BOOTLEGS - DEXY'S MIDNIGHT RUNNERS

As I told at the very beginning, the main goal of this blog is to help new bands. However, I have also posted albums/tracks/videos from bands that broke-up or that had come back, as I feel that they deserve to be heard by bigger audiences.

I intend to keep on posting links to vids, but also some boots. Here you will find your favourite bands (The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, Flogging Molly ...). These boots will be posted by chronological order and the first post is a bootleg from 1983, Dexy's Midnight Runners live at Rockpalast in Germany.

The following biography is taken from wikipedia:


Kevin Rowland (vocals, guitar, at the time going under the pseudonym Carlo Rolan) and Kevin "Al" Archer (vocals, guitar), both previously of The Killjoys, founded the band in 1978 in Birmingham, England, naming the band after Dexedrine, a brand of dextroamphetamine popularly used as a recreational drug among Northern Soul fans at the time. The midnight runners referred to the energy the Dexedrine gave, enabling one to dance all night. "Big" Jim Paterson (trombone), Geoff "JB" Blythe (saxophone, previously of Geno Washington's Ram Jam Band), Steve "Babyface" Spooner (alto saxophone), Pete Saunders (keyboard), Pete Williams (bass) and Bobby "Jnr" Ward (drums) formed the first line-up of the band to record a single, "Dance Stance" (1979). The song was released on the independent Oddball Records, was named "single of the week" by Sounds, and reached number 40 in the British charts, but the next single, "Geno" – about Geno Washington, and released on EMI – was a British Number One in 1980. It featured the band's newest recruits, Andy Leek (keyboards) and Andy "Stoker" Growcott (drums). Rowland had been taken to see Washington perform live by his brother when he was aged only eleven. The success of the song prompted Washington to make a return to live performance, and also saw the departure of Leek, who himself cited the "Top of the Pops thing...people wanting your autograph and that just because you are in the band", while Rowland claimed that he left because "he wasn't into soul music and didn't think the band would ever amount to anything". The band at this time dressed in donkey jackets and woolly hats, and had a look described as "straight out of DeNiro's Mean Streets". Rowland said of the band's sound and look in January 1980: "we didn't want to become part of anyone else's movement. We'd rather be our own movement". Image was very important to the group, with Rowland commenting "We wanted to be a group that looked like something...a formed group, a project, not just random".

"Searching for the Young Soul Rebels", their debut LP, was released later in 1980. The album's sleeve featured a photograph of a Belfast Catholic boy carrying his belongings after being forced from his home in the sectarian clearances of 1969, the half-Irish Rowland explaining "I wanted a picture of unrest. It could have been from anywhere but I was secretly glad that it was from Ireland". Of the album's title, Rowland said "I don't know...I just liked the sound of it, really".

(...)

Rowland then recruited fiddle players Helen O'Hara (from Archer's new group, the Blue Ox Babes), Steve Brennan and Roger MacDuff, known collectively as "The Emerald Express". With the addition of new bass player, Giorgio Kilkenny, this line-up recorded "Too-Rye-Ay" in 1982, a hybrid of soul and Celtic folk, with strong influences from the music of Van Morrison, the new sound accompanied by a new look, with the band attired in dungarees, scarves, leather waistcoats, and what was described as "a generally scruffy right-off-the-farm look", or "a raggle-taggle mixture of gypsy, rural Irish and Steinbeck Okie". Rowland said of the new image: "These are my best clothes. Again it just feels right for the music. Everybody else is dressing up sort of straightlaced and we come in wearing these and it's like, y'know here we are, a bit of hoedowning is even possible". The first single, "The Celtic Soul Brothers", was mildly successful but "Come on Eileen" soon followed, and became a Number One hit in both the UK and the United States (and, in the former, the biggest-selling single of 1982). The follow-up "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)", a cover of a Van Morrison tune, also reached the top 5 in the UK singles chart. The band sang this song on the UK comedy "The Young Ones". When the band performed this single on the BBC TV music show Top Of The Pops, which was broadcast live, there was an infamous mix-up (or deliberate prank) by the BBC engineers in charge of the background graphics. Instead of a picture of Jackie Wilson, the American soul singer, the band performed in front of a photo of Jocky Wilson, the Scottish darts player.

An finally, before the download link, some lines taken from Ann Scanlon 's book "The Pogues - The Lost Decade" (Omnibus Press, London 1988) page 9

"A few weeks later, Dexys Midnight Runners had their third coming: with three-piece strings and evergreen washed-out dungarees, the Celtic sold ones unleashed the year's loudest refrain with "Come On Eileen".

"Suddenly there was all this press about Dexys and all that Celtic thing and it just seemed like a really bizarre coincidence", says Jem.

"We just thought these blokes had come up with a watered down version of what we were doing", says Shane. "We thought they should have stuck to soul which they were good at"."

Enjoy!


DOWNLOAD

www.mediafire.com/?ojomxynwnon (Part 1)

www.mediafire.com/?nueni4mwo1m (Part 2)