Monthly Archives: December 2012

“I saw far more musicians eating greasy breakfasts at the M1 Blue Boar services that I ever saw popping pills.” The Zombies, 2008

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Stare at a crowd of people in their 60s and work out what they might have done for a living – it isn’t easy. Hairstyles, at least on men, tend not to vary greatly. The dress mode uniformly sits somewhere between smart and comfortable. Conversation tends to canter rather than run. Which means that, on the characterfully faded 15th Floor bar at St Georges Hotel, distinguishing the four surviving members of The Zombies from a memorial get-together in honour of TV theme titan Ronnie Hazlehurst is by no means a foregone conclusion.

In the end, a well-preserved Colin Blunstone clinches it. Sipping tea from a china cup, he’s palpably the same man who last appeared on nationwide TV in 1981, singing a glacial synth treatment of What Becomes Of The Broken-Hearted. After twenty-seven years out of the limelight, the Zombies’ frontman would have every reason to overcompensate with a few starry airs and graces. Instead, the fortieth anniversary of their benchmark album Odessey & Oracle – and the imminent tour in support of it – is enough to inject an excitable quiver into one of the most quintessentially English voices of its generation.

Not all injustices are rectified in the lifetimes of their victims – and in the case of guitarist Paul Atkinson, who died in 2003 this one hasn’t been either. For the rest of The Zombies, four decades of word-of-mouth have established the album alongside Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds as one of those albums you play to your children when they ask you what the 60s were supposed to be like. As a young mod, Paul Weller cottoned on to The Zombies after hearing Rod Argent’s gurgling Hammond on 1964’s She’s Not There. By the time he was in The Jam, he was already referring Odessey & Oracle as one of his favourite albums of all time. Though impartial ears may struggle to hear it, Dave Grohl claims that the current Foo Fighters album Echoes Silence Patience & Grace betrays a heavy Odessey & Oracle influence. In the words of Tom Petty, “If a group like The Zombies appeared now, they would own the world.”

He might have added that if The Zombies really were offered ownership of the world, they’d probably be too humble to accept it such an undertaking. Lest we forget this was a group who – with Odessey & Oracle – elected to run with a misspelt title rather than offend its sleeve designer Terry Quirk. Having found success in the 60s, they must have been privy to the temptations accorded to any rising star. Lest we forget, She’s Not There had already reached number two in America. In the wake of its success, Blunstone talks of having to constantly change hotels to try and shake off screaming schoolgirls. The tousled Argent recalls one fan snipping off half of his scarf with a view to moving on to his hair. Somehow though, The Zombies never quite seemed to shake off a feeling that stardom was something that happened to other people. Hailing from a St Albans grammar school initially offered up an angle for music journalists in the 60s. Reviewing She’s Not There, Disc Magazine said, “You’d never guess the group had 50 GCEs (at O, A and S level) between them.” In time, it may have also contributed to that sense of outsiderdom.

Argent remembers that the problem lay with living near London but not inside it. “With The Beatles and a lot of the groups that came down from Liverpool and Manchester, they would move down and spend the entire night at a place like the Cromwellian or The Bag O’Nails. We would occasionally go to those places, but we would always go back to St Albans afterwards.”

You suspect that they were often on the train home before many of their peers opened up their lapel pockets and swallowed whatever uppers they needed to sustain them through the night. As Blunstone puts it, “I saw far more musicians eating greasy breakfasts at the M1 Blue Boar services that I ever saw popping pills.” Nonetheless, without or without drugs, 1966 saw with The Beatles, The Byrds and The Beach Boys cutting loose from notions of what could and couldn’t be done within a pop group. Argent and The Zombies’ other songsmith, bassist Chris White sought to follow suit. But without a Brian Epstein or George Martin figure around to indulge their creative whims, the two writers began to realize that sad-eyed pop with a sharp R&B undertow – in other words, variations on a formula established by She’s Not There – may be anchoring them to a dying era.

Instead, The Zombies were saddled with Ken Jones – a producer who equated them with what he saw as a safe formula and, in Tito Burns a manager who didn’t always have their best interests at heart. When Burns told them that they were to tour the Philippines in 1966, they should have been suspicious. The Beatles had toured there months previously and ended up risking their own lives when the entire nation turned on them for snubbing a function attended by Imelda Marcos “But,” says, Argent, “No-one had told us about that. We were told that we would be paid a total £75 per night, before his 20 per cent was deducted.” Like so much of what happened during The Zombies’ collective lifetime, they can laugh about it now – the thirty hour journey, the gun culture, the stage managed press conferences which resulted in mendacious headlines such as Zombies Say Beatles Are Louts And Hooligans For Attacking Our First Lady – but at the time, the whole sojourn went by in a state of shock.

“I remember thinking at the time that perhaps this could be a nice holiday for us,” recalls Blunstone, who never seems happier than when setting himself up as the butt of the joke, “Perhaps we would play in the bar of a hotel and spend the day on the beach. When we got off the plane, it was 3am and there were tens of thousands of people at the airport. I remember turning around to the others and saying, ‘There must be someone really famous on the plane.’ It turned out that we were playing a ten night residency of up to 40,000 people a night.”

Despite discovering that Jorge Araneta – owner of the Araneta Coliseum where The Zombies played – had made £26,000 profit from their residency, The Zombies were told that their fee was non-negotiable. Any thought of fleeing was undermined by the 24 hour security to which they were subject and the fact that Araneta had their passports.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that Odessey & Oracle sounds like the work of a band with little left to lose. “Making an album and producing it ourselves was as much a matter of pride as anything,” says Argent. “Things were winding down, but if we could just fulfil our creative potential then we could go out on a high” – not, of course, a chemical high though. White suggests that much of what later came to be termed “psychedelic” was really just “a realization that you could write songs about all sorts of things.”

And they did. Written one morning when Argent made himself rise early because he felt he wasn’t writing enough songs, A Rose For Emily got its title from a book of short stories by William Faulkner whilst exploring similar lyrical terrain to Eleanor Rigby. Care Of Cell 44 saw Argent’s lyrical voice addressing a lover as she awaited release from her prison sentence. Odessey & Oracle was recorded around the same time – and at the same Abbey Rd studios – as Sgt Pepper. Common to both albums is an innocence that seems to accrue extra poignancy with the passing of time. In Friends Of Mine – a paean to the band’s courting friends – only one of the couples Jim And Jean) mentioned is still together. “They must be getting a bit worried at this point,” laughs drummer Hugh Grundy. Similarly, it’s hard to read a title like This Will Be Our Year without pondering the irony of what followed.

What followed, at least initially, was not a lot. Odessey & Oracle failed to find its way onto CBS’s release schedules until the following year. By the time it yielded a big American hit with Time Of The Season, White and Argent had formed Argent. As they pressed on with a loss-making tour of America, at least three other fake Zombies formed to milk Time Of The Season’s belated success. Back in London, Blunstone fared little better. “I didn’t know what I was going to do, really. I hadn’t got an idea in my mind. I felt very sad. You know, I wasn’t a writer.”

So while Argent and White indulged their proggier pretensions with Argent, Blunstone got a job in the burglary department at Sun Alliance Insurance – whilst some evenings saw him traveling to Barnes where producer Mike Hurst had a bizarre plan for him. He was to record a solo version of She’s Not There under the nom de plume Neil McAndrew. “I can’t tell you why because I don’t understand myself,” he now laughs. “It was going to be James McArthur, but there’s a James McArthur in Hawaii Five-O, so we thought that would be confusing.”

True to type, Blunstone agreed to change his own name because his arranger thought it would be a good idea to do so. “I was a lost soul at this point,” says Blunstone. The truth is that he only ever wanted to be a Zombie – and, by stealth, he managed to be one for his two solo albums Ennismore and One Year, which were produced by White and Argent.

In 2008, being a Zombie is still Blunstone’s favourite place to be. Odessey & Oracle’s eventual success has conferred a pleasing symmetry upon this story. It was the record that precipitated their split. Now, with even the NME even finding room for it in their top 100 British Albums of All Time list, it’s the record that has sparked this brief reunion. Unfinished business? “Not even that,” says Argent, “I’m here and these guys are here and, with that in mind…”

As ever Blunstone’s interjection sees him trying to accommodate the wishes of the wider world “…it would be impolite not to, don’t you think?”

“The longer he plays, the less blue space seems to divide the continents on the small illuminated globe placed beside his stool.” Davy Graham, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2006

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Anyone looking to see Davy Graham’s name listed among the festivities at The Barbican’s Folk Britannia weekend would have been forgiven for missing him. With many of his contemporaries – Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch – receiving prominent billings, Graham himself is represented only by some grainy monochrome footage of his younger self in the screening room. The archived clip shows the young Graham playing Anji – the exotic, otherworldly instrumental that became a set text for virtually every other folk guitarist of the 60s.

And yet, as his old peers congregate a couple of miles down the road, it’s appropriate that the elusive Graham should be found where he has always existed – ploughing his own furrow, slightly outside the circle. This is how it was in 1964, when – with Folk Roots, New Routes – he and Shirley Collins demonstrated the resilience of British traditional songs by conferring a host of inspired jazz and eastern-influenced arrangements upon them. Over forty years on, supplementing his meagre royalties by teaching guitar, he’s all but left British folk behind. Very little of what he plays tonight is recognizable to owners of those early albums. But then, as this physically imposing legend, now 66, points out to a surprisingly young crowd, it’s not as though they were around back then either. Instead, much of the material he favours is centuries older: a Indian folk song hailing from Mahatma Ghandi’s birthplace Porbander is tackled with a elemental gusto more common to old bluesmen; another instrumental meditation signals an unannounced detour into Spanish classical music, a fine blizzard of sweet, scurrying notes punctuated by dramatic downstrokes that increase to signal imminent climax.

The longer he plays, the less blue space seems to divide the continents on the small illuminated globe placed beside his stool. It’s heartening to find him in far better shape than his well-documented heroin dependency would have portended – although his playing lacks the restraint and precision of his younger years. However, given the material he favours these days, that’s not always a problem. In fact, a string of indigenous Romanian and Armenian tunes benefit from his rough, visceral picking – their performer seemingly set on singlehandedly doing the work of three guitarists all at once. Under the circumstances, it’s hard not to sympathise with one of his students when – a propos of nothing – Graham calls his protege onto the stage to perform a couple of numbers while he has a rest. Whatever else may have changed, it still takes a brave man to follow Davy Graham. Just as it did 40 years ago.

“The CD vs vinyl debate has, in essence, always been with us. Only the names have been changed.” Greg Milner: Perfecting Sound Forever

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Having interviewed hundreds of people for his exhaustive history of recorded sound, Greg Milner has been nothing if not meticulous. However, from his New York base, one item of news eluded the Spin and Village Voice writer. It concerned a peculiar little revolution currently taking place in Hayes Middlesex. Twenty years ago, not a shred of trend analysis that could have told you that the rhythmic clunk and hiss of the old EMI vinyl pressing plant would defy all odds and continue spitting out black vinyl well into the 21st century. Even as recently as eight years ago, the place seemed beyond reprieve. EMI sold the pressing plant. All that remained for its manager Roy Matthews to do was give a guided tour to the property developers who bought the premises. Had the new owners not fallen in love with the idea of owning the place where Beatles albums were , Matthews would have long retired.
 
Instead, business at the newly-named Portalspace has risen year on year. As download sales make incursions into sales of the CD, suddenly it’s not too fanciful to imagine – as sometime Nirvana and Pixies producer Steve Albini explains to Milner in Perfecting Sound Forever – black plastic may yet end up being the analogue tortoise to the digital hare. “The vinyl record will certainly outlast CDs. I don’t think we’ll see the end of vinyl LP manufacture in my lifetime.” Professor P.B. Fellgett echoes Albini’s point, suggesting that we approach the new dawn of digital music judiciously. “Progress is not always a straight line. Often we must go backwards.”
 
There are plenty of passionately argued books out there that suggest we down lasers and return to vinyl. Milner’s isn’t one of them – although by the time you reach the end of it, your feelings about the shortcuts made by digital technology in the name of convenience may have the same effect. Well before Milner reaches the present, however, a familiar dialectic asserts itself. The CD vs vinyl debate has, in essence, always been with us. Only the names have been changed.

In 1888, eleven years after Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, Emile Berliner invented his rival gramophone. Edison styled his product as the more high-end artefact; Berliner’s had convenience going for it. Edison’s claims for the purity of the phonograph’s sound were not unfounded, but his purism exasperated his staff. He even sought to turn his near-deafness into an advantage, claiming that the human ear was an imperfect conduit of the sound captured by his Phonograph. When testing the quality of his musical releases, he sought to bypass his ears by biting into the wooden cabinet which housed his invention – all the better to mainline the vibrations. A modern-day equivalent might involve the head of Innocent testing his company’s smoothies by eating them intravenously, this bypassing the “subjectivity” of the taste buds.
 
By adopting a more populist approach, Victor trounced Edison. They made Berliner’s machine on a mass scale and they also made the records that went with it. Most cannily of all, they then they persuaded a high-profile recording artist – Enrico Caruso – to sell it for them. Milner calls it the “first synergistic relationship between [a company’s] hardware and its software.” Almost a century later, the Polygram-owned Philips did the same – bankrolling a advertorial supplement in Q magazine with Polygram-signed Dire Straits singer Mark Knopfler on the cover, espousing the virtues of their CD players.
 
If a single question underpins Milner’s historical excavations, it’s probably this. Does music have a “soul”, and if so how does an artefact best go about preserving it? “Presence” is a recurring theme in Milner’s investigations. He pre-empts the sense of evolved superiority we feel when reading about the public tone tests staged by Edison and Berliner, in which musicians “performed” only to stop halfway through as audiences gazed on aghast with wonder. How could they be so naïve, we might ask, as to mistake a scratchy old cylinder for the real thing?
 
The mind processes familiar sounds at lightning speed. It needs to if we’re to avoid getting run over on busy streets. Confronted with anything unfamiliar, the mind will shove it – once again, at lightning speed – into the most appropriate box. Milner makes the point that we have never stopped doing this – merely that our naivety has become more, well… more sophisticated. He’s absolutely right to draw an analogy between those early tone tests and the all-pervasive use of the voice correction software Auto-Tune in the last few years. The “human” voice extruded through Auto-Tune sounds far less like a human voice than that of Caruso on those early Victor recordings. And yet we almost never stop to question its veracity.
 
Is our enjoyment of a piece of music contingent on presence? Milner has landed himself with the job of marshalling such a huge amount of information that there are times where he can barely keep up with what it all means. At Sun Studios, Jack Clement had to manufacture “presence” to overcome the limitations of the available space. On those early Elvis records, he did it with the use of reverb. When Elvis signed to RCA, he had all the extra space he needed, but he couldn’t attain the mythical sound of Mystery Train. Presence was also the holy grail identified by the hugely popular sound effects albums released on Emory Cook’s label Cook Laboratories. As with the early tone test experiments, people’s desire to be “fooled” by a realistic sound knew no bounds. The advent of stereo meant that post-war audiophiles sat in their front rooms, listening to table tennis balls ping-ponging from the left speaker to the right and back again.

Such bizarre behaviour needs a theory to explain it and Milner’s is that the increased urbanization of American post-war life created a need to experience the real world vicariously, albeit with a Frigidaire at arms-reach. He stops short of noting that this period wasn’t just restricted to music. This was also the golden age of food science where synthetic re-creation of the real stuff was something to take pride in. Why keep stocking up on the real thing when you could have a jar of the powdered stuff on hand at all times?

But while audiophiles pursued their “demented quest”, reaction and creation went hand in hand with the thrillingly unreal noises pioneered by Joe Meek and Phil Spector. Overseen by George Martin, The Beatles obsessed over the possibilities of “bouncing” the contents of what they had recorded onto four tracks of magnetic tape onto a single track – thus freeing up room for more bells and whistles. In their case, Milner suggests that the line between rampant creative genius and crowding out a good idea could be drawn straight down the middle of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, a song which took 29 takes and barely fitted onto eight tracks of tape. Its engineer Geoff Emerick said it never surpassed George Harrison’s original acoustic take.
 
As the years roll by, Milner’s book turns increasingly into a parable concerning the inability of musicians, record companies, producers and listeners to see the the wood for the trees. Suspended halfway between awe and bewilderment at the totality of Def Leppard’s vision for their second album Hysteria, Milner talks about the album’s multi-million pound journey from a bunch of four track demos recorded in a poky Dublin studio to its eventual completion. Frontman Joe Elliott’s driving conviction – that “a kid in Des Moines, Iowa” might care if a guitar was slightly out of tune – resulted in a rock album of unearthly universality. In striving to appeal to all humans, it ceased to sound human at all.
 
Ironically, given his truculently unstarry approach to the business of making music, the real star of the second half of Perfecting Sound Forever is Steve Albini. When technology serves the music, he is unfailingly withering. Bands who sign to major labels and find themselves lured by a producer into recording their parts separately, then wonder why the ensuing recording sounds so flat. They’re “doing a simulacrum of what they did every day.” It’s a process he compares to have a beautiful woman come into your room and disrobe, then having someone come in the following day and assemble her from various body parts.

On what basis, asks Milner, did the pro-digital lobby trumpet the imperishability of its products – be they DAT, CD or MP3? He speaks to mastering engineer Doug Sax, who claims there is no such basis. The bearings in hard drives dry out – and when they do, the information is irretrievable. By contrast, Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska was recorded onto a cassette using a ghetto blaster which had previously sank to the bottom of a river after being knocked off his canoe. Prior to mastering, the cassette had also spent a fortnight without a case in the back pocket of his jeans. Magnetic tape has proved remarkably durable.
 
The propaganda that accompanied the advent of digital technology – that until now we were compromising a musical experience by listening to it on vinyl or tape – has in time come to be true of digital. Milner isn’t surmising here. He reserves the most damning sections of Perfecting Sound Forever for the 21st century mania for musical compression. Pop songs used to have a dynamic range. The quiet bits were quiet and the loud bits were loud. If you want your single to be played on the radio, full dynamic range is no longer an option. A sonic picture of a recent hit – say Franz Ferdinand’s The Fallen – shows a thick band of sound seemingly designed to be heard over the rumble of car engines and traffic. A sound picture of Neil Young’s 1975 song Tonight’s The Night depicts a series of peaks and valleys. Increasingly, dynamic range is an anachronism. But the problems ushered in by compression have yet to be untangled. Loudness may ensure that a song played on the radio gets our attention. We may even buy the album. But once we have the album, loudness also accounts for why perfectly good music may start to feel oppressive after a while. Three tracks and we’re lunging for the off switch.
 
Perhaps the cumulative sense that music is ganging up on us, crowding us out with its very ubiquity and unprecedented availability, is contributing to its commercial devaluation. For many music fans who feel this way, analogue isn’t just a qualitative choice; it’s a symbolic one.
 
Between the last sentence and this one, I walked over to one of the shelves where I keep my seven-inch singles and picked up a record at random. It was The Young Rascals’ 1967 hit How Can I Be Sure. As if to honour Edison’s criterion, I asked myself if the sound of Eddie Brigati casting his fate to the whims of true love as pensive strings swirl around him was the real thing. Milner’s answer: “The analogue fan longs for the days when there was a clear boundary between reality and its representation, because maybe in the sound of their favourite records they hear a better world.” I’d say that just about nails it.

“This used to go like that, but then one day something happened as it so often does.” Dexys Midnight Runners in 1982.

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“There there my dear” by Dexys Midnight Runners

The school holidays were six weeks long. I was in my dead grandmother’s house in Athens, bored out of my mind while my older brother – homesick and in love with wedge-haired rouge-streaked Caroline Fellowes – played The Doors‘ 13 compilation on a single-speaker tape recorder over and over again. For all of that, I was relieved to be bored; relieved to be away from my pipe-smoking form teacher Mr Newton, who looked like Lech Walesa, ran the chess club and sought to alleviate the tedium by picking on pubescent halfwits like me.

It was all a bit shit, to be honest, but it would have been shitter had it not been for Eddie Holmes. Eddie was the toughest kid in the year. Self-doubt literally wasn’t in his vocabulary. The morning after his first wank, he proudly marched into the playground and told us that he’d “spunked up.” Then he proceeded to ask every single other boy in our class if they too had spunked up. Everyone said yes, except for me. At 13, I was already becoming unbearably supercilious. Within a year, I’d be writing Doors lyrics all over my exercise books and feeling superior because of it. Boys like Eddie normally bullied boys like me, but for some reason Eddie liked me. In fact, Eddie was the only person in my class who liked me. Maybe he’d seen one too many BBC childrens series in which the handy alpha male had a nerdy friend called Brains, and together they formed a ying-yang shield of invincibility. Maybe he just needed a Goose for his Maverick.

Whatever our differences, one thing Eddie and I did have in common was that we were both Dexys Midnight Runners fans – him a little more than me, if truth be told. He continued to buy their singles even when they didn’t chart. A year had elapsed since Dexys’ last hit. In modern pop terms, that’s practically the space between breakfast and lunch, but for most of my classmates in July 1982, Dexys were over a long time ago. Except that, during the course of month that I had spent in Greece, Dexys were anything but over. In the space of four weeks, they’d put out a record and that record had climbed to number one. Not just that, but this Dexys looked nothing like the Dexys of Geno or the Dexys of Show Me.

Consciously or not, Come On Eileen deployed off the same trick that, two years previously, Madness had pulled off with Baggy Trousers. Down to the Crombies and Harringtons, the Doc Martens and the drainpipes, Suggs and his mates looked like most of the boys in my class. We saw our day-to-day lives in the words of that song and, vicariously, felt a sense of yearning for something that was still ongoing. If Baggy Trousers described what was happening in the classroom, Come On Eileen described what was happening in our interior world: the desperate quest for some sort of encounter that might circumvent the awkwardness of courtship. The need to stop being a person that hadn’t done it and to start being someone who had. And, as with the cast of Baggy Trousers, Eileen was to all intents and purposes, a figment of Kevin Rowland’s imagination. Eileen was his first love. A teenage crush idealised by the passage of time. By the time Come On Eileen hit the top spot, Kevin was going steady with Dexys’ violinist Helen O’Hara. But my friends and I all had our Eileens – crushes that we were too scared to even tell each other about. Between the Dexys song and the Madness song, our collective world had been gift-wrapped and presented back to us. And that’s how, in the summer of 1982, we already found ourselves nostalgic for a version of what we were going through there and then.

But I couldn’t just go out and buy Too Rye-Ay. Not on my pocket money. Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile) appeared, and that was barely less a force of nature than Eileen. Dexys were on TV a lot, and every time you saw Kevin, you felt that there was a pop star you could believe in. My brother returned from town one Saturday afternoon and told me that he saw Kevin and Helen on an escalator that – for the fact that they were dressed in their ripped dungarees – could have come right out of a TV screen. In December, something like the opposite happened. Dexys Midnight Runners appeared on fledgling Channel 4 music show The Tube and reeled me in, out of my empty front room, out of Acocks Green, out of pre-adolescent uncertainties and into something, to quote another Dexys song, “pure and precious”

In the four months since Come On Eileen hit number one, Dexys’ ascent was ratified by their Tube performance. Even The Jam’s final live TV appearance with Beat Surrender warranted a lower billing. Kevin Rowland was intensely competitive, but he was also the product of a catholic upbringing, with all feelings of unworthiness that brings. Both of those traits seemed evident in their Tube performance. Dexys had 20 minutes to do whatever they wanted and, like Queen at Live Aid, these 20 minutes radiated a supercharged urgency that set them apart from all their contemporaries. Whatever self-doubt afflicted Kevin at this time, none of it extended to the music. Dexys had been touring since the summer. The chemistry between the players is palpable, not just in the playing, but in the sly smiles and playful glances exchanged between Helen O’Hara, Billy Adams and Steve Brennan.

For all of that, the first two songs, Let’s Get This Straight (From The Start) and Celtic Soul Brothers offer no indication of what’s about to follow. “This used to go like that, but then one day something happened as it so often does. And now it goes like this.” Like what, exactly? A single note repeated on a bass string – a noise which instantly commands your attention – and then, “Ro-Ro-Ro-RO-BIN!” Two years previously, There There My Dear sailed into the top ten in Geno’s slipstream, an amphetamine-charged evisceration of Kevin’s greatest bete-noir: the left-leaning dilettante whose cold correctness arouses suspicion in a singer simply can’t understand people like that. But, by December 1982, There There My Dear was less about the person addressed in the line, “I don’t believe/You really liked Sinatra,” more an existential address from the man asking the question.

In the seconds that follow the Sinatra line – in the tidal rush of horns and thermal upswell of hammond that fill the available space – you begin to apprehend the measure of Dexys’ commitment. This is just a brief interlude before the next verse, but it’s worth dwelling on. Last year, when making a documentary about Dexys’ 1985 album Don’t Stand Me Down, I met the saxophonist on the right. As Chairman of Sony Music, Nick Gatfield is one of the most senior executives in the British music industry. He seems ambivalent about his time in the band, in particular the tortuous period between 1982 and 1985 – but he’s not ambivalent here. No-one is. Kevin Rowland could barely string a few chords together on a guitar, so why did he attract such devotion from his fellow musicians? Why did Helen O’Hara jettison a promising career as a classical violinist to help realise his musical vision? Was it just the promise of mere session work that would have persuaded venerable American backing singer Jimmy Thomas to don dungarees and weigh in on backing vocals? The answer reveals itself from about three-and-a-half minutes – when everything but the rhythm section drops out, Kevin sinks to his knees and delivers four minutes which effectively place him within touching distance of Sam & Dave, Van Morrison, Otis Redding – the singers who clearly shaped his earliest notions about what it was to be a great frontman. Thomas, sometime sideman to Ike Turner, looks just as lost in the moment as everyone else.

Six minutes and forty-four seconds. A wordless scream. Alternating cries of “STOP!” and “GO!” on every bar. And suddenly, the band are watching Kevin as intently as I am, in a Birmingham sitting room, on the other side of a cathode ray. No-one knows what’s coming next. No-one could ever guess what could ever come next. “At this point, I do some press-ups”, declares Kevin. And off he goes, not for the last time in his career, merging the sublime and the ridiculous in ways that no-one else would dare. In a song that defies its subject to forget his inhibitions, to show some passion, the a performance that demands the same of you. And no more so at this point. Aged 13, self-conscious in all sorts of ways, I sat stock still watching Kevin Rowland cradling an imaginary baby, seemingly in a dream-state, apologising for some imagined “joke.”

From that moment on – with Plan B and Let’s Make This Precious still to play – Dexys Midnight Runners ruled my world. I unwrapped Too Rye-Ay on Christmas morning, wandered into the posh room where we kept the hi-fi and plugged in the chunky headphones. I pretty much I stayed there until 1983. Sixteen years later, I met Kevin Rowland and told him so. He remembered that week for different reasons. All his friends assumed that now he was a pop star, he must have had loads of invitations to swanky New Year’s get-togethers. As a result, none of them thought to ask him what he was doing. Kevin Rowland, frontman of Britain’s biggest-selling pop group at that moment in time, spent the evening alone in his house. Two very different lives in the same city, both of them changed forever by Too Rye-Ay.