Dexy's Midnight Runners 

Influenced by Stax, Sam & Dave, James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Northern Soul, Dexy's Midnight Runners began rehearsing in a garage in Northfield, Birmingham. The combination of their big brass sound and the rhythmic drums, bass and guitar created something unique.

Summer 1980 was a restless time - Punk was dead, Ian Curtis had just killed himself and The Rolling Stones and Queen topped the album charts. The release of Dexy's debut album, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, was an event to be savoured. Resolutely and defiantly, the group had already crossed swords with EMI and would soon take on the music press.

Their album opened with the twirl of a radio dial sampling bits of The Sex Pistols and The Specials before Kevin Rowland sneered "for God's sake, burn it down". What followed was the most incandescent and refreshing record of the year. An energetic mix of pop, Northern Soul and punkish attitude.

A re-recorded Dance Stance offered a searing indictment of anti-Irish racism, the celebratory Geno had become a chant at every gig, there was an instrumental that sounded like a film theme and the epistolary There There My Dear in which Rowland savaged a fashion-conscious contemporary. The closing words "welcome to the new soul vision" were greeted with joy by many for whom Dexy's Midnight Runners represented an oasis of passion and commitment at the beginning of a new decade.

Taking their name from the legendary mod pep pill 'Dexedrine', Kevin Rowland had formed Dexy's in July 1978 to try and emulate their heroes of the 60's soul scene. Sporting an image inspired by Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (i.e. New York Dockers), Dexy's quickly became the toast of the British music press.

There was dissension in the ranks however, and the bulk of the band left in 1981 to form The Bureau. With Rowland and Jimmy Patterson the only remaining original members they bolstered the line-up with new recruits. The resulting single, Show Me, hit the UK Top 20 later that summer, although a follow-up, Liars A to E, failed to chart and the group retired to reconsider their approach.

Augmenting the band with The Emerald Express (fiddlers Helen O'Hara, Steve Brennan and Roger MacDuff) Dexy's re-emerged in Spring 1982 with a revamped Irish folk/soul hybrid and a rousing cover version of Van Morrison's Jackie Wilson Said making the Top 5.

The Celtic Soul Brothers introduced this new dishevelled romantic gypsy vagabond image, and though the track failed to chart, a follow-up (Come On Eileen) was a massive transatlantic Number One smash hit. Not only were Dexy's big news in the UK again, they had cracked America (albeit briefly).

The subsequent album, Too-Rye-Ay (1982), was the most successful of their career, but yet again the line-up splintered and the momentum faltered with the brass section of Patterson, Maurice and Speare departing in summer 1982.

It would be a further three years until the release of Don't Stand Me Down (1985), a considerably lower-key effort which enjoyed only a brief visit to the charts. With a nucleus of Billy Adams and Helen O'Hara, Rowland began recording in 1984, taking almost two years of punctilious rewriting and reworking to produce redemptive songs filled with passion, humour and honesty. But the masses didn't get it.

A solitary hit single, Because Of You (used as the theme tune to the UK TV series Brush Strokes) followed in 1986 before Dexy's were consigned to history.

Eventually declared bankrupt, Rowland was forced to sell his home, sign on the dole and move into a squat. Clearly the answer to his woes was to stage a comeback in an undercrackers-revealing dress, as seen on the cover of his notorious 1999 folly, My Beauty. It reportedly sold just 500 copies, though that didn't stop him from taking to the stage at the Reading Festival in a white frock and stockings to croon The Greatest Love Of All.

The bottles flew and he has kept a low profile ever since.