From rehearsals in a warehouse to battles with record companies, lineup changes, and an attempt to write the new Bohemian Rhapsody, the singer and his long-serving trombonist share the stories behind the hits

Tell Me When My Light Turns Green (1980)

Kevin Rowland (vocals) One of the very few old songs we play now. This was a Dexys song before Dexys even existed. I was in this punk band called the Killjoys, who weren’t very good. I already had an idea to form a big soul band with a brass section. When Kevin Archer joined the Killjoys in Spring 1978, I played him a few songs and when it came to this one he just went, “That’s soul, that is.” I said, “Ah, that’s really good then, because this band isn’t gonna go for ever and when it’s over I’m gonna form this new band, doing soul.” Shortly after that, we had a gig to play the Nashville in London, a big gig in those days. One of the members phoned up and said: “Three of us are not doing it and what’s more we’re leaving the band.” For a couple of weeks I was devastated. I’d hired a van and everything. Then I thought: “Fucking hell, this is the time to form the new band.”

“Big” Jim Paterson (trombone) Joining Dexys was a fluke. I happened to read Melody Maker one Friday and there was an advert for a trombone and trumpet player. I phoned up when I was a bit drunk, but Kevin phoned me back on the Saturday. I went for an audition and got the job. In the space of two weeks I went from being unemployed and not caring about anything to being in a very special band.

KR I wrote the lyrics – “Seen quite a bit in my 23 years/ I’ve been manic depressive and I’ve spat a few tears/ I’ve been spat on and shat on made to eat soap” – when I was 23 and by the time it came out I was 26. Growing up in Birmingham as the son of Irish immigrants, I must have felt really frustrated when I wrote that. Like most of the lyrics, I’m in it when I write. I write these things because I have to.

Dance Stance, AKA Burn It Down (1979)

KR Anyone joining Dexys had to give up their job and rehearse all day long. We were on the dole for two years: that was our student grant. We had nothing to lose and felt that what we were doing was everything. In the early days we’d break into places to rehearse. I remember going into a furniture warehouse with a 30-foot drop at the back. The coppers were banging on the door and we shouted: “We’re claiming squatters’ rights.” They’d go: “Not in fucking Birmingham you’re not.” They threatened to send the dogs in and Jim shouted at them …

JP “Can the dogs jump 30 feet?”

KR This song dates from that period. We’d signed to Bernard Rhodes [the Clash’s manager] who licensed us to EMI and it was our first time in the studio. The performance was great, so I kept ringing Bernard asking when it was coming out. He said: “At exactly the right time for your career.” Bernard had suggested changing the title from Burn It Down to the less inflammatory Dance Stance and was telling us that EMI loved it and I went along with that, stupidly. Then I met the guy from EMI, who said, “I don’t like the production.” Nor did I. The only one who liked it was Bernard. So I thought: “I can’t work with this guy,” and we signed direct to EMI. We learned that early on, that the wrong producer can totally screw your record up. You’ve got to watch them. I was sick of hearing anti-Irish prejudice all the time from really thick people and the lyrics just spilled out of me. I had this biography of Brendan Behan and on the back it said: “Some say Behan has the potency of Oscar Wilde …” and listed all these other great writers: Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw and so on. I’d heard of them – that was all – but thought: “I’ll put them in!” I don’t think I was ever claiming to have actually read them. I was saying: “If Irish people are so thick, how come they’ve produced all these great writers?” When we did the album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, we changed it back to Burn It Down. I’ve read those writers now.

Geno (1980)

KR The lyrics are all true. I saw Geno Washington in 68 at the Railway Hotel in Harrow. I was 15 years old and out with all the older kids – you had to be 18 to get in – short-haired, cool-looking mods-turning-into-skinhead types. Looking back, it’s probably not the best gig I’ve ever been to, but I didn’t have anything to compare it to. I didn’t have any intention to be a singer at that point. I just thought you go to school, go to work and that’s it. But when he came on swinging a towel, something clicked in me. We recorded it with Pete Wingfield, who was a very good producer. The “Geno! Geno!” chant at the beginning is all us, multi-tracked. We used brass like a heavy rock band would use a guitar: set it up really loud. However, when Pete mixed it in the studio, the brass sounded really ordinary. I told him that but he wasn’t listening. Eventually he agreed to do two different mixes but said: “Well, I wash my hands of it.” I told the record company they had to use the second mix but the guy almost shouted at me. I didn’t hear anything more until I got a phone call from the product manager. It turned out there’d been a problem with the test pressing and he couldn’t get hold of the record company guy or the producer. “So would you mind coming down to London to remaster it?” It was an amazing twist of fate. When the record company guy came back off holiday he went: “I’ve heard the single on the radio. You used the other mix! It sounds fucking shit.” It spent two weeks at No 1. He never mentioned it again.

There, There My Dear (1980)

KR We’d become very successful very quickly. I remember walking down the high street and girls were coming out of the clothes shop and screaming at me. I thought: “This is amazing.” But you can’t turn it off. I thought that proving myself would make me happy, but I still wasn’t and that was a fucking shock. A very uncomfortable feeling. Now what do I do? I started to get incredibly stressed. The whole thing was a pressure.



JP You were carrying everything on your own. Others were helping you, but not enough

KR This reminds me of that period. Like Geno, Kevin Archer had the chords and I showed him the lyrics and didn’t think they’d fit, but he showed me they could. He was brilliant like that. It’s an angry song. In the lyrics, I’m addressing “Robin”, but he was the personification of a certain type of middle-class musician in NME, quoting Kerouac and Burroughs and all these authors I’d never read. I’d never write a song like this now, but people say the charts are full of those people again.

Plan B (1981)

KR By this point, it had stopped being fun. We’d taken on the record company and stolen our own master tapes [to get a better royalties deal] and we took the music press on by putting statements out in adverts in instead of giving interviews, which infuriated them. We took everybody on, really. I take responsibility. I was far too controlling and aggressive. One day, five band members announced they wanted to go their own way, as Dexys, and get a different singer. At first I was relieved. All that stress just went. Then after a couple of days I thought: “Fuck that! It’s my band name!” and started to get another band together around myself, Jim, and Kevin Archer. Then Kevin left, too, because he was disillusioned. I said to Jim: “We need to write,” and he started coming round to my flat.



JP We’d write all night – 16-hour days. We were always hard workers.

KR This is one of the first we wrote together. I think we had the intro first. “You’ve always been searching for something …” I’d met this fan, a really nice girl who came and told me how much that first Dexys album meant to her. I really connected with that, but nothing was ever enough. Although success had left me empty, I’d see these other people on Top of the Pops and think: “Fucking hell …” So after that we went all out to be successful.

Come On Eileen (1982)

KR Around 19 years ago I gave an interview about how I’d stolen Come On Eileen from Kevin Archer. Some of it was true. Most of it was me punishing myself. I was in a dark place and thought it had all been him and I had no talent. What actually happened was … he played me his demos and he was using a combination of a Tamla-style beat with violins, which I thought sounded better than what we were doing. So I nicked that style, and the idea of speeding up and slowing down. I didn’t steal one note, one chord, one melody …



JP That combination isn’t unique anyway. So “stealing” is too strong.

KR I shouldn’t have done it because he was my mate, but for years I signed over half my songwriting to him, so I paid my dues. The song itself came out of a process we used a lot where we’d get a chorus and sing melodies over the top. We’d get a hundred ideas like that and …

JP Five out of a hundred might be any good.

KR For years I told everyone that Eileen was my childhood girlfriend. In fact she was composite, to make a point about Catholic repression. On the Projected Passion Revue tour in 81 there was this girl interviewing us and she was going on about the spiritual nature of this music and I’m thinking to myself: “Right, but that’s not what I’m feeling at this moment …” She was really good looking, and I was reminded of being a teenager, surrounded by Irish Catholic girls you couldn’t touch, but at the same time with these overpowering feelings of lust which you’re not supposed to have. When I played the demo to the record company, they didn’t like it and I was so upset I told them to fuck off. This was before I had any proper lyrics and the chorus went “James, Stan and me”, about James Brown and Stan Morrison, which was our nickname for Van. We’d been outside the Birmingham Odeon in 78 and it said “Van Morrison” in lights and some girl said: “Oo is he? Never ’eard of him.” We went: “Oh it’s Stan Morrison. He’s a comedian, they spelt it wrong.”

This Is What She’s Like (1985)

JP No Dexys lineup lasted longer than about a year, because Kevin was always thinking about where to take it next. Once I come offstage, it’s over, but Kevin lives it, 24 hours a day.



KR After the Too-Rye-Ay album I had that itch again: “Start afresh. Form an amazing fucking band.” We regrouped around a nucleus of myself, Billy Adams [guitarist], Helen O’Hara [violinist], Nick Gatfield [sax] and Jim came back after a spell away. This song literally came to me as I was going off to sleep. Those words – “What’s she like? Tell me what’s she like” – and melodies just came. It didn’t sound like anything.

JP It’s not really a pop song, more of a classical piece: three separate symphonies. When we play it live now it can be 22 minutes long.

KR It’s a love song, but it’s got a shitlist in there about the English upper classes. I wouldn’t write that now, but back then I hated them very passionately. The Little Nibble mentioned in the intro was one of the caffs where we held band meetings and is central to Dexys mythology.

JP I never liked the tea.

I Love You (Listen to This) (1985)

KR We’d been to America, doing interviews all day long, meeting the record company – and you’re supposed to do a gig after that. It was demeaning. I was dragging the songs out live, trying to find an intensity in them that I never could, and it all seemed a bit empty really. I felt we were compromising. Then I fell in love. I was torn: obsessed with her but not enjoying the band. The opening line – “I was thinking of a compromise when I saw the beauty in your eyes” – just came out. When we made Don’t Stand Me Down [the third Dexys album], I felt that we couldn’t do anything better than that. It took so much out of me, but the record company threw the towel in. I think they wanted to teach me a lesson. I thought this song could be a Bohemian Rhapsody for the 1980s, but when the record company wanted to release it as a single I said no. I was pretty crazy around then, but when the album was a relative failure, I lost myself for a very long time to cocaine and heavy drinking. Several years later, I was in rehab when I read the first of many reappraisals. I’m going to get emotional now. Chris Roberts called the album a masterpiece in a Melody Maker booklet [called Unknown Pleasures]. I showed it to the counsellor and we read it together. It was really touching and lifted my spirits. It felt great to be understood.



It’s OK, John Joe (2012)

JP When Kevin reconvened Dexys, my trombone was in the loft. I hadn’t played for 16 years. I’d stopped drinking and lost the will to play. Then Kevin phoned me. Getting back onstage without drinking was a big thing. But here I am.



KR When we did some shows in 2003, I remember thinking: “What next?” We weren’t ready to make an album, but were writing songs and talking about ideas. I’d met this girl called Johanna in Sweden and she emailed me, asking: “Do you believe in love?” I replied: “I do believe in love, Johanna. I don’t know anything about it. I know about depending on people …” And then when I read it back, I thought you could put that to music. I’d been working with this guy called Ben Brierley with a view to writing songs for other people. He came up with that riff, and that was it, really. When we recorded it with Jim on trombone, I changed the name to John Joe. It’s personal, but the song changed, and I became someone singing it to someone else. That line: “It’s not the end of the world because I’m meant to be alone,” is how I felt at the time. I never rewrite lyrics that come from a very deep place. All the songs on that last album are the truth.

Nowhere Is Home (2012)

KR Instead of “Nowhere is home to me” I originally sang, “Can’t be myself with you.” Sometimes you just get an idea, and a deeper meaning suggests itself. I don’t regret changing it. It’s better. I’m really happy with this lyric. It’s a song about rootlessness. Irish nationalism – and I did get into that with Don’t Stand Me Down – is a dead end, really. I used to think, “I’m Irish, that’s my cause,” or, “I’m working class, that’s my tribe” but that kind of identity is not enough. It’s too restrictive, not the real you. It’s a badge, a set of clothes. That line, “Take your Irish stereotype and stick it up your arse,” is me talking to the Irish who embrace that stereotype. Now, I don’t know what my identity is.

JP I’m a trombone player in a group called Dexys. I’ve been extremely lucky to be successful and that’s it. There’s nothing more to say.

KR He never sees himself as a songwriter. What about all those great songs you’ve written, Jim?

JP I think lyrics are the most important thing

KR I think music is most important thing.

JP So where are we going next?

KR The caff.

Dexys’ live film Nowhere Is Home is released on DVD on 20 October