FEATURE:
Groovelines
Dexys Midnight Runners and the Emerald Express – Come on Eileen
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THIS is a bit of a classic…
that I have not featured before. Released in June 1982, Dexys Midnight Runners’ (credited to Dexys Midnight Runners and the Emerald Express) Come on Eileen was taken from their album, Too-Rye-Ay. That album itself is a bit of a classic in its own right. That said, there is no doubting the biggest song on it is Come on Eileen! The song reached number one in the United States. It was the British band’s second number one hit in the U.K. following 1980's Geno. Not only was it a chart success. Come on Eileen won Best British Single at the 1983 BRIT Awards. It was named as Britain's best-selling single of 1982. Not only is the song one of the defining hits of the 1980s. It is a track that translates to this day and still sound amazing. Some say that the group are a one-hit wonder. I disagree. Although Come on Eileen is their biggest moment, Kevin Rowland and co. have had more than their share of hits! There are a couple of interesting articles that take a closer look at a massive Dexys hit. American Songwriter wrote a feature on Come on Eileen a couple of years back:
“The greatest one-hit wonder of the 80’s? Maybe the greatest one-hit wonder of all time? You can certainly make that case about Dexys Midnight Runners and “Come On Eileen,” the band’s 1982 lightning bolt of a single that they never could quite repeat. Not that they should be ashamed about that, because this was a song that brimmed with so much spirit and passion that anyone would be hard-pressed to replicate it.
IN THIS PHOTO: Dexys Midnight Runners in 1982
It should be noted that “Come On Eileen” was not the only hit that the group had in their native Great Britain; they had actually scored a previous #1 smash with “Geno.” In America, the song seemed to drop out of the clouds in the midst of a wave of British invaders at the peak of the MTV era. Yet unlike the electronic, automaton chilliness of the Human League or Soft Cell, “Come On Eileen” was brimming with palpable heart and soul.
The song was written by Dexys’ frontman Kevin Rowland along with band members “Big” Jim Paterson and Billy Adams. Rowland told authors Jonathan Bernstein and Lori Majewski in the new book Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined The 80s that a big hit was something he was actively trying to achieve. “I always want what I haven’t got – or I used to,” he said. “I was hankering after pop success at that point. I’m not saying we wrote it with that in mind. Oh, that I would be that clever. But we did write it, like everything we did, the best we possibly could. We worked our arses off. Every detail counted.”
Rowland and his collaborators bucked the prevailing trend at the time by spurning synthesizers in favor of a slew of back-porch instruments like fiddles, banjo and accordion. With sure-handed 80’s hitmakers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley at the producing helm, the end result was a song with more hooks per capita than anything short of “Billie Jean,” even as Rowland’s heartsick vocal added a touch of melancholy to the uplift of the instruments.
The song’s lyrics, at surface level, may seem to be nothing more than the narrator’s amorous plea to Eileen, one that gets downright spicy at times: “You in that dress/My thoughts I confess/Verge on dirty.” Yet “Come On Eileen” spins off from that basic concept to articulate the youthful urge for separation from an older generation hoping to indoctrinate these youngsters into their tired society.
Rowland name-checks weepy 50’s crooner Johnnie Ray at the beginning of the song to symbolize the kind of sorrow that hangs over the entire scene he wishes to escape. “These people ‘round here,” he sings, “Wear beaten-down eyes sunk in smoke-dried faces/So resigned to what their fate is.” He promises Eileen that their fate will be different: “No not us/We are far too young and clever.”
By the time the bridge rolls around, with what seems like a whole gang of Runners imploring Eileen from all angles in swooning countermelodies, you are completely caught up in the song’s energy. In the end, nothing sums up Rowland’s argument as well as his wordless cry of independence: “Too-ra-loo-ra, Too-ra-loo-ra, aye.”
Even though Dexys Midnight Runners imploded not long after this colossal #1 hit, the song itself still looms large. There’s nothing wrong with having just one hit when it’s a hit as memorable as “Come On Eileen.” “And you’ll hum this tune forever,” Kevin Rowland promised. You can call that line foresight or just plain youthful arrogance, but you can’t deny its accuracy”.
Come on Eileen is one of those songs that has been shared through the generations. You can play it and, by the time the chorus hits, everyone is singing along! It is an undeniable classic. Stereogum wrote about how Kevin Rowland’s band were not hugely successful to start out with:
“The first few records from the new Dexys lineup weren’t terribly successful, but then Rowland heard demos of some Blue Ox Babes songs. Rowland loved the way Blue Ox Babes combined Celtic strings with uptempo soul beats, and he basically decided to steal this style for Dexys. Rowland tried to get all the horn players to learn to play strings. When that didn’t work out, Rowland recruited violinist Helen Bevington, a music school student, from the Blue Ox Babes. Rowland got Bevington to change her name to Helen O’Hara, since it sounded more Irish, and he convinced her to bring in a few more string players from her music school.
This lineup of Dexys Midnight Runners didn’t last long, either, but Rowland kept it together long enough for Dexys to record Too-Rye-Ay, their second album. While working on the new album, he assigned the band a whole new look: Those grimy and patched-together overalls from the “Come On Eileen” video. Rowland co-wrote “Come On Eileen” with band members Jim Patterson and Kevin Adams, though he later admitted that he’d stolen the basic sound from his ex-bandmate Kevin Archer. Rowland was very much trying to make a hit when he came up with “Come On Eileen”; Dexys needed one badly. They got it.
I don’t think I’d ever really given the “Come On Eileen” lyrics much thought before sitting down to write this piece, but there’s a lot going on in the song. Rowland wrote those lyrics about getting into a sexual relationship with a friend when he was in his teens. Catholic guilt hangs over the song; Rowland tells the girl that his thoughts “verge on dirty” when he looks at her. He gets majestically sentimental about his parents and their music. He thinks of their mothers listening to “poor old Johnny Ray,” the dependably bummed-out pre-rock American pop idol, and he thinks that they could sing Irish lullabies just like their fathers. But he doesn’t want to end up like his father
Rowland sings about Birmingham’s miners and factory workers with a sort of terror. To him, they’re “beaten down” and “so resigned to what their fate is.” But Rowland dares to imagine something better for himself and Eileen: “We’re far too young and clever.” That’s when “Come On Eileen” becomes a song about sex, one of our most dependable, if short-lived, means of escape. Rowland wants Eileen to “take off everything,” and suddenly the song turns into a giddy chant, speeding up and slowing down tempos recklessly.
“Come On Eileen” takes its intro from “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” an Irish folk song that Thomas Moore (not the saint) wrote in 1808, and its big hook is suspiciously close to the one on “A Man Like Me,” the 1972 single from Jimmy James, a Jamaican singer beloved on the Northern soul scene. (This is another one of those cases where someone probably would’ve been sued if it happened today.) “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and “A Man Like Me” don’t necessarily have much in common with one another, but Rowland draws them together through horny desperation and fired-up intensity and a big clompy-clomp rhythm, and he makes them work.
A big part of the charm of “Come On Eileen” is Rowland’s voice. He’s clearly not the soul singer that he wants to be, but he doesn’t let that stop him. He yelps and wails as hard as he can, and his Northern English honk bulldozes through all the strings and horns around him. When “Come On Eileen” turns into a big mass singalong, it finds a certain drinking-song grandeur. Producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley had already done a lot of work with London ska goons Madness, and both the clean clumsiness of the “Come On Eileen” beat and the gang-shout chorus could’ve come straight from that band. (In the US, Madness’ highest-charting single, 1982’s “Our House,” peaked at #7. It’s a 9.)”.
A song that I really love and have so much time for, it is a chart-topper that has lifted people for almost four decades. I wanted to know a little more about the track. The band, now trading as Dexys, released Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul in 2016 (an album of interpretations of Irish songs and other select compositions). Both their 1980 debut, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, and 1982’s Too-Rye-Ay are stunning albums. The latter’s Come on Eileen is a stone-cold classic that is...
IMPOSSIBLE to dislike.