Dexys Midnight Runners

Reformation tours are all to be approached with some trepidation and it’s this trepidation which nearly saw DiS forgo this concert altogether. ‘Gig’ is far too smutty a word to be used with regards the Royal Festival Hall. It has got ‘Royal’ in its name - here, they have ‘ushers’, not ‘bouncers’!

Fortunately, there was no reason to worry. Dexys are BACK, baby, and then some.

Despite a few cries of “GIVE IT SOME WELLY!” it’s a mostly subdued audience. It’s highly unlikely Kevin Rowland leads his band in jogging sessions before rehearsals these days. But these aren’t the young soul rebels anymore; Dexys Midnight Runners have changed with the times yet again (“the world’s changed, so why can’t we?” Rowland enquires, to much applause). It’s been nearly 20 years since they called it a day – not quite as long since Rowland’s solo performance at the Reading festival, but let’s not talk about that. Fortunately tonight, Lucy Morgan is the only one onstage wearing a dress.

OK, so it was a bit of an odd set. Favourites like ‘The Celtic Soul Brothers’, ‘There There My Dear’ and their cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Jackie Wilson Said’ are shunned in favour of the slightly more obscure - when you’ve only got three proper albums to choose from, it doesn’t get that obscure. Time has been kind to Dexys, with ‘This Is What She’s Like’ (from the much-ignored-at-the-time ‘Don’t Stand Me Down’ album) becoming the epic crowd-pleasing show-stealer of the night. ‘Liars A To E’ is a joy and DiS even enjoyed ‘Because Of You’ – not normally a favourite to these ears – while new song ‘My Life In England’ is happy, jaunty pop. Likewise, the pantomime-like banter between Rowland and Pete Williams was great fun and it’s just lovely seeing Lucy Morgan back onstage with them. ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’, however great it still sounds, is played at half the speed as it is on the BBC sessions album and even ‘Geno’ seems a little more plodding than normal, but these are classics that will not die… and it doesn’t seem anybody minds.

The only real glitch of the night comes on the final encore. It would’ve been nice to finish on the high of ‘…What She’s Like’ or even the more obvious ‘Come On Eileen’ (a song normally reserved for your parents to drunkenly dance to at weddings). Instead we get last month’s single, ‘Manhood’; not a bad song per se (rather like it meself despite its cheesiness) but it’s not given the ecstatic reception the band were probably hoping it would’ve done by now, most likely due to its lack of mainstream media support.

By the end though it doesn’t really matter. A few teary eyes are in the house and the bar downstairs becomes buzzing with happy folks jabbering away about the show until kicking-out time. DiS gets the train home and listens to two young men try to chat up a couple of ladies. The young ladies had never heard ’Geno’ or ‘Come On Eileen’, they said to the men, “would we have heard of anything else they did?