ABBA’s Dancing Queen, Soft Cell’s Tainted Love, and Come On bleedin’ Eileen are three songs guaranteed to make me flounce off a dance floor in a huff muttering something about “not a dance track” (although these days I probably shouldn’t be on there in the first place both as a danger to everyone around me and for the general embarassment levels of the human race). But anyway.
Fundamentally it’s a pretty good song, but horribly, horribly overplayed by lazy wedding DJs.
Kevin Rowland wanted to add a string section to his horn section, and then the horn section quit; this album, however, does include some overlap between them. It sees a shift from the Northern Soul sound to a more Celtic sound – this hybrid is evident from the start with The Celtic Soul Brothers, an up-tempo soul tune with strings (Helen O’Hara and Steve Brenna, aka The Emerald Express) playing the parts normally reserved for the horns – the soundscape is traditional Irish, but the music itself is soul. And it works very well. (I refer the reader to Jimmy Rabbitt's comments in The Commitments about why Irish people should play soul music).
Let’s Make This Precious has horns and strings working together; it’s soul again but also feels a little like The Specials (and some of the string motifs reminded me of Penguin Cafe Orchestra). Again it gives the Dexys a unique sound – the closest would be Bellowhead that I can think of. As soon as I had this thought, All In All came on, which is a waltz-tempo track that has a very Bellowhead feel – and at this point I realised the Jon Boden’s vocal range is not unlike Rowland’s.
Let’s ignore Come On Eileen, and also the legendary event where the band performed the Van Morrison cover Jackie Wilson Said on Top of the Pops only to have a big picture of darts player Jocky Wilson projected behind them – this wasn’t a behind-the-scenes error, it was a deliberate choice from Rowland based on the band’s name for the song. Just as Freddie Mercury really does sing “fried chicken” as a placeholder that got left into One Vision. I’d like to think that Jackie Wilson, Jocky Wilson, and perhaps even grumpy ol' Van Morrison would have found it amusing.
When the main tune kicks in on Plan B, there are traces of Paul Weller / The Jam. Liars A To E has R&B style backing singers “The Sisters of Scarlet” including the mighty Sam Brown (once a singer with Jools Holland, now a ukulele virtuoso after illness damaged her voice) and ubiquitous Eighties backing singer Katie Kissoon.
Rowland is somewhat more comprehensible than I think of him as being, which is normally not a lot thanks to the slurring on Come On Eileen – I've only just realised that Eileen is wearing a “pretty red dress”, not a “pretty white dress”. How confusing is that? Although, in my defence, the white sounds more virginal and reluctant than the daring and sexualised red, as befitting the song’s echoing the sentiments of Thomas Moore’s poem “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms” quoted at the end of the song, or Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd To his Love”. By centuries of colour-coded heuristic in Western art and literature, one would assume a heroine in a red dress to have no compunction about whipping it off, and not need an entire (horribly over-played) song to coax her.
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