One of the leading lights of the British post-punk/new wave movement in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, return with what may be their final album.
However, those not paying attention may believe it has already been a long break. Forthcoming seventh effort ‘Love’ is their first under their original moniker for more than 40 years, having been going under the truncated name Dexys since their reformation in 2003. If you’re confused, you’re not the only one.
“Funnily enough, I saw the catalyst for that last night,” says the band’s founder and sole remaining original member, Kevin Rowland, speaking with CLASH. “I live in a block and two years ago, I was going to Glastonbury and there was a young woman in her thirties. She said, “I’m just getting ready to go to Glastonbury.” I said, “I’m going to Glastonbury.” She said, “What are you doing there?” I said, “I’m playing there. I’m in a band called Dexys.” She said, “That’s not the same as Dexys Midnight Runners, is it?” I said, “Actually, it is.”
“I realised there are a bunch of young people who may know Dexys Midnight Runners from ‘Geno’ and ‘Come On Eileen’, but they thought it either wasn’t us or they were a bit confused by it,” Rowland continues. “When we came back in 2012 after a long break, with the album ‘One Day I’m Going To Soar’, there was a lot of bands from the ‘80s doing the revival circuit. They were very much ‘remember us,’ and I wanted to avoid that. I thought, how can we say it’s us, but we’re not being trying to be how we were? Of course, the only people who get that were people who knew Dexys Midnight Runners, and I overlooked that point. I think this will mitigate that and avoid that conversation anymore.”
With that confusion now corrected, much has been made in the build-up of how ‘Love’ was informed by Rowland’s excellent autobiography, ‘Bless Me Father’, released last year. However, it’s author isn’t quite so sure: “Everything’s intuitive with me. I’m not really analysing how it’s going to be. I always see that as your job or the producer’s job, but I just do it. If something feels good to me, I know it’s right. I’m not thinking this relates to the past or this is similar. I’m too preoccupied with how can I get this to sound as good as possible? It becomes an obsession for me, and it’s all engrossing. I don’t have headspace for anything else.”
“That’s why I don’t know if I want to carry on doing it because it’s gruelling. I haven’t got much room for anything else. I wish I could temper it more, but that’s the way I am, I suppose.”
Despite seemingly confirming that ‘Love’ will be Dexys Midnight Runners’ final studio album, Rowland is leaving things open-ended. “I mentioned it to the record company and they said, “OK, we’ll promote it as the last one,” and I said, “No, never say never.” I don’t want to be that guy who says he’s never coming back and in five years’ time comes back. But I’ve got no ideas or no inspiration for another one, so it kind of is an ending. Maybe something will happen and I’ll feel different, but I don’t feel like that right now. I’m not complaining, but it’s a lot of work for me. It’s a couple of years of my life; doing the album, but all the promotion, I don’t find that easy. My life is on hold for two years.”
“The writing and recording of it was stressful because, if you write a good song, you’ve got a responsibility to take it to its full potential. There are pitfalls along the way. People will try to change their ideas.”
While not exactly lightening his workload, Rowland did enlist legendary producer David Holmes for their swansong. “I first met him at a party in 2007,” he explains of how the relationship began. “He told me he loved Dexys and he would really like to do something. We talked about it, and I’m not sure why we didn’t. He reckons that he didn’t feel he was ready until this album.”
“He contacted me about three or four years ago and said, “What are you up to? Do you want to start something from scratch?” I said, “I’m in the middle of something.” I was halfway through the last album. We texted every now and again, and then when we demoed ‘Once A Man, Twice A Child’, I was happy with it. I sent it to David (because) I wanted someone to hear it. He wrote back an enthusiastic text saying, “This is fucking great. We’ve got to work on this.” I already had a couple more demos, so I sent him them.”
“The great thing about him was he listened to the demos over and over. He knew them inside out. You don’t often get that with a producer. They finish one band, have a couple of listens to your tracks, and straight into the studio. It feels like a production line, but it didn’t with him, because he’s not in the studio doing albums all the time. He’s out in the world doing different stuff. He might be DJing. He might be going to Los Angeles to do a soundtrack. He’s not just going from one album to another. It was a big deal for him, and he was just so into it.”
“I could tell he was (listening to the songs) because when I phoned him up, he started quoting lyrics. That helped. He got right inside of the songs with me, and that’s unusual for producers to get right in there with you. They’re normally a bit distant, in my experience.”
However, there was some uncertainty on Rowland’s part about how the relationship would work. “I didn’t know what he was going to try and do. I thought, because he’s David Holmes, he remixes stuff, is he going to try and do a fancy thing on it? I said to him early on, “The only way this will work is if we do it together. I can’t hand everything over to you.” He agreed, and he was great, coming up with things. He knew a great drummer and a good bass player and string arranger. But more than that; when I was over there, we were working on keyboard sounds and it was looking for an organ sound on ‘My Life In England Pt. 2’, and he went, “This is about your childhood, so we need something that sounds like a fairground.”
“On ‘Once A Man, Twice A Child’, at the end there was a keyboard left over. After I finished the last vocal, “I gave me a chance to show how I loved you,” and I went, “Do you think we need that?”. He went, “Yeah, definitely. That’s you hugging your dad.” Just stuff like that, he had that overview. He was all about feel and I’m all about feel.”
As the title suggests, ‘Love’ is about all aspects of the most sacred word, be it familial relationships or romantic entanglements. The aforementioned ‘Once A Man, Twice A Child’ is one of the more moving tracks on the album, as Rowland makes peace with his relationship with his father. “Just getting it out there and releasing it will be (cathartic) in the same way that the book was cathartic. It’s almost like getting your secrets out there. Once they’re out, that’s it. There’s no going back and you’re free of them. What can anybody say? What they got? They haven’t got anything to beat you with. You’re not hiding anything.”
Although Rowland takes on most of the responsibility, Dexys Midnight Runners are a band, and on ‘Love’, each member contributed to the songwriting. “We wrote all the songs first, so by the time we spoke to David, all the songs were written and demoed in quite a good structure, then we sent the stems to David. I wrote ‘It’s Over Now’ with Sean (Read). I wrote ‘My Life in England’, Pts 1 and 2 with Jim (Paterson), and (‘I Want To Be Holding You Next Christmas’). I wrote ‘You’re Alright’, ‘You’ve Got the Love’ and one other with Mike (Timothy). They were just involved in the writing more. When we were at the mixing process, it was very much all hands-on deck.”
“I went into the studio with David and one mixing engineer, but I wasn’t happy with those mixes, so we got in Pete (Schwier), who mixed ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’ and (solo album) ‘My Beauty’, and quite a lot after that as well. I can’t underestimate his contribution, it was massive. Then it was a case of people would send the mixes to us and we’d all be contributing. Eventually we got it, and everybody’s happy.”
‘Love’ begins and ends with a piece called ‘My Life In England’, which many Dexys fans will be familiar with, having first been released back in 2003. “I thought it was a good song, and I felt not enough people had heard it,” Rowland explains, simply, of his decision to update the track. “I felt it fitted with the concept of the album. It’s not massively different, but there wasn’t a lot wrong with it to begin with. I felt that it was unfinished business that could get that a bit better, and it fitted in with the concept. And we didn’t have that many more songs!”
“(Pt. 2) was written around the same time as Pt. 1. It was originally before the Good Friday Agreement (in 1998), and it was so fucking crazy. Innocent people were lying in jail.”
While not thematically linked, the closing seconds of the song feature Rowland delivering a stark instruction: rise up. “It’s just: fucking rise up out of the lethargy,” he explains. “I hope that doesn’t mean rise up and join Reform or something. That’s certainly not what I meant. I was talking about Gaza in the verse before that when I said, “This world’s so fucking crazy and it’s some people being starved.” We’ve got to stop this madness. Our humanity, certainly my humanity, is dying while people suffer over there and we do fuck all about it. People being slaughtered, our government don’t care. They clearly don’t.”
“I just I won’t be able to live with myself unless I do whatever I can, no matter how tiny it is. I’ve written about political things, and I’m not knocking it, but I’ve never been a ‘Stand Down Margaret’ (song by The Beat) guy. I always thought, she’s not going to listen to that and stand down. I often mention political things, but never would the whole song be about it. It’s basically a love song and I’m dropping it in at the end of it.”
Our time with Rowland is nearly up, but CLASH couldn’t let the opportunity of asking about one of Dexys’, nay the world’s, most notorious songs. What does Rowland think of ‘Come On Eileen’ in 2026? He hesitates before answering.
“We did nine nights at the Duke of York in 2013, and we didn’t play ‘Come On Eileen’ and we got rave reviews and great audiences. They were the best shows that we did up to that point. I just wanted to make that statement.”
“Now, I suppose creatively I feel it’s a bit of a millstone, but financially I’m grateful for it. I’m older now, and I know it is part of our heritage; it’s part of us so we play it. I don’t hate playing it. It’s a bitch to sing! There’s lots of vocal gymnastics.”
If ‘rise up’ is to be the last we hear from Dexys Midnight Runners on record, there is some consolation from Rowland that, on the contrary, the band itself is nowhere near finished. “We’re definitely going to tour. There’s a couple of Dexys albums that I feel could have got through to a bigger audience. I’ll be open to looking at doing shows around their anniversaries. I’m not really a fan of those kinds of ideas, whenever it’s been mentioned before. I’ve always been more interested in what I’m doing now.”
“If this is the last album, and I’m saying ‘if’ because, when I was when we were making the album, I just thought, I don’t want to do this again. We’ve done seven albums, I think they’re all pretty good. The journey from ‘Searching For The Young Soul Rebels’ to this is quite a journey. This is not something we could have made in the ‘80s. No way. Seven albums is a body of work, so I thought it seems like an ending.”
‘LOVE’ is out now via Heavenly Recordings.