Dexys Midnight Runners

Having emerged as a clean living, guitar-free, Geno Washington-adoring soul revue gang in woollen hats and jogging vests on 1980’s seminal ‘Searching For The Young Soul Rebels’, for Dexys to re-appear only two years later as raggle taggle gypsy fiddlers in hairy pit-flashing dungarees marked them out as pop’s most flagrant ’80s chameleons. In fact, the only thing that hadn’t been re-invented was Kevin Rowland’s clinical inability to sing the last syllable of a verse propeerrrllllyyyaaaaooowooojimmy! The soul purists cried Judas, the rest of the globe sent ‘Come On Eileen’ and ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ on to chart glory. For us, its legacy was The Wonderstuff, Levellers and The Holloways. But with classics like the tear-tossed ‘Old’ and ‘Liars A To E’ newly packaged in with a bunch of rare live tracks, this expanded re-issue stands as a fitting monument to pop history’s most spectacular ideological quirk.

Mark Beaumont