0079. Dexys Midnight Runners
Don’t Stand Me Down
This was the third and final album from the eighties-incarnation of Dexys (the version I could get hold of was, however, the 2002 "directors cut" with remastered and, in some cases, renamed tracks - the sleeve of which appears in the "1001 albums you must hear"-book, so my skepticism about their dedication to the project has grown).
Burdened by an increased megalomania in band leader Kevin Rowland they didn't release any singles from the album until after it flopped (and this re-release also of course starts off with the track Kevin Rowland's 13th Time, which I - keeping with the rules of getting as close to the original album as possible - didn't listen to).
But for a guy with such a huge "artistic integrity" hat he doesn't even want to release singles it's pretty wierd that he's off looting other peoples' songs:
The intro of One Of Those Things sounds like Sweet Home Alabama [fact check: apparently it was stolen from Werewolves Of London]. Knowledge Of Beauty also contains some suspiciously familiar chords and it doesn't even stop there, cause somewhere in This Is What She's Like the humming starts to sound a lot like some bars in Come On Eileen.
Probably not their greatest moment and definitely not their greatest songs, this is an album you can do without.
