We’d just finished another year at Manchester Polytechnic and summer was staring at us. Before heading to our respective homes, a few of us went up to Newcastle for the weekend to visit a friend. We saw a sign “BBC Radio One Roadshow with Dexys Midnight Runners”. What to do? We were very cool, I mean very cool, and a Radio One Roadshow? Seriously not cool. It was probably introduced by Richard Skinner or, I don’t know, Peter Powell or something. And it was in a tent. I know. A Radio One gig in a tent. You’d think we were going to see Nik Kershaw or maybe Howard Jones. But it was Dexys and we loved Dexys. So we went. And it was extraordinary. It was so extraordinary it was released as a CD in 1995. The shock of the power of the horn section, the passion and emotion of the songs, the everything of Kevin Rowland. Back then, pop music was about synths, about artifice, about dressing up as a pirate or a Pierott clown. Dexys were about horns, about soul, about passion.  

That was June 1982 and Kevin’s outfits have changed a few times since then, but the fashion for passion has never wavered. Time’s passed but they – he – are still extraordinary. And last night at The Dome was just as extraordinary as ever.

A homecoming gig – Kevin lives down here, don’t you know – this was as much a celebration as anything – celebrating the history of the band and the audience, celebrating the songs, celebrating survival. The night was split in two halves: the first given over to the new album, “The Feminine Divine”, the second a run through of the old. Playing your new album which probably no one’s heard for the first hour of a gig, it’s asking a lot and is at the same time fantastically ambitious and arrogant. So far, so Dexys.

“The Feminine Divine” is as ever a step away from the expected which is, I guess, the expected. A treatise on Kevin’s relationship with women and how it’s changed, played live it’s stripped back, theatrical (between each song there was a ‘dramatic scene’ between band members Rowland, Jim Patterson, Sean Read and Michael Timothy), less horn more synth. Dressed in a dark blue pantalon suit, white beret and striped t-shirt (you know these things are important), Rowland held the stage, his voice at 70 still really strong and still carrying that familiar plaintive soulful plea.

While the new songs held up, the place really came alive during the second half when the lights came up, the horns came out to play and, standing on the balcony, he started up

“I won’t need to think of nice things to say,
I don’t want to want this way anymore,
Shh now and hear comes silence,
from this comes strength I promise”

which led, naturally, to

“You’ve always been searching for something…” from 1982’s “Plan B”. And on it went. “Geno”, “Jackie Wilson Said” (complete with backdrop of Jocky Wilson), “Until I Believe In My Soul” through to the much loved but rarely played “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green”. As the lights came up, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

photo: Sandra Vijandi