Dexys Midnight Runners

With their violins wailing, pants cuffed to the knees and Northern Soul fetish, Dexy's were sort of a strange crew to be making hit songs in the '80s. You get the big hit "Come On Eileen" here, but Kevin Rowland's brilliant quavering voice also does justice to Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said." The band's unique Celtic soul still sounds great today.

Armed with a folio of hearty Stax/Volt-style tunes and enough pretensions to poetic
spirituality to sink a shipful of Solomon Burkes, singer-writer Kevin Rowland took Dexys
Midnight Runners on a desperate hunt for a mythic tribe of bold new British youth on 1980's
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels. That same anthemic breast-beating and soapbox
arrogance also scuttle the band's second album, Too-Rye-Ay, an otherwise ambi... More >