dexy's midnight runners
This is not the kind of song you make hoping to make the charts. And I've seen other bands who have a handful of ridiculously popular songs under their belt do exactly this. Talk Talk did it after 'It's My Life' took over their career. They hid inside their next few albums, cloaked in daringly long, very wonderful songs, far more interesting than their earlier hit. P.I.L. did it too, to escape the limelight of the Sex Pistols, and their output slapped long, thick slabs of subterranean bass lines underneath epically bombastic dub reggae songs that were very long and totally unsuitable for radioplay. And I guess bands like Pearl Jam and stuff did too, but I'm not really that adept in that area.
Dexy's Midnight Runners, perhaps to distance themselves from the apocalyptic 'Come On Eileen', dove into obscurity as well. 'Come On Eileen' overshadowed all the excellent northern soul of their debut album, which I still think is better all the way through. I love that era of Dexy's. Anyone paying attention at the time must have been mystified when the band needlessly reinvented themselves, going from thin suits and horns to raggy overalls and fiddles. Still, it would be hard to imagine the 1980's without 'Come On Eileen'.
It took two years for them to follow up with an album that was universally ignored. Don't Stand Me Down, described as "defiantly uncommercial", alienated both kinds of fans they had with the first album and the second, but never bothered to gain any new fans of a third variety. I remember the album coming out and I thought it looked absurd, on the cover they were all dressed as preppy's and in 1985 you didn't do that as a joke. I wrote them off without ever listening to a single song from it. It was the look of losing the plot and not even being concerned.
But now I realize what they were doing, they were making ambiguously long songs with weirdly intimate conversations inbetween, that would explode into rhapsodically extravagant tunes that married perfectly the two earlier incarnations of the band.
On what I consider now to be Dexy's opus, This Is What She's Like, clocking in at an audacious twelve minutes, Kevin Rowland shows us what he's made of. It starts with him and his friend, bandmate Bill, having a somewhat paranoid conversation in which Bill finally asks Rowland what she's like, presumably his new girlfriend. An innocent question, but Rowland answers with his trademark mouthful of marbles and launches a tirade of pet peeves and annoyances of both the upper and working class, berating those who manage to put fabulous and super in each sentence and also those who describe nice things as wonderful then punctuates these outbursts with she never would say that, yet we are never that much clearer about her. Bill keeps the refrain at his side with "what's she like" and Rowland, clearly getting irratated, says "I'm trying to tell you", until the near climax of the song where he says he needs to express himself and he takes off into one of those hair-tingling yodels, saying nothing but saying it with such affection and agony that you know then exactly what she's like and why he's got such a hard time squeezing it out. She's not like anybody else, she's lovely.
I know I bait you often with phrases like trust me on this one, but you got to give it a listen.
Trust me on this one: Dexy's Midnight Runners :: This is What She's Like 1985
Dexy's Midnight Runners, perhaps to distance themselves from the apocalyptic 'Come On Eileen', dove into obscurity as well. 'Come On Eileen' overshadowed all the excellent northern soul of their debut album, which I still think is better all the way through. I love that era of Dexy's. Anyone paying attention at the time must have been mystified when the band needlessly reinvented themselves, going from thin suits and horns to raggy overalls and fiddles. Still, it would be hard to imagine the 1980's without 'Come On Eileen'.
It took two years for them to follow up with an album that was universally ignored. Don't Stand Me Down, described as "defiantly uncommercial", alienated both kinds of fans they had with the first album and the second, but never bothered to gain any new fans of a third variety. I remember the album coming out and I thought it looked absurd, on the cover they were all dressed as preppy's and in 1985 you didn't do that as a joke. I wrote them off without ever listening to a single song from it. It was the look of losing the plot and not even being concerned.
But now I realize what they were doing, they were making ambiguously long songs with weirdly intimate conversations inbetween, that would explode into rhapsodically extravagant tunes that married perfectly the two earlier incarnations of the band.
On what I consider now to be Dexy's opus, This Is What She's Like, clocking in at an audacious twelve minutes, Kevin Rowland shows us what he's made of. It starts with him and his friend, bandmate Bill, having a somewhat paranoid conversation in which Bill finally asks Rowland what she's like, presumably his new girlfriend. An innocent question, but Rowland answers with his trademark mouthful of marbles and launches a tirade of pet peeves and annoyances of both the upper and working class, berating those who manage to put fabulous and super in each sentence and also those who describe nice things as wonderful then punctuates these outbursts with she never would say that, yet we are never that much clearer about her. Bill keeps the refrain at his side with "what's she like" and Rowland, clearly getting irratated, says "I'm trying to tell you", until the near climax of the song where he says he needs to express himself and he takes off into one of those hair-tingling yodels, saying nothing but saying it with such affection and agony that you know then exactly what she's like and why he's got such a hard time squeezing it out. She's not like anybody else, she's lovely.
I know I bait you often with phrases like trust me on this one, but you got to give it a listen.
Trust me on this one: Dexy's Midnight Runners :: This is What She's Like 1985