Kevin Rowland On Remixing Dexys Midnight Runners’ ‘Too-Rye-Ay’

Musical histories of 1982 usually recall a year when shiny, synthesizer-led pop sounds were all the rage. There’s some truth in that, of course. The UK Top 40, in particular, was inundated by glossy pop hits from the likes of ABC, Dollar, Duran Duran, and Culture Club. Yet most of the retrospectives conveniently forget that one of 1982’s biggest bands, Dexys Midnight Runners, went against the grain and captured the wider public’s hearts with the thrillingly organic, Celtic-tinged pop of their massive-selling second album, Too-Rye-Ay.

The trailblazing Birmingham-based band, led by the singular Kevin Rowland, released Too-Rye-Ay in July 1982. It came out in the wake of their transatlantic chart-topping hit, “Come On Eileen” (it outsold Irene Cara’s omnipresent “Fame” to become the UK’s biggest hit of 1982), so it arrived bearing the weight of expectation.

Listen to Too-Rye-Ay “as it should have sounded” now.

However, Too-Rye-Ay wowed the critics (“On this record, Rowland does the impossible – makes me believe he’s found some young soul rebels,” gushed The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau) and it tore up the charts – peaking at No. 2 in the UK and No. 14 on the Billboard 200, with platinum discs to follow. In fact, in 1982, you’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone who wasn’t deliriously happy with Too-Rye-Ay – except for Kevin Rowland himself.

“[The record’s co-producers] Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley were very successful at the time, they’d had a lot of hits with bands like Madness, so what they said mattered. They had the final say in how Too-Rye-Ay originally sounded,” Rowland says today.

“Before ‘Come On Eileen,’ we’d had a couple of singles that didn’t do so well, so their opinion held sway. If I said I really didn’t like the sound of something, I’d be told not to worry, it was fine. I could never pinpoint exactly what the problem was with the way [the album] sounded, but I was never happy with it. Then, when it was finished, I was told the budget was spent, so I’ve had to live with it – until now!”

The new version

Forty years on from its initial release, Too-Rye-Ay is finally being presented “as it should have sounded” to Kevin Rowland’s ears. It’s now back in circulation as a new super-deluxe boxset edition which also includes an impressive collection of B-sides and outtakes from the era. Rowland, though, is keen to stress that the record’s new edition isn’t a reissue. It’s a necessary remix. “The fact Too-Rye-Ay turns 40 this year means nothing to me, it was the opportunity to remix it that was the motivation,” he explains. “It was the mix that let it down. That was what always needed addressing.”

To make Too-Rye-Ay sound as it should, Dexys turned to a close associate, their long-time producer/engineer Pete Schwier who re-evaluated all the songs and made some cogent suggestions for sonic improvements.

“Pete’s been working with us since Don’t Stand Me Down, and he’s fantastic,” Rowland enthuses. “After he’d re-evaluated the tracks, he sent rough mixes to myself and [Dexys violinist] Helen [O’Hara], and then we’d give him comments back, and we’d go from there.” In advance PR for the album’s new edition, Schwier says the remixing process was “quite straightforward,” but his input has clearly made a decisive difference. He says his brief was to “bring as much emotion to the songs” – an objective that Kevin Rowland believes has certainly been achieved.

“You suggest that it sounds punchier now – but that’s only half the story, as it has a lot more dynamics and a lot more emotional depth. It sounds a lot more pure for want of a better term,” he says. “It’s a very musical mix. It lets the vocals breathe, and also we were able to deal with a few of the studio treatments and production techniques. They were of their time, but I didn’t like them, and they didn’t reflect the dynamic range of the music.”

Having listened intently to the songs before, during, and after the process, Dexys frontman is especially satisfied that many of Too-Rye-Ay’s best songs have now realized their true potential. “I think that ‘Old,’ ‘Liars (A To E),’ and ‘Until I Believe In My Soul’ have all taken on another life now,” he enthuses. “They were always good songs – and I do want to stress it was never the performances, it was the mix that held Too-Rye-Ay back – but they’ve all really come alive now.

“I’m really pleased we’ve been able to release the remixed radio edit of ‘Old’ as a single,” he further explains. “It was considered as a single at the time but never was. I’m really happy with the way that sounds now. There have been some subtle changes with the arrangements too. For example, on ‘Plan B,’ we moved the brass to come in earlier. On ‘Liars (A To E),’ we brought the backing vocals down an octave in places, as I felt they were too high, and on ‘Until I Believe In My Soul,’ we replaced the penny whistle on the intro with Jim [Paterson]’s trombone, also recorded at the time.”

‘Come On Eileen’

One Too-Rye-Ay song that Kevin Rowland could live with, however, was the album’s worldwide smash, “Come On Eileen.” The story of how Dexys were transformed from the gritty, soul-tinged post-punk outfit of their debut album, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels to the more rustic-sounding, dungaree-clad stars of Too-Rye-Ay has already been well-documented elsewhere, but the process begs the question of how much Rowland’s own Irish heritage influenced the album’s overall sound.

“It didn’t so much when we were making the record, but it did impinge on the songwriting to a degree,” he considers. “Like many English people, I’ve an Irish background, so I always tried to get a little bit of it into our stuff. But of course, we’re talking about the early 80s here, so it was quite hard to say anything about Ireland or Irish culture without it being misinterpreted. A lot of people didn’t want to hear about it because of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.”

“For example, Birmingham’s biggest radio station, BRMB apologized after they played ‘Come On Eileen’ for the first time,” Rowland adds. “They said they hoped it didn’t cause offense to anybody, because there had only just been an IRA bomb gone off in London the day before. We had all that to contend with, so I felt I almost had to sneak a bit of Irish culture in. I certainly didn’t want to go all out on playing Irish folk, but it was good to bring a little into our sound. Obviously, Eileen’s an Irish name, and the song was all about growing up with Irish girls, really.”

The record’s success

Topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, the joyous “Come On Eileen” certainly struck a chord with the wider public and its success ensured Dexys profile was at their highest circa Too-Rye-Ay. When the album went Top 20 in the US, tangible international success was within their grasp, but was Kevin Rowland – a performer renowned for his intensity and inability to suffer fools gladly – ever really cut out for the trappings of mainstream fame?

“Well, getting that sort of attention isn’t for everyone,” he reflects. “Actually, I quite liked it at the beginning, but the whole pop stardom thing brings its own difficulties. I find it a sort of competition and we weren’t helped when the record company decided to follow up ‘Come On Eileen,’ with a cover version (the Van Morrison-penned ‘Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile)’). That was a mistake. It still got to No.5, but we were banking on having another Top 3 hit at least.”

“So I started to get a bit disillusioned after that,” he furthers. “Dexys was already 24-7 for me anyway, but when we went to America and the itinerary meant I was doing ten interviews every day and all that sort of stuff, I soon started to feel like I was on a treadmill.”

After ‘Too-Rye-Ay’

Also included in the new Too-Rye-Ay boxset, the bonus live set from London’s Shaftesbury Theatre in October 1982 proves that Dexys had become one of the most dynamic live acts of their era. However, while the album took the band to the US for a further bout of touring during the summer of 1983, Kevin Rowland decided enough was enough. He’d had his share of the spotlight, and he wanted to explore different styles of music and methods of songwriting. When his band eventually returned with 1985’s adventurous Don’t Stand Me Down, they were a very different beast.

“I never want to repeat the same thing, because ultimately, you’ve got to be true to the music and the inspiration behind it,” Rowland says today. “It’s your job to honor the music, wherever it comes from. It’s not something where you should put it before a committee, and they decide how it should sound, though if you don’t do that, you probably won’t enjoy sustained success.”

Nonetheless, Dexys Midnight Runners remain as revered as ever. In recent years, they’ve returned to the fray (now known officially as simply ‘Dexys,’ styled without the apostrophe) with widely-acclaimed studio albums such as 2012’s One Day I’m Going To Soar and 2016’s Let The Record Show: Dexys Do Irish And Country Soul, while the band’s current line-up sees Kevin Rowland again working with key figures from his band’s history such as Helen O’Hara and Jim Paterson.

Despite health issues forcing the cancellation of the UK tour scheduled for September and October of this year, Kevin Rowland is back in the thick of it, and the fact his band’s talismanic second album can now be enjoyed “as it should have sounded” is all the tonic he needs.

“For so long, I’ve felt that of our 80s albums, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels and Don’t Stand Me Down were really good, but Too-Rye-Ay was lacking in something,” he declares. “But that’s all changed. The way Too-Rye-Ay sounds now, it’s right up there with the best of our work.”

Listen to Too-Rye-Ay “as it should have sounded” now.