Dexys lyrics reworked: 'Come on Ireland'

Rowland’s fight to build on early success points the way for our nation of Celtic Soul Brothers

CAN A country be said to be having problems producing its follow-up album? I think we can safely say that it can, and that indeed we are. Our initial album, that barnstorming crowd-pleaser, stadium-filler and tear-jerker, was the Irish Republic.

Now we’re locked in a studio in Switzerland – or perhaps Germany, don’t go there – with a producer who doesn’t like us and has no ideas at all.

The record company keeps on phoning to see if we’ve come up with any new songs, and you know, the thing is, we haven’t. Why don’t they want to hear The Wild Rover anymore? We’ve got nothing to give at the moment – except rugby. We’re an obedient and conventional band, but we hanker after the days when everybody loved us. That’s why we’re slightly relieved that Greece and Spain are in the dog house.

The follow-up album is what a band or performer is expected to produce after the first, big hit album which was such a success and changed the band’s lives, flinging them from bedsit to penthouse, from butter voucher to brandy, in one fell swoop.

In rock music, the difficulties involved in trying to recapture that first, fine, careless rapture of the hit album are so numerous, and the whole follow-up album syndrome so universal, that there is currently a short radio series, Follow-Up Albums (Thursdays, 11am, Radio 4)m presented by music journalist Peter Paphides.

The subject of the first programme was the album Don’t Stand Me Down, by Dexys Midnight Runners. In 1982, the charts belonged to Dexys Midnight Runners – they had everything except an apostrophe – and what was labelled their Celtic Soul.

The sheer energy of them is still breathtaking. In the era of the shoulder pad (both male and female), they wore dungarees. Come On Eileen and (Jacky Wilson Said) I’m In Heaven When You Smile lit up that summer. (Younger readers, this was so long ago that it was before Live Aid. Stop texting when I’m talking to you!) There was no doubt that Kevin Rowland, the band’s leader, was a genius. Or difficult to work with. Or Irish.

His lover and collaborator, the fiddler Helen Bevington, changed her name from the too-English Bevington to O’Hara in order to be Celtic enough for the band. As sales of the hit album, Too-Rye-Ay (yes!), went from strength to strength, the follow-up to it was eagerly expected. Rowland acquired a lovely flat but, “I still felt empty inside.”

It got a whole lot worse: “I started to go to socialist bookshops . . .” And the next thing you know, he’s in Belfast doing a fundraising gig for a gaelscoil, God bless him. I have no desire to belittle Rowland’s crisis, which caused him a great deal of suffering both in the years when he was creating the follow-up album to Too-Rye-Ay, and in the decades afterwards. But it does seem amazing now that our concept album, the Irish Republic – on which smart people like TK Whitaker worked hard – was so successful that it swept people as intelligent and creative as Rowland completely off their feet and into, or alongside, the Troops Out movement.

Remember that Rowland’s lovely flat was located in Birmingham, where the Provisional IRA had killed 21 people and injured 182 in pub bombings in November, 1974. Left-wing English people always seemed surprised that it was difficult to talk about Ireland in England at this time, but the violence was particularly terrible; Irish people, both in Ireland and the UK, were less surprised.

Rowland is from an Irish family: like Morrissey of the Smiths, like Shane McGowan of the Pogues, he was raised by exiles. Like Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who both produced singles about the situation in Ireland after they left the Beatles. Both singles were banned in Britain.

In the crisis surrounding the follow-up album Rowland went back to his roots. “It’s hard to describe Mayo,” he told Paphides. “It’s kind of haunted.” He and Helen O’Hara were photographed as Irish emigrants – Helen shrouded in a rough shawl. And quite a lot of the long-awaited and fought-over follow-up album, Don’t Stand Me Down (1985), was about Ireland.

The thing is – and if you work in the Department of Finance, then look away now – Don’t Stand Me Down was a disaster. It entered the album charts at 21 and fell out altogether a few weeks later. The band had restyled itself (there were no stylists in those days) by going into Brooks Brothers in New York. “We were sick to death of wearing dungarees and scruffy clothes,” said Helen Bevington O’Hara. The fans didn’t like the change, and the record company, Parlophone, pulled its funding of the Don’t Stand Me Down tour.

It took almost a decade for Don’t Stand Me Down to be reappraised, and judged a masterpiece. Rowland says he heard the good news while in rehab for his drug addiction. He is currently promoting his new album, One Day I’m Going to Soar. The point is, it’s no good just repairing the damage, you’ve got to come up with new material – and the sooner you come up with new material the better.