Time Capsule: Dexys Midnight Runners, Too-Rye-Ay

Every Saturday, Paste will be revisiting albums that came out before the magazine was founded in July 2002 and assessing its current cultural relevance. This week, we’re looking at Dexys Midnight Runners’ phenomenal and underloved second LP, which harbored a one-hit wonder that outshone the rest of the tracklist but changed pop music’s equilibrium in the early 1980s.

The origins of Dexys Midnight Runners date as far back to 1978, when Birmingham twenty-somethings Kevin Rowland and Kevin “Al” Archer formed the group after the dissolution of the punk outfit the Killjoys. After the Killjoys called it quits, Rowland wrote a song called “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green,” which would become a centerpiece track on their debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, two years later. Rowland and Archer named the band after Dexedrine, a recreational drug popular amongst Northern soul lovers and club-goers who needed a fix that would keep them dancing until dawn. Searching for the Young Soul Rebels was powered by the hit single “Geno” and two other charting singles—“There, There, My Dear” and “Burn it Down”—and Melody Maker named it one of the best albums of 1980, as did NME. Its fusion of punk rock and blue-eyed soul puts it nicely in the company of other new wave records of the time-period, while its use of trombone, saxophone and organs gives it a far more orchestral bent than the records we typically canonize as influential on contemporary post-punk and alternative artists.

Dexys Midnight Runners didn’t find broad commercial success for two more years, when they released Too-Rye-Ay in July 1982 and saw the record hit #2 on the UK Albums chart (it would also hit the Top 10 on the Australian, Dutch and New Zealand chart, and it peaked at #14 on the Billboard 200). It’s certified 2x Platinum across the world, bolstered by the popularity of its second single: “Come On Eileen,” which was a #1 hit in eight countries and a Top 10 hit in five others. For many and most, “Come On Eileen” is why Dexys Midnight Runners remains a household name in the zeitgeist, though you’d be hard-pressed to find enough people who can accurately tell you who it is that sings the song in the first place. It’s a shame, too, because Dexys are one of the greatest bands to ever do it. And “Come On Eileen” is one of the greatest pop songs ever put to tape.

Too-Rye-Ay was a special record because, thanks to “Come On Eileen” puncturing through the mainstream, it put Celtic-pop on people’s radars. Archer, due to exhaustion from touring, left Dexys Midnight Runners in 1981 and, years after its explosion, Rowland publicly acknowledged his former bandmate’s influence on the track. Archer, in 2009, explained that he loved playing music in Dexys but hated Rowland’s way of running the band and the culture he incorporated within it under his direction (he banned drinking before shows and enforced exercise routines, and he often fought with the press). And that division can be felt in the swing of styles between both of Dexys inaugural albums.

There’s a bit of dimensional, accessible polish to Too-Rye-Ay that was more absent on Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. The latter was this angry, dense, horn-centric barnburner sung by a couple of Birmingham kids dressed like New York dock workers with a fresh EMI deal. The convergence of jangle pop and jazz was happening in Chicago at the time, but Dexys Midnight Runners were doing it better. They were opening for the Specials and doing ska better than them, too. 2 Tone Ska, London punk and Motown were the amalgam that cast Dexys into one of most original-sounding templates in English history. And Too-Rye-Ay was Rowland putting an easy-on-the-eyes polish onto all of it and trying to better-capture his own Irish heritage.

Before Dexys Midnight Runners descended upon Genetic Studios in Berkshire to record the album, Rowland sought to add a violin section to the band’s already-in-place horn ensemble. When he brought in violinists Helen O’Hara and Steve Brennan (of the Emerald Express), Dexys’ horn section (which included the band’s co-leader and co-composer Jim Paterson) left the group and became the TKO Horns (though Paterson never really left the band). But, Rowland charmed them into sticking around just long enough to make Too-Rye-Ay. In turn, Dexys re-recorded their 1981 singles “Plan B,” “Soon” and “Liars A to B,” which “Soon” getting revised into an opening section of “Plan B” on the final cut of the album. At 10 songs, it’s rare that Too-Rye-Ay gets love beyond “Come On Eileen”—an understandable and all-too-common trend when it comes to one-hit wonders.

“Come On Eileen” wasn’t only the best #1 hit of 1983, but it remains one of the greatest #1 hits of all time. It’s an infectious, dazzling cut of new wave injected with off-kilter (to the layman’s ear, at least) Celtic folk-pop. That opening fiddle solo, the a-cappella “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” outro (which was nixed from the single version, though I sometimes sing it to myself around the house), the accordion pulls from Mickey Billingham and the up-tempo horn and mandolin that duet across the track’s bridge—how can you not hopelessly fall in love with the song over and over with each listen? “Eileen, I’ll hum this tune forever,” Rowland opines. In the 41 years since then, the rest of us have taken part in that same, perfect declaration.

But Too-Rye-Ay is far more than just “Come On Eileen.” Their cover of Van Morrison’s “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile)” is one for the books, equipped with more horns than “Come On Eileen” but, in some ways, more splendid. Critics called it a Van Morrison rip-off—even though that’s kind of the point of a cover song in the first place—but there’s an enchantment in Rowland’s voice that gives the track its own ragged, beautiful signs of life. It was a Top 5 hit in the UK and for good reason: the touches of organ from Mickey Billingham, the twin saxophones from Brian Maurice and Paul Speare, Seb Shelton’s percussion that sounds like it was cut straight from a drum machine—they all make for an amusing, delightful concoction of soul-pop. As a follow-up single to a #1 hit in August 1982, Dexys Midnight Runners didn’t quite capture the same momentum that “Come On Eileen” had two months prior (there was no way it possibly could, to be honest) but it worked its magic more than well-enough.

Along with the timeless, romping Irish jaunt of opening track “The Celtic Soul Brothers (More, Please, Thank You)”, “Old” and “Let’s Make This Precious” pump Too-Rye-Ay’s A-side up into one of the most muscular of its time. “Old” is a five-minute concerto that bleeds through tempo-shifting intervals and is accentuated by O’Hara and Brennan’s violins. The “And worse from us, so obvious, preposterous, when you think of the time that each has spent, words heaven sent and truly meant to show” chorus tumbles into the “Old, may I sit down here and learn today?” verse, and the horn medley that sneaks in after the song’s initial fade-out nearly sounds like the horns from “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green.” “Let’s Make This Precious,” too, channels similar horn patterns as “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green,” and you can feel Archer’s soul rocking throughout the arrangement. It’s kooky, off-the-beaten path and, to be quite honest, a glorious distillation of an oft-forgotten band at their peak.

Too-Rye-Ay’s B-side is filled out with previously released singles, with “Plan B” being the best of the bunch. After the reworked “Soon” intro, the track channels some notes of the Cars, as Rowland’s voice conjures similar hues you might have found in that of Ric Ocasek’s. “Until I Believe in My Soul”—a free-jazz crashing into the mainstream fit nicely with Paul Speare’s tin whistle. Elsewhere, Rowland’s spoken-word poetry on “I’ll Show You” (“It’s so hard to picture dirty tramps as young boys, but if you see a man crying, hold his hand, he’s my friend”) turns the album into a tender, crushing regalia of thieves, office clerks, misfits, mortgaged-up families and scornful lovers. Nine tracks in and all that’s left to contend with is the blitzkrieg of “Come On Eileen,” which serves as a finely-cut exclamation mark on an all-kills-and-all-frills album of piercing pop perfection. For a couple of Englishmen dressed in donkey jackets, overalls and wool caps like they were train-hopping vagabonds, I’d say they made out pretty good in the end.

The full-volume triumph of Too-Rye-Ay has been cast off to the same wayside as other one-hit wonder-bearing albums, like Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, Blind Melon and Get the Knack—all of which, might I add, are phenomenal if you look beyond outside the margins of their standout songs. Too few people remember Too-Rye-Ay. “Come On Eileen” became a two-faced sword, in that it put Dexys Midnight Runners in the same conversations as their English contemporaries of the “Second British Invasion”—like the Buggles, Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, Simple Minds and Eurythmics—but it also turned them into something of a novelty act.

But when “Come On Eileen” tumbles out of our speakers or is dropped into a scene in a coming-of-age movie, you get up and dance, too. The modern music world had never seen such a dynamic, soulful song rule the world—which helps make “Come On Eileen” and Too-Rye-Ay both eternal, glorious works of art that “moved a million hearts in mono.” It’s a compelling, clear-eyed embodiment of a musical style that’s rarely been in such focus in the 42 years since hitting the shelves. As Kevin Rowland, Giorgio Kilkenny, Billy Adams and Mickey Billingham sing out in unison near the end of the album: “That’s all there ever is, that’s all there ever was.”