Who remembers what turned them on to rock 'n' moment, what record—stranger Still Why? Admitted I have friends who can reel off the first six singles they ever bought (and some of them have to think 20 years back), but why we went on to ghettoize ourselves as Presley fans, or British beat maniacs, or—like me—arrogant soul fanatics, is harder to recall. Easier are the moments when music was reaffirmed to us.

For me it was the time in the late 60’s when the Four Tops played the Albert Hall and it was hard to draw breath for the whiplash emotional response to “Bernadette,” '‘Seven Rooms Of Gloom” and the ubiquitous “Reach Out.”

For Dexy’s Midnight Runners it was, it appears, the night they fell into a club and saw Geno Washington anc^ the Rarq Jam Band, expatriate-formed straight out of a USAF base: “Back in '68 in a sweaty club/Before Jimmy’s machine and the rocksteady rub/That man took the stage with his towel swingin’ high/This man was my bombers, my dexys, my high.”

For me it was the night Ben E. King stashed his speakers unsteadily on the arm of a club couch, overcame with a smile the ineffectuality of a scratch white back-up band trying to make sweet souL sounds, and made a pure alcohol rub of “Stand By Me.” '

Dexy’s addiction had that necessary naive superiority that came at Washington’s feet: “The crowd they all hailed you/They chanted your name/ Ah but they never knew like we knew/Me and you we’re the same.”

Having that,kind of love affair with the music meant you fought under separate colors. Ecstatic emotional commitment, untampered by an inevitable forthcoming cynicism, could be / put down to the times: the time that rock ’n’ roll seemed innocent, made—or so we liked to believe—by lovers, put out on record by lovers who hocked their father’s car to get the cash tqgether for the pressing. Workers like Berry Gordy, Jr. who came off the assembly line and risked all for love. Such quasi-religious, pseudosexual commitment was so intense that you’d fight with non-believers, sneer at their music and refuse to believe that what they received through their speakers bore any relation to the experience of soul music. Body and soul you danced, sweat and desperation from lyric and music alike that made you a wrecked/happy emotional masochist.

Searching For The Young Soul Rebels has brought Dexy’s Midnight Runners from relative obscurity in Birmirigham to the top of the British album charts in less than three weeks. Like the punks and skins, who kept their collection of early ska and manifested themselves as the Specials, the Beat, the Selecter (all of whom incidently are

finding the rigors of a fast bum to success now turning into survival problems), so Dexy’s polished their originals of U.S. soul and the British counterparts. Eight strong and boasting— ironically—an original Ram Jam Band member in their horn section, Dexy’s have emerged as a sharp if not wholly satisfying amalgam of punk, beat generation and Stax. The result to a co-conspirator of soul power is .nostalgic, subversive, annoying, amusing and occasionally really successful.

Among other things punk stopped once and for all the fashion for British musicians to sing in a mid-Atlantic drawl. So Dexy’s, molding in their name alone a Mod’s favorite drug (a speedy little tab known as Dexedrine) and Wilson Pickett’s most familiar song, sing their new brand of soul “the new soul vision” with the arrogant flat punk voice:

“I was too weak to foight” they now pound out in homage tt> the Tops’ “Seven Rooms Of Gloom” and called “Seven Days Too Long.” What takes getting used to is Dexy’s use of overt homage to original soul influences of that and the climactic “I Couldn’t Help If I Tried” with an anti-soiil tradition (the weak over-casual voice). Musically hours of fun can be obtained by the soul cognoscenti in recognizing deliberately plagiarized old riffs at the start of numbers: Pickett’s “Midnight Hour” on “Burn It Down”; Qtis’ “I’ve Been Loving You Tpo Long” on “I Couldn’t Help It”; “Keep On Running” and “Bread And Butter” on the falsetto speed of “Thankfully Not Living In Yorkshire Doesn’t Apply” (not a word of which is available to the naked eardrum).

Yet the whole point of soul music’s effect on a listener was its clues: the intro was always the first taste of the melody line, it dropped down to a verse that was part of a thematic whole—that set the scene, that provided the singer’s monologue against the backing, and it was left to the middle break to start to build the necessary finale. Now Dexy’s interject a contemporary idrom against that familiar brass structure and the results are anti-education. Where once soul was by implication political because its concentration on enjoyment—“leisure”—and the drama of wrongdoings in relationships reflected the only areas of relief and power to blacks. Dexy’s present romantic imagery as though it were anti-, romantic and without the necessary passion to recall the sense of original involvement. Such experimentation leads to a deliberate distancing between audience and musician, the molding of the nostalgic sound with the contemporary white boys experience, with a, bit of intellectual reference (all white) thrown in for good measure.

In a way Dexy’s music, while paying homage to soul is really soul music about alienation. As though David Byrne was using Wilson Pickett’s back-up band. Like Secret Affair’s Ian Page who sold an identity for the new Mods by recalling the sociological reasons why Mods had existed in the first place, so Dexy’s recall the reason for soul’s success among the white British boys. There were never really any soul girls. Like Mod girls they were always there because of the soul and mod boys. I got hooked absolutely not in the clubs (where the movement manifested itself) so much as on the record player as part of the job I had. Tussling with 90 singles a week, writing to spread the word -to those who didn’t know how Aretha and Sam Cooke and Gladys Knight, Irma Franklin, Kitty Lester, Joe Tex and Ben E. King, Jerry Butler and A1 Wilson could well change their lives. Trying, from isolation, to pass on those lonely shivers and heart leaps.

Yet I never met another woman who was' in love with soul the way 1 was, and now, some 15 years on, I only know one.

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The week I’m writing this there are four sou| records in your Top 20 singles chart, two in ours, and Dexy’s—still the only exponent of the new soul, couldn’t be said to have started a full scale revival in the same way ska did. Yet,'maybe like the best kind of homage, what Searching For The Young Soul Rebels does is send you rifling around for those originals to rekindle that old feeling, re-tap those strange and mysterious ties.