I loved Dexy's Midnight Runners' debut album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels with a passion on its release back in 1980. Can vividly remember blasting it out of the sound system in Tony's car on the streets of Blackpool on a visit to Stotty's parents' place in August of that year. I had it on vinyl, but I presume we had acquired a cassette tape for the car. It was the horn sound more than anything else that did it for me. A sort of mixture of Northern Soul smoothness and depth with the punch of ska. But I had no idea at all what lead singer & writer Kevin Rowland was all about. I liked the oddly mangled vocals for their obvious passion, but the guy struck me as a bit of a plonker to be honest. And that impression was broadly confirmed by Dexy's subsequent career. Didn't like the second version of the band with the violins, thinking it a bit of a tragedy that the horns had gone.
Fast forward some forty-five years or so, and there I was today listening to an older and obviously wiser Mr Rowland being interviewed for a podcast by James O'Brien. It's a great interview, sounding like an honest, relaxed chat between the two, and is genuinely informative. And it's left me understanding that the younger version of me could be a bit narrow at times in his appreciation of what other young people with a lot more talent were up to, and the pressures that a number of them were dealing with, of which I was fortunately free.
Having had a good listen I played Geno in celebration of our misspent youths, sort of wishing I'd created something a quarter as good in my own.
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