My three weeks with Dexys Midnight Runners!

Quite possibly the longest three weeks of my life.

It was 1984 I think. The venue was Westside Studios in west London where I was working as an assistant engineer. The studio had largely been built on production royalties from the Dexys’ album ’Too-Ray -Ay’ from which the massive hit ‘Come On Eileen’ came.  My bosses, Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley, had produced ‘Too-Ray-Ay, as well as producing Madness, Elvis Costello, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions, Bush and David Bowie.

‘Come On Eileen’ was brilliant, unique and whacky production in every way. It had really unusual arrangements and tempo changes. This was a classic Clive Langer…..he was the brilliant musical guy out the production duo, Alan Winstanley was the stoic engineer who polished up the recordings and turned them into great sounding pop records. Clive was always into unusual, quirky arrangements which explains a lot about how the fantastic Madness records came about. Kevin Rowland, Dexys’ singer, writer and founder, decided he didn’t need Clive’s help in the making of the follow up album to ‘Too-Rye-Ay’ - the titanic ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’. 

Kevin, was not the easiest of chaps to get along with and he seemed to enjoy making life very difficult for all around him - whilst shooting himself in the foot, career wise, at every opportunity. At least in this stage in his career.

By the time Kevin and his clan came to Westside, he’d already worked with, and fired, legendary producers, John Porter, Jimmy Miller and Tom Dowd. Tom Dowd for Christ’s sake?! The man who recorded everyone from The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Meat Loaf, and Eric Clapton to Diana Ross, Ray Charles and Dusty Springfield - I seriously doubt that the man had ever been fired before. Incidentally, the documentary ‘Tom Dowd  and The Language Of Music’ is well worth watching. This guy was a genius.

Prior to the Westside sessions, Kevin had burnt through well over a hundred reels of analogue 24 track 2” tape recording with Tom Dowd - probably over £100k’s worth. Alan had subsequently been wading through the tapes with Kevin in another studio editing songs together from multiple takes of the same songs.  These were often recorded weeks or months apart, leading to some interesting and not entirely pleasant tempo changes and vibes. 

When I saw Alan on the first day of the Dexy’s session at Westside, he already looked very battle weary.  When Kevin walked through the door I instantly saw why. Kevin’s vibe was extremely heavy, he was sullen, humourless, paranoid. He was more cult leader than band leader. His loyal followers, including long suffering members guitarist Billy Adams, Kate O’hara and ‘Big’ Jim Paterson hung on Kevin’s every word and tried to please their leader as best they could. The vibe from all of them was laden with mistrust and fear. I don’t think anyone was particularly safe from being kicked out of the band by Kevin. One roadie was fired during the Westside sessions for making Kevin a bad cup of tea!

Our main task was to ’tidy up’ some of the live takes that Tom Dowd had recorded and Winstanley had edited together. One day Kevin said ‘On this song (can’t remember which one), I like everything but the very first bass note. I just want to replace the first bass note - the rest is perfect’. So, we spent ages matching the sound of the recorded bass part and then my job was to record the first note and drop out of record before the second note. Bearing in mind that this was an uptempo number and the bass was playing a pumping 8th note part, there was very little room between notes - and more importantly, there was no ‘undo’ button in those days! We rehearsed the event a few times and then I went for it. To my great relief, the second note remained intact. 

Kevin listened back to the new first note…and then again….and again. After a long pause, with everyone looking at the leader to see what he thought,  Kevin said…’you know what…..I love the first note now…….but…..I think we need to do the second note now…..it’s not as ‘in the pocket’ as as the first note.’ The ‘pocket’ of the first note was, according to Kevin, ever so slightly ahead of the beat -  and he liked that. 

So. For the next 8 hours or so we continued replacing  - note by painful note - the entire bass track! I don’t remember exactly how many 8th notes there were in this song but it was an absolutely torturous process . The bass player, John Edwards, and I were completely fried at the end of the day because it was so tense in the room and John was being asked to deliberately play ahead of the beat - not an easy task. Inevitably after hours of this I missed a couple of drop outs and erased the next note by mistake. This always caused high drama because Kevin would say, predictably, that the note I’d just lost was one of the best in the song!  The rest of the band, except the bass player, would all agree and look at me as if they wanted to burn me at the stake. At the end of the day, Kevin took home a cassette of what we’d done.

The following day he came in and announced that the bass sounded crap because it was all ahead of the beat! The cult/band all agreed with Kevin as they always did, except the poor bass player. I wanted to throw up. So, then we spent another whole day replacing  - again, note by note - the entire bass line, placing the notes in Kevin’s other favourite ‘pocket’ - just after the kick drum. Why, I hear you ask, did you not just record the whole bass part again rather than note by note? Because that would have been less torturous.

Again Kevin took another cassette home at the end of the day and yep, the next day he said that the bass sounded crap because it was all after the beat!  So, a third day was spent re-doing the bass - note by note obviously - and this time the notes ended up back in the places they were originally - on the beat!

Guitarist, Billy Adams, wasn’t exactly a virtuoso player and he had a very bizarre way of strumming the strings with his right hand. Rather than strum up and down like most guitar players, his downward strums seemed to be aimed inwards towards the strings - the end result was that he broke an extraordinary amount of strings. We could literally record a few bars of guitar and then ’twang!’ a broken string. Then, after the string was replaced, we’d manage to get a few more bars and ‘twang!’. 

However the string breaking wasn’t the worst part of this scenario, it was the tuning up of the new string which was the killer. Kevin wanted the whole band in the room with him to democratically aid with the tuning. Kevin had a theory that you couldn’t just use a guitar tuner like every other guitar player would - oh no. He decided that the guitar tuner was only good for one or two strings. Another two could be tuned to a piano and the last two had to be tuned to a tuning fork. This process could take up to 20/30 minutes. When it was finally agreed that the guitar was in tune, everyone would leave the live room, except Billy. We’d drop him in to record just before the bit where his string broke last and we’d hear ‘chug, chugga, chug chugga, chug chugga, chug, chugga, chug chugga, chug chugga, ’Twang!’. At which point Alan and I would look at each other in disbelief and drop our heads in our hands and try and put ourselves in a coma for the next half an hour.

There was great excitement at one stage because Kevin was flying over a mega respected, old school soul drummer from LA to play on a track or two. I can’t remember exactly which drummer it was but he’d played with Al Green I think. He was arriving on a Sunday and I was supposed to have that day off. I was excited to meet this guy but I decided that for my own sanity I should have a day off. After all, I told myself, ‘I’ll see him on Monday anyway’.

Monday came and back in the studio, I excitedly asked how it went with the drummer and when he was coming in again. The band looked very sheepish. Alan said quietly to me….’Kevin fired him - after about two hours’. 

Rental gear.  A beautiful old Hammond organ was delivered by a music equipment rental company at the beginning of the session and after a while I asked Alan when we were gong to get to hear it. Alan replied ‘we probably won’t, Kevin is only renting it because he doesn’t want any other band using it. He’s been renting it for months’. So Kevin was paying hundreds of pounds a week for an organ he wasn’t going to use. He seemed determined to make ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’ the most expensive album of all time. Weeks after he left, we still had rented vintage Fender Strats that Kevin had hired sitting in a closet that no one had bothered to tell the rental company to pick up!

One day when we were recording a brass part. Kevin was very comically trying to cue the band when to come in because he didn’t like their timing. This involved him waving his arms around like a madman and then yelling ‘NOW!’. It got to a point where the brass players were being pushed to their physical limits and were in danger of splitting a lip or something. Once, after Kevin said - for the umpteenth time - ’no good, do it again’, Alan and I heard through one of the brass microphones a player sigh in despair. Kevin heard it too. He said ‘Wait….did I just hear an unwillingness to do another take from someone?’ The next day trombonist, ’Big’ Jim Paterson, was no longer in the band.

In a complete u-turn from the bands image up to the making of this album, Kevin decided that rather than the ragtag shirtless, denim dungarees look, the image was going to be a bank clerk, double glazing salesman look. Rowland described Dexys' new look as "so clean and simple; it's a much more adult approach now”. So during the three weeks I was in the studio with them, the band would bring in their new ‘stage gear’ to show Kevin and he would either give the items his blessing or not.

Well, finally, after what seemed like a lifetime (and many, many guitar string changes), the sessions were over and Kevin and his followers left. It felt like spring had come. They had far from finished the album though and we still got updates on how the album was going via Alan.

At some point Alan stopped working on the record and the record label - I think it was London Records in the UK - refused to expand the album budget any more after it reached some crazy figure like £700,000. After this Kevin started using his own money. He ended up mixing in the famous Electric Lady studios in NYC.

When mixing was finished, rather than pay the studio bill, Kevin decided to steal the album master tapes from the studio. His brilliant plan involved booking a limo and asking the driver to wait right outside the studio. He then went inside and told the receptionist that he wanted to look at the master tapes because he needed to check something. After being let in to the tape store by an assistant engineer, Kevin grabbed the tape boxes, pushed the assistant out of the way and legged it out of the studio. He rushed past the receptionist into the street with the assistant in hot pursuit. When he reached the limo, he grabbed the door handle to get in only to find it was locked! The limo driver had apparently locked up and popped off to get a coffee. At that very awkward moment for Kevin - a cop happened to trundle around the corner and promptly arrest him. To make matters worse, Kevin was carrying a knife.

Not so long after that debacle, the tapes ended up at the record label’s skyscraper office in Manhattan where there was a serious fire. For many days or even weeks, it wasn’t known if ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’ had survived the fire or not. I have to say that there were some amongst us who couldn’t help thinking that this might be divine retribution for the pain and suffering that was inflicted on many people during the making of this record….like the poor guitar roadie who Kevin made sit in a stuffy, dark, windowless corridor all day waiting for Billy to hand him a guitar with broken strings. At least he was kept busy though.

The album did survive and came out to terrible reviews. It entered the very bottom of the UK charts in the first week, only to plummet out the following week. 

Many months later I was at a cash point in west London and a voice behind me said ‘hello’. The hairs on the back of my neck shot up - I turned around and there he was. Kevin.