The popular (American) perception of Dexys Midnight Runners reads a little like a Spinal Tap-esque parody: “strange British soul-punk band implodes after first chart-topping hit due to frontman’s mandate forcing members to exclusively wear dungarees; disappears into ether, never to be seen again.” Mention them to any non-Brit, and the response is a guaranteed “Who? The ‘80s one-hit-wonder group who did ‘Come On Eileen’ and dressed like farmhands? What about them?” This misframing of the group within the American consciousness is nothing short of tragic—just one of these days, I want to reference Dexys Midnight Runners and receive a knowing nod instead, an “Oh, of course, the band responsible for one of the greatest debut records in U.K. history.” But they say to be the change you wish to see in the world, so it seems the responsibility falls upon me to enlighten the masses.
45 years ago, the first iteration of Dexys Midnight Runners (Dexys Mark I, as they’re called in the band’s extensive lore) released Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, an exuberantly sincere and wholly inimitable album that remains one of a kind to this day. Northern soul in sound yet punk in affect, Young Soul Rebels is at once a lightning-in-the-bottle encapsulation of its time and place—early-’80s Britain post-punk at its most raw—and an utterly prescient record even four-score-and-five-years down the line.
I.
Searching for the Young Soul Rebels exists in that strange turn-of-the-decade no-man’s-land between a rock (the dying anarchic punk of the 70s) and a hard place (the burgeoning glittery pop of the New Romantics in the 80s). But unlike other records created in that same gap, its bridging of sound feels less like a desperate maneuver than a hard-won choice. It’s not a band jumping ship as its desired genre sinks beneath the industry waves, but sailing full speed ahead into a strange, uncharted, narrow strait—it’s an album made by a punk-bred musician who just really, really loved soul. And that’s exactly what frontman Kevin Rowland was: He, alongside co-founder Kevin Archer, got his start in the short-lived punk group The Killjoys, but found himself listening to a lot more Geno Washington than Gang of Four. Rowland’s ferocious, all-consuming vision demanded nothing less than perfection from Dexys’ debut, although the form of that perfection seemed to exist only in his mind, much to the consternation of his bandmates. As he himself admitted in a 1980 interview (following the release of Young Soul Rebels and the band’s first large lineup shakeup), “I think I was asking them to perform impossible feats, I wanted the pinnacles of achievement. It was a stupid situation because I’d feel frustrated if they didn’t come up with what I wanted, and they’d feel stupid if they couldn’t get there.”
Under Rowland’s leadership, Dexys Midnight Runners was less a band than a gang—which is, in fact, what Rowland himself frequently billed it. During the band’s first run (from 1979-86), he enforced a grueling rehearsal schedule, mandated peculiar band uniforms (yes, the famous “Come On Eileen,” Too-Rye-Ay-era dungarees—but also, at other points in the band’s history, dockworker donkey jackets, boxing boots and ponytails, and pin-striped suits), forbade drinking, drugs, and dating, and insisted upon an intense group fitness regimen. As a result, the band saw over 24 different members come and go over the years, with Rowland serving as essentially the lone constant. After their third and most experimental album, 1985’s Don’t Stand Me Down, was brutally panned by critics (although it, like Young Soul Rebels has since seen a renaissance), Dexys dissolved entirely, seemingly for good. But the band slowly, carefully began to reform—albeit with a new lineup, as per usual. Despite rumors of their return originating in 2003, it wasn’t until 2011 when the band, which now goes only by Dexys, released a new record: One Day I’m Going to Soar (subsequently followed by 2016’s Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul and 2022’s The Feminine Divine).
Even with all this storied history, though, it’s always been Young Soul Rebels that I return to again and again—and I’m not alone, judging by all the other retrospectives from the past decade or so, all trying (much like I am) to correct the mistakes of the critics that came before. Drowned in Sound, for instance, has called the record “damned near perfect;” Pitchfork dubbed it “the tightest and most consistent Dexys album,” and BBC argued for its place in the pantheon of “the greatest debut albums of all time.”
At the time of its release, however, some critics considered Young Soul Rebels to be the worst of all worlds: too earnest and self-conscious to be punk, too excessive and raw to be pop, too meticulous and ideological to be soul, and overall, simply trying too hard to be something to actually be anything at all. As David Hepworth wrote in a devastating pan for The Face in 1980, “[T]here’s barely one sustained passage where you feel that the musicians have become possessed by a spirit of any more potency than acute self-consciousness and a grim determination to be seen as a purifying force. Certainly that description could pass for ninety per cent of current first albums, but Dexys are supposed to be grafting within the parameters of Sixties soul, where instinct and sensuality are at a premium and glum deliberation is out of place.”
But this strict adherence to genre—to this notion of what a band is and is not supposed to be, arbitrarily decided by perceived affiliations to other sounds and groups—seems, to me, to be the actual limiting parameter here. Hepworth gripes that “[If] Dexys didn’t make so many claims for ‘soul power,’ then you wouldn’t feel so consistently moved to point out how slow they are to share it,” but to be fair, it’s not the tradition of soul that the record declares alignment with, but a new, as-of-yet-nonexistent iteration of it they hope to pioneer. They’re quite explicit about it, really: the album ends with Rowland repeating “Maybe you should welcome the new soul vision” over and over like a mantra, as if in direct response to critiques like Hepworth’s. Arrogant? Possibly. But, crucially, it’s Dexys saying, point-blank, that they never intended to fit within the guidelines of anyone but themselves, to share the vision of anyone but their fearless (and, at times, seemingly quite difficult) leader. And what that “new soul vision” actually is is anyone’s guess—although I certainly have my own.
II.
Dexys, at the time, was a band of internal contradictions. Their incredibly rebellious screeds—the repeated refrain “You know the only way to change things / Is to shoot men who arrange things” on the album closer would probably be enough to get someone arrested in America today—were set to unmitigatedly joyful and painstakingly arranged brass harmonies. They were (or, at least, Rowland was) image-obsessed à la glam rock and boy bands, yet the “image” in question was that of a gang of dockworkers, farmhands, or Brooks Brothers-wearing salesmen, depending on the era. They were embarrassingly earnest, yet dripping in sarcasm. They reveled in the concept of “burning it all down,” yet excruciatingly planned and rehearsed every aspect of every song. They were mainstream enough to get a great deal of radioplay (in the U.K., until the “Come On Eileen” heard ‘round the world), yet counter-culture enough to… lock the doors of the EMI Records studio when producer Pete Wingfield went to grab a cup of joe, then steal the only tapes of the album, gleefully hightail it in a getaway car, and take their own record hostage until the label agreed to raise their pay (a caper that almost ended in disaster, as the band came close to accidentally demagnetizing the tapes—wiping everything—by hauling them through the London Underground). The wide variance in descriptive terms used by critics (even within positive reviews alone) is, perhaps, the clearest example of the band’s contradictory multitudes: Ned Ragget praises Searching for the Young Soul Rebels as “vibrant, alive, and unconcerned with perfection,” yet Tom Ewing’s equally glowing review of the reissue in Pitchfork calls attention to the Rowland’s “ferocious perfectionis[m]” in its very first sentence. Somehow, both feel true at the same time. That’s dialectics, baby.
Take Rowland’s own vocals: he sounds perpetually caught somewhere between a gulp and a sob, he chews words until they’re unrecognizable in his mouth, his delivery is stilted, lilting, and frequently unintelligible, and his every emotion bleeds through each syllable to such a degree even the listener might feel uncomfortable. His “affectations,” as Rolling Stone critic David Fricke derogatorily called it in 1981, were the target of many a critic’s ire back in the day (Fricke, for instance, but Creem’s Mitchell Cohen as well, and let us not forget Hepworth’s brutal pan: “Kevin Rowland’s vocals come from just this side of megalomania, sometimes drawing on reserves of self-pity that seem fathomless…[H]e positively snivels.”) And yet, this now-touchstone of the band’s sound was hardly inevitable or the consequence of Rowland simply having the “misfortune” of being born with that voice; it was very much a calculated decision. In the liner notes on the record’s expanded 30th anniversary reissue (which I highly recommend, as one of my primary gripes with the album is that Dexys’ fantastic, kinetic cover of the Cliff Nobles & Co instrumental track “The Horse” was relegated to a single’s B-side and left off the album’s tracklist), co-founder Kevin Archer writes, “We had to practise hard to get the vocals tight so that our vocal style would sound like no other group.” For better or worse—and as you might have gleaned, I am firmly in the camp of “better”—that is exactly what they did.
Nowhere are these contradictions more vividly expressed than in the songs themselves. Track by track, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is a manifesto written in brass and sweat, equal parts protest, longing, and euphoria. The record’s earnest and occasionally over-the-top belief in itself might feel corny in a world oversaturated with irony—a description as apt today as it was in the late ‘70s Britpunk sphere—but that’s precisely what makes the album so indefatigably endearing. The album opens with forty-or-so seconds of a scratchy radio dial cycling through snippets of Deep Purple, the Sex Pistols, and the Specials (a sampling of Britain’s cultural noise at the moment) before Rowland cuts through with a barked, near-militaristic shout to his bandmates, who reply in turn with the practiced punctuality of a group of recruits—or chefs on The Bear: “Jimmy? (Yeah!) Al? (Yeah!)” A pregnant pause, then Rowland sneers, low: “For God’s sake, burn it down.” The horns kick in. Bam. Is it a little cheesy? Undoubtedly. But so is “Another Brick in the Wall, Part Two” and no one gave Roger Waters shit for it. And not unlike the Pink Floyd track, “Burn It Down” is so genuine, insistent, and confident in itself that it’s hard not to get swept up in its fervor and chant right alongside it.
It doesn’t hurt, either, that the track those early seconds are attached to is a very good one: “Burn It Down,” originally released as the single “Dance Stance” (titled after the classic Northern soul tradition of downing a shit-ton of drugs and dancing till dawn), is not only a riotous fuck-you to the prominent anti-Irish-sentiment at the time—a recurring motif throughout the record, with the album cover being a photo of a young Irish boy fleeing during the Troubles—but also a riot in general. Never has a song fighting against discrimination been so bouncy. The one-two-three punch of the group shout of “Shut it!”, Rowland’s drawled “Shut your fuckin’ mouth ‘til you know the truth,” and that exuberant syncopated followup from the brass section (Jim Paterson on trombone, Jeff Blythe on sax, and Steve Spooner on alto sax—yes, I know saxophone isn’t even a brass instrument, but the effect of the trio is thoroughly brassy, so let me have this) is a borderline sublime experience. And also, it’ll be a cold day in hell when I don’t defend a song that repeatedly boasts about Samuel Beckett in its chorus.
“Burn It Down” soon fades into “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green,” a song so great it convinced even a highly skeptical 15-year-old who didn’t particularly care for “Come On Eileen” to check out the rest of Young Soul Rebels, and then to write a whole essay singing its praises eight years down the road (I am referring, of course, to myself). It’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had listening to a song about the frantic terror of a hopelessness so strong you pray to gods you’re not sure exist for a sign, however small, that your life will mean something. “It’s not that I don’t believe in you / Oh, your work’s all around for me to see,” Rowland wails, then breaks into the titular plea: “Won’t you please help? / Would you please tell me when my light turns green?” And “Keep It,” a late-album entry written by Archer rather than Rowland (whose original lyrics for the song were, somewhat unfortunately, turned into “Love Part One”), builds this same theme into a more ideological denunciation of the politics of playing it safe: “You beg for help and advice, how to handle your life / But you dare not move, you cannot pay the price / Chances slip, you just chatter, flatter, forget what matters.” The staccato bursts from the horn section that punctuate its faster final verse—”You’re scared to scar your pretty face / Safe now cos your head’s in the sand”—feel increasingly like desperate attempts at a society-wide wake up call.
But vibrant, brassy ebullience is far from the only modality Young Soul Rebels operates in. Just as the breakneck uptempo pace and effusive brightness threaten to become one-note, Dexys switches tactics entirely—something they do cleverly throughout the record, never letting you sit in one sound or emotion long enough to grow tired of it, and always reminding you they have more to offer. “I’m Just Looking” is a bizarre, bluesy mourner that begins with about a minute of what is, essentially, the marriage of 1980s blue-eyed soul and the very 21st century phenomenon of ASMR YouTubers. Rowland does not sing the first verse so much as breathe it against the mic, the movements of his lips more audible than the words they’re shaped around. The horns come in soon after, and suddenly the song smolders. Down-tempo and pathos-ridden, “I’m Just Looking” demonstrates what makes Rowland’s idiosyncratic voice so effective, even as the emotion in it threatens to make the lyrics unintelligible—at one point, the instrumentation cuts off entirely for a single line, forcing listeners to swallow their discomfort and pay sole attention to the near painful display of vulnerability in Rowland’s tone. He positively howls on “Your winning day’s long ago” before quieting slightly into the bruising echo of “Don’t let it show / Pretend you don’t know,” and the viscerality of it lingers well beyond the song’s end. The arrangements more than pull their weight as well, the jubilant horn section from the album’s opening tracks now transformed into something smooth and brooding.
Later track “I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried” functions similarly, serving as a balladic breather between, arguably, the record’s two most buoyant tracks (the sing-along-style Chuck Wood cover, “Seven Days Too Long,” and the irresistibly playful, falsetto-filled oddball “Thankfully Not Living In Yorkshire It Doesn’t Apply,” a standout showing for both the band’s Petes—Williams on bass and Saunders on organ). Rowland downright croons through the verses as the song crescendoes into full-force melodrama so grand it threatens to become wholly unmoored by the second bridge, which devolves briefly into incomprehensible half-babbling half-scatting, before righting itself just in time for the last chorus. Although its more conventional structure and almost over-the-top dramatics make it somewhat less compelling than the tangible emotionality of “I’m Just Looking,” the way the song builds is so excessive (and Rowland’s delivery of that “point-point-point someone” line so inexplicably satisfying) that I can’t help but find myself endeared by it anyways.
And, of course, there’s “Geno,” the band’s first hit—though it failed to make waves in America, it was every bit as big as “Come On Eileen” in the U.K., hitting #1 on the Singles Chart in 1980 and briefly cementing Dexys as a household name (take that, “one-hit-wonder” truthers). Ostensibly a tribute to American soul singer Geno Washington, “Geno” barrels forward with the kind of swagger and bombast that belies just how deeply sentimental the song actually is. Rowland recounts, in his oddly syncopated syntax, sneaking into Washington’s shows as a wide‑eyed teenager, watching him command a room with such raw energy it made his own life feel momentarily larger than it was. It’s a deeply personal story, but the communal joy in the recording—those roaring horns, that crowd‑like chants of “Geno! Geno! Geno!”—makes it feel almost universal, a shared memory of youthful obsession and the thrill of discovering that music could be something you lived for. There’s a reason it became such a crowd-pleaser (Rowland once said they felt it best to play it twice per concert, once at the beginning and once at the end): it feels tailor-made for the stadium. I, as a matter of principal, very rarely hear a song and feel compelled to dance, but for better or for worse, the moment I hear “Geno” I suddenly transform into that one guy who went viral for dancing to Bon Jovi at that Celtics game (a video that, pro tip, syncs up to “Geno” rather impressively if you start playing it exactly 13 seconds into the song!).
The record’s one real miss has got to be the penultimate track, “Love Part One,” a spoken word and smooth sax number that’s a little too close to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s parody of Def poetry for me to defend in good conscience. As deeply as I believe in a musician’s right to be earnest, I’m only human, and as a human who happens to be a woman and a published poet, I have an instinctual fight-or-flight reaction to anything that sounds like it was penned by a scorned 19-year-old boy who goes to open mic night because it’s cheaper than therapy. That being said, something about the last line (or maybe Rowland’s delivery of it) goes extremely hard, and echoes in my head long after the song closes: “Sometimes I almost envy the need, but don’t see the prize.”
III.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of “Love Part One” is that its placement right before the final track breaks up the narrative the record had been so expertly building, especially considering how perfectly it comes to a head by the album’s close. Save for the one cover song, “Seven Days Too Long,” every other song nudges the record in a certain direction, albeit some (“I’m Just Looking,” “Thankfully Not Living In Yorkshire…,” “Keep it”) more than others (“Geno,” “I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried”). We open on the middle-finger-flipping of “Burn It Down,” followed by the existential reckoning with one’s place in society of “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green.” Then comes “I’m Just Looking” with its restrained, husky-voiced fury towards the self-declared people of conscience who are all secretly “looking to win it / And not taking it in,” then Rowland’s autobiographical account of eschewing traditional paths (“flunkin’ and bunkin’ school”) in favor of his idolization of Geno Washington, “the fighter that won.”
“I Couldn’t Help It If I Tried” has Rowland bemoaning the lack of “someone / who thinks like I see.” “Thankfully Not Living in Yorkshire It Doesn’t Apply,” for all its lightheartedness and “ooh-ooh ah-ah”s, spends its runtime reflecting on the feeling of helplessness bred by societal passivity: “I’ve walked around, seen the town with the crowds / With their frowns on their faces and occasional traces of doubt / I’ve walked about, worked it out, pissed about, tried to shout, / No one’s listening.” And finally, we have “Keep It,” which disdains the tendency to choose the comfortable, safe, and normative over the vulnerable, passionate, and real. This entire thematic throughline culminates in “There, There, My Dear”—and as powerful as it is, I can’t help but feel it would be even more so without the detour that is “Love Part One.”
Regardless, there’s a thesis here, and it isn’t a particularly subtle one. Really, it’s almost aggressively conspicuous—and as a critic who notoriously cannot stand when a work hits its audience over the head with its message, writing this essay has made me hyper-aware of how deeply frustrated this level of didacticism perhaps should make me feel. But it doesn’t, and I don’t think that’s the result of sentiment overriding objective critique, either; after all, there would be no sentiment to speak of if I felt, even for a moment, that the album came across as brow-beating as it might sound on paper. Rather, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is couched in such effusive instrumentation, spread across such a variance of songs, and most of all, infused with such sincerity that it never feels as pedantic or instructive as it otherwise could.
This sincerity is, itself, the point—and that, ironically, becomes evident on what is easily the most sarcastic track on the record, “There, There, My Dear.” Written as an address to a fictional pseudo-intellectual (“Robin”) but evidently meant as an open letter to the industry and world at large, the track strips bare the tendency of the masses towards performativity in all aspects of life: from politics (“You’re supposed to be so angry / Why not fight?”) to pants (“You are so anti-fashion, so wear flares / Instead of dressing down all the same”), literature (“Keep quoting Cabaret, Berlin, Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Duchamp, Beauvoir, Kerouac, Kierkegaard, Michael Rennie”) to lifestyle (“You’re always so happy / How the hell? / You’re like a dumb, dumb patriot”). Dexys attack it all in this rollicking final song, with Rowland’s hilariously over-the-top rolled Rs serving as the pièce de résistance and making every address to Robin sound just as faux-pretentious as—to bring us back into Always Sunny territory—Dennis Reynold’s parodically bad “elegant British accent.” From the horn trills and brass hooks to the sustained organ and pulsing bass, “There, There, My Dear” is utterly contagious in its gleeful mockery.
Given everything that’s happening in the song (and there’s a lot, from the instrumentation to the namedrop of the album’s title: “I’ve been searching for the young soul rebels / I’ve been searching everywhere”), it’s easy to miss what is perhaps the record’s most ideology-defining line. Tucked into the back half of the second verse, Rowland rants: “I’d listen to your records / But your logic’s far too lame / And I’d only waste three minutes of my life / With your insincerity.”
And there’s the rub: say what you’d like about Dexys Midnight Runners, about Kevin Rowland, about Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, but their sincerity is perhaps the one thing you cannot call into question. But I think music critics, at times, confuse sincerity with organicism. Take Cohen’s 1981 pan in Creem: “Dexy’s [sic] Midnight Runners want to fuse the spewing rancor of punk with the fluid passion of their treasured soul sources, and are so bleeding self-conscious about the whole thing that they come very close to parody.” In other words, the band is trying so hard to make something that does justice to its influences that it wraps around to feeling like the pinnacle of insincerity: parody. That seems, to me, like a fundamental misunderstanding of not only Dexys’ project, but of the spectrum of sincerity to parody at large. After all, is there anything more sincere than trying too hard?
IV.
There’s a lot about Searching for the New Soul Rebels that still resonates: “There, There, My Dear” is just as brutal a skewering of pretentious posers today as it was upon release, if not even more so—although I might be biased speaking as someone who attended a liberal arts college and frequently wanted to yell “Keep quoting Cabaret, Berlin, Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Duchamp, Beauvoir, Kerouac, Kierkegaard, Michael Rennie / And I don’t believe you really like Frank Sinatra” at a certain archetype of 2025 pseudo-renaissance man. “Tell Me When My Light Turns Green” is just as apt an encapsulation of the desperation and dread of your early twenties as it was when Kevin Rowland penned it, if not even more so—though, again, I might be biased, speaking as a dread-filled 23-year-old staring down the barrel of adulthood who has also, in his words, “seen quite a bit in my 23 years / Been manic-depressive and spat a few tears.” “Geno” is just as much a banger today as it was when it topped the UK charts in 1980—although that might be my own bias once more, since whenever the song comes on, I have to resist the bodily urge to start grooving a la that Celtics dude. And even if these are just personal biases, the fact that I—a very American, very Gen Z woman who typically has little patience for 1980s anthemic pop—feel this passionately about the album at all speaks volumes to its longevity and appeal.
But more than anything else, it’s the sincerity that makes the record feel so crucial even now. To be blunt: I learned the hard way—in high school, in college—that the very worst social sin one could commit was the sin of earnestness. Generation Z, my generation, practically grew up on the internet, our experience of the world forever mediated through the screen of a phone. And, as a result, ironic detachment was all, is all. Sometimes I still hear that old adage about how it’s “better to fail than never try at all,” and I can’t help but bristle at how outdated and inapplicable it feels. In this new world of perpetual visibility, this panopticon-esque side effect of social media that leaves us feeling like we must perform some version of ourselves at all hours of the day, there is something worse than failing: being seen trying.
That’s precisely why the “new soul rebels” Rowland sings of are just as necessary—and just as absent in the mainstream—now as then. So, my guess at what Dexys’ “new soul vision” actually is has less to do with soul music than it does the soul, period: It’s a vision of a world that finally turns away from the safe, comfortable detachment of feigned indifference and stoicism, and moves towards a politics and praxis of passion and sincerity, in all its humiliating vulnerability. At the end of the day, all that matters in life is how you live it, and you don’t have enough time to waste on pretending the world affects you less than it does. Get out and fight, even if you lose. Feel something real and act on it, even if it gives people (to paraphrase the quite mean opening line of Hepworth’s review) no shortage of excuses for snickering at you from behind their hand. Unsurprisingly, Rowland himself put it best: as he said to Smash Hits in 1982, “People will always laugh at Dexys. That’s fine. But I know that what I’m doing is totally honest. I believe in myself. I will pin my soul up on the wall and let people read it. They can laugh, they can cry. It’s up to them, I really don’t mind. But I’m doing it.”
I won’t lie to you and say I’ve been able to internalize his worldview yet; far from it. But that’s why I still turn to Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, eight years after I first encountered it and 45 years after its release: as a reminder to try.
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
