Dexys Midnight Runners have announced their new album ‘Love’ with the wistful single ‘My Life In England Pt. 1’ – along with releasing more UK and European tour dates.
The group will join forces for what might be their final album, set to be released on September 4th via Heavenly Recordings. It’s the band’s first record under the name Dexys Midnight Runners since 1985’s ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’. The record has been produced by David Holmes (Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds).
‘Love’ is set to touch on frontman Kevin Rowland‘s life, “from his 2nd generation Irish childhood and family relationships to late-life romance, loss and reconciliation”. Lead single ‘My Life In England Pt. 1’ follows this thread by reworking the band’s original version for their 2003 ‘Let’s Make This Precious’ compilation album.
Rowland explained: “It’s all memories of my own experiences. Pete, that’s my brother. In my book [Bless Me Father], I changed his name to Pat. There’s quite a lot of overlap with the book in this one. We were in England dreaming of America: it was pre-Beatles, so it was Elvis, it was Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay, clothes, all of it was America.
“In the second verse, I’m remembering being in a social club listening to everyone singing Kevin Barry,” he continued, referencing the Wolfe Tones song about the 18-year-old medical student and IRA soldier executed by the British government on November 1920.
He went on to recall “my mum telling me ‘This song’s not allowed in England’. It was daytime, and all the curtains were drawn, everyone drinking, singing an illegal song. I remember thinking, Wow, yes, exciting! My childhood memories, I just wrote them down.
“You can’t really write on behalf of anybody else,” Rowland concluded. “Though I realised later that when I was growing up in north-west London, loads of the kids around there were second generation Irish. All obsessed with being up the front with the best clothes, with dancing to the new records.”
They’ll also embark on an intimate in-store tour, where fans can have the chance to have their vinyls signed and catch the band in stripped-back performances.
“Love”, Dexys Midnight Runners’ latest (and possibly last) album, is a luminous collection of scenes and reckonings. Stories of family and friends, tales from past and present. All drawn from Kevin Rowland’s life, each an individual jewel, threaded together with love.
Songs begun three decades ago sit alongside those written in the last year. A vivid depiction of Rowland’s Irish immigrant childhood; a moving letter to his grandchildren; a wistful moment at the start of a love affair; a pin-perfect portrait of time spent with a dying parent; the difficulties of relationships when you’re older. All deeply personal, all true, all here; the full human span of relationships, family and intimate emotion. The theme of this album — Kevin’s ninth, Dexys’ seventh — gradually emerged as the songs progressed. “I don’t remember when it happened, but I just thought, ‘Hang on, these are all love songs, of different kinds’,” he says. “I knew then: Call it “Love.” These are love songs, but not of the usual pop style.
Not will-she-won’t-she romance, but something more emotional and all-encompassing. Those small moments that illustrate a rollercoaster sweep. “Everyone came at this project with love,” he says. To tell a lifetime of different loves. A love life.”
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