Don't Stand Me Down
| Don't Stand Me Down | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||
| Studio album by Dexys Midnight Runners | ||||
| Released | September 1985 | |||
| Recorded | 1984–85 | |||
| Genre | New wave, blue-eyed soul | |||
| Length | 46:28 | |||
| Label | Mercury | |||
| Producer | Billy Adams Helen O'Hara Kevin Rowland Alan Winstanley |
|||
| Dexys Midnight Runners chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Alternative cover | ||||
The 2002 "Director's Cut" reissue
|
||||
| Singles from Don't Stand Me Down | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Encyclopedia of Popular Music | |
Don't Stand Me Down is the third studio album by Dexys Midnight Runners, released in September 1985.
The album was released three years after their second album, the internationally successful Too-Rye-Ay. At the time, Dexys' lineup had been pared down from ten members to just four: vocalist/guitarist Kevin Rowland, guitarist Billy Adams, violinist Helen O'Hara, and saxophonist Nick Gatfield, the last of whom left the band after the recording sessions were completed. These four members are pictured on the original album cover in suits (and, for the men, ties), in what Rowland referred to as an "Ivy League" or "Brooks Brothers" look.
Because the band was only four, a number of performers and session musicians filled the other roles during the lengthy recording sessions, including Vincent Crane (ex-Atomic Rooster) on piano, Julian Littman on mandolin, Tim Dancy (who had been Al Green's drummer) on drums, Tommy Evans on steel guitar, and former Dexys members "Big" Jim Paterson on trombone, John "Rhino" Edwards on bass, and Robert Noble on organ and synthesizer.
In an interview with HitQuarters, saxophonist Gatfield described the recording as a "long drawn out painful process". Gatfield, who did not play on Too-Rye-Ay, felt that the new album marked a telling and troubling shift from it, as unlike that record, which he claimed was made very inexpensively and "had an energy about it", Don't Stand Me Down cost a huge amount of money and, according to Gatfield, "felt uncomfortable and unnatural".
O'Hara expressed a different perspective in a newspaper interview accompanying the reissue of the album. O'Hara, who had been part of the Too-Rye-Ay band, said that "it became clear that Kevin wanted to experiment more musically" than the record company was comfortable with, and that, even before the album was released, "it was obvious that nobody was really going to promote it." To her, the best thing about Don't Stand Me Down was "that it got released at all", but the lack of commercial success was "quite hard to deal with, particularly for Kevin."
On the original issue, just Alan Winstanley and Rowland were credited as producers, but Adams and O'Hara were added as co-producers in 1997, when the CD was reissued on Creation Records; at the same time, the titles to two of the songs were changed.
...
Wikipedia