On the heels of a year that found them releasing a new album “The Feminine Divine” and embarking upon a successful tour in support of the LP, Dexys are on the cusp of doing it all over again.
This time, however, the new album is a live effort that spotlights the aforementioned studio LP while also offering additional tracks from the band’s extensive discography, including such hits as “Come on Eileen” and “Geno.” And, yes, they’ll be touring behind this one as well, including a stop at Glastonbury.
While the band happily plays songs from their back catalogue, frontman Kevin Rowland has been – and remains – very vocal about his complete and total interest in taking part in nostalgia tours that involve falling back almost exclusively on the old hits.
“It’s all about the new stuff,” Rowland said of the band’s 2023 tour “I mean, we’re happy to play the old stuff, otherwise we wouldn’t play it. But it’s really all about the new stuff. Sometimes fans want to just relive 1980 or 1981 or 1982, and that’s not what we’re about. They don’t get it. But I understand they probably had some great time around then. It was a free time in their lives or whatever, but our job is to keep moving forward. You can’t recreate the past anyway, so why try?
“Even the old ones, the way we’ll be performing them is Dexys, as we are now, performing the old stuff,” Rowland continued. “We’re not trying to recreate 1982. We might change tempo a little bit, or few bits and pieces, lyrics, but we realize that, at the same time, people like those songs and they want to hear them, so we don’t massively change them too much.”
Scheduled for release on May 24th, “The Feminine Divine + Dexys Classics: Live!” was recorded during the band’s 2023 tour and features 19 tracks.
The first half of the LP features the entirety of The Feminine Divine, while the second half offers 10 songs from throughout the band’s back catalogue, including tracks from 1980’s “Searching for the Young Soul Rebels”, 1982’s “Too-Rye-Ay”, 2012’s “One Day I’m Going to Soar”, and 2016’s “Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul”.
The Fat Angel Sings 