of rock history, never properly recovered. It had proven to be a kamikaze album. How romantic.
A 45-minute, seven-song record, it's brave, bold, passionate, inquisitive and swaggering. Rowland confesses, as is his style, but also attacks, accuses, curses. He swoons with love and rages with curiously specific frustration. No Live Aid clichés here. He ups the ante by entering into constant asides and dialogues with sidekick Billy Adams, displaying worry and doubt and great lashings of male vanity. Like any Dexys record, "Don't Stand Me Down" is as volatile and voracious as an ego in full effect. Records without egos are negligible, unassuming, self-effacing backdrops. "Don't Stand Me Down" goes where only egos dare.
And what everybody missed, distracted by the smokescreen of the smart clothes ("So clean and simple; it's a much more adult approach now") and the unwavering dignity ("Helen's now the bandleader, the musical director... I feel comfortable enlarging on the lyrics: I think it's THERE"), was the humour. No, a more savage word than that, comedy. The lacerating absurdity of those moments of pseudo-mundane banter between Kevin and Billy is at least superior to the complete works of Becket, Pinter and Mike Leigh combined. Those awkward silences, the ungainly flurries when both speak together, "Derek And Clive" without the punchlines. The ensuing awareness that every second of the music is alive, quivering, exposed, that anything could happen at any instant. That an event is just around the corner. On this record, ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE. It's not divorced from real life, it's distilled from it.
Musically, it plays with "good old fashioned" techniques and resonates with the Dexys vocabulary of violins, saxophones and grand pianos over crisp, unapologetic backbeats. If ever proof were needed that it's not what you do, it's what you say while you do it… Kevin's text breathes fire and the music's juices melt down. My favourite sleeve notes: "The words don't quite fit the songs but they read better this way. The Black Writing is Kevin, the Maroon is Billy." Frantic, flamboyant, foolhardy, this is a posturing, profound album.
'THE OCCASIONAL FLICKER'
Creeps in… "No, I don't want sympathy, uh", sung like an exiled god... "compromise is the devil talking" ...much self-justification, talk of redemption, aspirations to self betterment over trilling pianos and great big thwacking drums, admissions that he is indeed a better man, and so on until… the weirdest thing. A double take, one of those moments where you're not sure if you just imagined it, when he says (not sings), "It kind of reminds me of that burning feeling I used to get", and another voice, a new one to us responds from another speaker, "What?" – and suddenly the album's course has taken a determined tangent, has become MORE THAN JUST MUSIC.
–You know, that little problem I used to get.
–What, are you still getting trouble with this?
–Yeah. Not all the time or anything.
–Like it was?
–Yeah, sometimes.
And then Billy says the funniest thing.
–Are you sure it's not heartburn?
And Kevin, not fazed or displeased by this, this potential ridiculing of the classic Dexys "flame", deadpans, as if genuinely mulling it over.
– Heartburn? No, it's definitely not heartburn... it's nothing big or important, just a little matter of burning... it's not arson... it's nothing to get excited about...
Nothing to get excited about? For the first time on record, Rowland is acknowledging the existence of the in-between times, the flat sections between peaks. Of course, this makes the peaks higher, and means that "Don't Stand Me Down" is ALL PEAKS. (Now, as all through this album, the musicians are going for it.)
'THIS IS WHAT SHE'S LIKE'
The magnum opus. Twelve and a half minutes long. Never a dull wotsit. The greatest record in the history of blah blah blah by anyone ever, blah, etc. No, but REALLY. This is the one. Those of us who GET IT still manage to look at each other embarrassed to discuss it with Kevin Rowland – like, not bad that "Guernica", Pablo, pleased with it yourself? Ten years on, I still cannot listen to this song just the once. It’s enough of a struggle to get past each of The Brilliant Bits without rewinding and having it again.
–All right Bill?
–All right.
It begins with desultory small talk between Kevin and Billy – a dry but frighteningly convincing everyday conversation between two blokes.
–Where've you been? See anyone down there? What were you all talking about before I came in? You weren't talking about ME, were you?
–No, honestly, no, I don't know where you got that idea from.
You can't quite believe this is occurring on such an important record, and how long they're letting it go. Commercial suicide, obviously, but the atmosphere is hitting new roofs of drama and suspense. Billy begins to demand a description of "What She's Like" and Kevin teases before letting fly, hammering the most bizarre and personal targets en route. The kind of people that put creases in their old Levis. That use expressions like tongue in cheek and send up (Sure, says Billy obediently, I know them). Well, I hate them, snarls Kevin, in so many words, I can't STAND people like that.
–Let me put it another way.
–Please do.
So he has a go at the English upper-class ("Thick and ignorant and not used to being with people"), the scum from Notting Hill and Mosely Hill they call the CND (this was WAY contrary and unfashionable at the time), the newly wealthy, peasants with their home bars and hi-fis...
Er, I'm not sure, actually, mutters Billy, with impeccable timing. This stuff is FUNNY. AND politically incorrect. Genius! Anyway, all these things are what SHE is NOT. Bill chips away. Kevin chides: In time, in time, until finally – and, by now, we've had about four stunning musical climaxes – he decides that not only will he tell us what she's like, he'll make it CLEAR. He'll present a picture. You'll be in no doubt. Listen close.
We've already had a transcendental patch where he's declared, I would like to express myself at this point, gone "La la li la" like there's no tomorrow, and Billy's nodded: I know what you mean. Now, of course, WHAT SHE'S LIKE, after all, is articulated not through words but through a wailing and howling and crooning that brings the paint off the walls to reveal hidden Michelangelos.
–Do you get my drift?
–Oh yeah. I'm starting to get the picture.
–We are indeed.
–Well, how did all this happen?
–Just all at once, really. The Italians have a word for it.
–What word's that?
–A thunderbolt or something.
–What, you mean the Italian word for thunderbolt?
–Yeah, something like that. I don't speak Italian myself, you understand.
–No.
–But I knew a man who did.
And with the most impeccably gauged gasp of "OW! OW!" in the vocal heritage, Kevin exits pursued by strange animal purrings and growlings and the band are uncaged. You want this to go on forever, and it damn near does.
'KNOWLEDGE OF BEAUTY'
A sad seven-minute ballad eulogising Ireland, Kevin singing of his national pride, his love of his father. He phoned me up in New York from Kilburn to amend three words of his views on the Irish. Unnecessarily zealous, if becoming. One interviewer said to him: "But you were born in England"
"Just because you were born in a stable doesn't make you a horse," Kevin said.
'ONE OF THOSE THINGS'
–You know, recently I was thinking about one thing or another and music crossed my mind.
–Yeah?
–Yeah.
In which Kevin blasts a Radio One DJ called "Sid Jenkins". He's not lodging any complaints or anything, he adds, it's just that the music all sounded the same.
–You mean it all sounded similar?
–It all sounded the same.
While he's there, Kevin has a go at socialists, for good measure. The music was allegedly plagiarised from Warren Zevon's "Werewolves Of London".
–It's just one of those things.
–What, you mean one of THOSE things?
'REMINISCENCE PART TWO'
Some nights, I'd walk her home along the Edgware Road, experiencing for the first time this warm friendship and not wanting to be anywhere else... It didn’t last, and it happened that my feelings changed before hers, but I'll always remember those days…
'LISTEN TO THIS'
A breathless pop surge which echoes the more celebrated Dexys singles, horns racing each other to the finishing line. "I was thinking of a compromise when I saw the beauty in your eyes/It heightened something in me so I'll say so.../Well there's nothing wrong but the wrong in me, you were everything you were meant to be…”
When someone can write "the perfect pop song" this easily, it's no wonder they branch out in weird abstract directions every now and again.
'THE WALTZ'
Where we find our title, where we're moved by the simple romance of it all, where the pay-off line, BEAUTIFULLY sung, is "There's no beauty any more," but, while we're admiring that, Rowland signs off with another: "Here is a protest, here is a protest..."
A protest against mediocrity, "Don't Stand Me Down" is full of stories and character and a cast of thousands, elevated not by bombastic production but by authentic human frailty and Kevin Rowland's indomitable spirit, vision and wit. I hope he comes back again, because he is as far as this country has gone towards producing the heroic. What a man.
Here is the influence "Don't Stand Me Down" had on the course of popular music.
None whatsoever.
You are all stupid scum and deserve to die, but that's another story.