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Fact #165697

When:

Short story:

Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners enters the UK singles chart.

Full article:

Kevin Rowland (leader of Dexys Midnight Runners) : The idea came to me because I met this beautiful girl in Sweden, Europe. in 1981 who came to see us. She was really into our music, moved by it, so that was one idea.

The reason it was ‘Eileen’ was because there was a song by Squeeze called Labelled With Love that I really liked. It contained the lines, ‘drinks to remember I’m me and myself’, but I thought it was ‘Eileen and myself’. My sister put me right, although I still thought it was a lovely name and wanted to use it.

We were going through a tough period songwise and wanted to do something that really cut through, so myself, Jim Patterson, Billy Adams and Micky Billingham came to the first songwriting session. We used to have regular sessions round my place. We’d get records out for inspiration about rhythms, and Concrete And Clay was the starting point where we got this from. We adapted lots of bits of stuff like we always did and they’d end up very different. So now we had the idea about Eileen and a musical starting point.

When we used to write songs in those days, we’d go into the rehearsal room and get the band to play what we had, usually a chord sequence that we’d play over and over, and put melodies over the top. We often wrote happy feeling songs, then we’d go away with a cassette to work on.

Usually I’d go away and write the lyrics separately. We tried the chorus in every single key and, as we were making the demo, I got the idea to sing the ‘too ra loo ay a’ bit.

As regards using the name Johnny Ray, I wasn’t a fan but the words fitted well. I tend to write ideas down on scraps of paper and use them at different times. The ‘beaten down eyes and sunken smoke dried faces’ was written a year earlier when I lived in Smethwick in Birmingham; loads of factories around there smoking and stuff.

The song was recorded as part of an album produced by Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley at Streetly Studios. Not a particularly happy process because the band was breaking up at the time. We weren’t getting on, so most of the band came back just to do the work as sessions. It was more like a salvage operation, really, to try and get something from our earlier work.
(Source : not known)