Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners

About

“Come On Eileen” is the fourth single and final track of DMR’s 1982 album Too-Rye-Ay. In the UK, the band was already well-established with their 1980 chart-topping “Geno” along with three more top 40 hits, and “Geno” had reached #2 in Ireland as well. But this song not only topped the charts in Ireland and the UK (where it became the biggest selling single of the year), but also was their first to be released in the US and it reached #1 there too in the spring of 1983. While the group had continued success in the UK & Ireland, they did not reach the top 40 again in the US, making them a one-hit wonder there. The song rides a wave of working class nostalgia and youthful pride, with the narrator trying to convince the titular Eileen that by pulling together and embracing music and sex they’ll break out of their crushing hometown and the chains put on them by their parents and the poor economy of the time. In effect, it’s the Celtic soul iteration of “Born to Run”. Kevin Rowland told Melody Maker: It’s about somebody I grew up with. It’s absolutely true all the way. I was about 14 or 15 and sex came into it and our relationship had always been so clean. It seemed at the time to get dirty and that’s what it’s about. I was really trying to capture that atmosphere. Musically, the group was inspired by songs like Tom Jones “It’s Not Unusual” with a ‘bomp ba bomp’ rhythm. Originally the song was written about vocalists that inspired Rowland, but one day he told the producer he wanted to change the topic: We recorded it as “James, Van and Me” – James Brown, Van Morrison, and Kevin Rowland. That was the original chorus, singing about people who influenced him to write the song – like he mentions Johnny Ray. And then Kevin Rowland came in one day and said, “I want to change the lyric completely, it’s a working lyric.”