Voices by Nick Coleman

Author:Nick Coleman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Grace notes

Dexys Midnight Runners: ‘Keep It Part Two (Inferiority Part One)’

EMI Records, 1980

Has any figure in British pop wrestled more earnestly with the question of what ‘soul’ means than Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners?

‘Welcome to the new soul vision,’ he blurted, manifesto style, at the end of the group’s third hit, ‘There, There, My Dear’, as if he knew what he was talking about. The evidence is that he sort of did. Kind of.

For sure, the group had an overt sense of its own soulful identity, with a look (donkey jackets, woolly hats), an attitude (sullen, antisocial, contumacious) and an assumed air of authority predicated on a worked-out ideological stance vis-à-vis the real value of pop music in modern society. At one point, Rowland even imposed a total Dexys embargo on the press, following ribald and/or dismissive coverage in one of the music papers, preferring instead to pay for advertising space in the same paper in which to explicate (and obfuscate) his position in terms not entirely comprehended by everyone. In the great stylistic mash-down that followed the decline and fall of punk, your ideological dance stance counted for almost as much as your haircut.

But what Dexys lacked in politesse, modesty and soulful reserve, they compensated for with a conviction that passion should be the engine of all value in pop; that, if nothing else, pop music should make you feel the same strong emotions as those felt by the boys in the band. And, boy, did they make a song and dance about it. They were ever so slightly oppressive – which was one of the reasons some music journalists were ribald and dismissive in return.

‘Keep It Part Two’ is a fanfare for the onset of depression, breakdown and creative involution. It begins with blatting minor-key horns riding a seething Hammond slow-boil. It boils, they blat, the song cloaks itself in haughty but dismal shades. It then opens out into expansive chorus mode, achieving maximum load in its third minute with a full-bore horn play-out that multitracks trombone and saxes into extravagant cadential cascades. Both as a groove and as a mobile edifice it is magnificent – Booker T and the MGs could not have invested a state funeral with more simmering dignity. But it is the sound of Kevin Rowland’s strangulated voice, thumbed like putty into the gaps in this noble musical structure, which makes a sturdy piece of songcraft into a broken window allowing a view into a trashed interior. It is dark as night in there.

‘Keep It Part Two’ asked the big soul question and then answered it, while gazing at its own penumbral reflection to make sure it looked and sounded soulful in the right way, not the wrong way. It represented in 1980 the absolute high-water mark for white British soul self-consciousness – so much so, in fact, that it bordered on the Gothic. Not for years afterwards would aspirant soul boys and girls again feel that they needed to explain themselves with quite so much self-lacerating candour, nor make their pitch with so many laryngeal contortions.

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