Dance Stance

Dance Stance was the first Dexys Midnight Runners single. Rowland wrote it, and Bernard Rhodes, who signed the band, produced it and released it on his Oddball label, distributed by EMI. It reached number 40 in the UK in early 1980. Sounds named it single of the week.

Rowland's original title was Burn It Down, and Rhodes suggested the change to something less inflammatory. The lyric answers the anti-Irish feeling of the time, in the middle of the Troubles, and names Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O'Neill, Edna O'Brien and Laurence Sterne. Rowland said he had a biography of Behan that listed great Irish writers and he put the names in, and that he was not claiming to have read them. On the single his name was given as Carlo Rolan.

The players were Rowland, Al Archer, Pete Williams, Geoff Blythe, Jim Paterson, Steve Spooner, Pete Saunders and Bobby Ward. EMI and Rowland thought the production held the record back, and the band dropped Rhodes and signed to EMI. A re-recorded version under the original title opens Searching for the Young Soul Rebels at 4:21. Pitchfork's Tom Ewing wrote that it sets out the band's stall as a brawling kind of soul with a thick, brass-driven sound.