"Dance Stance" is the first single by Dexys Midnight Runners

Dexys Midnight Runners

Dexys Midnight Runners are a British pop group with soul influences, who achieved their major success in the early to mid 1980s. They are best known for their songs "Come On Eileen" and "Geno", both of which went No. 1 on the UK Singles Chart....

. It reached #40 on the UK Singles Chart in early 1980.

The song references a range of Irish playwrights and writers including Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan

Brendan Francis Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both Irish and English. He was also an Irish republican and a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army.-Early life:...

, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...

, Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

, Edna O’Brien and Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...

.

The angry delivery of the lyrics reflect the punk sensibility of the time, although the style of the music is more the soul/Northern soul style from which the band's name is derived (the name is a reference to drug-fueled dancing in the all-nighters which were a feature of the Northern soul

Northern soul

Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged from the British mod scene, initially in northern England in the late 1960s. Northern soul mainly consists of a particular style of black American soul music based on the heavy beat and fast tempo of the mid-1960s Tamla Motown sound...

 scene).

Dance Stance was performed by Kevin Rowland

Kevin Rowland

Kevin Rowland is an English singer-songwriter and former frontman for the pop band Dexys Midnight Runners, which had several hits in the early 1980s, the most notable being "Geno" and "Come On Eileen".-Career:...

 (vocals, guitar), Kevin "Al" Archer (vocals, guitar), "Big" Jim Paterson (trombone), Geoff "JB" Blythe (saxophone), Steve "Babyface" Spooner (alto saxophone), Pete Saunders (keyboard), Pete Williams (bass) and Bobby "Jnr" Ward (drums).

A re-recorded version appeared on the band's debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels is the first album by Dexys Midnight Runners, released in July 1980 .The album was ranked 98th in a 2005 survey held by British television's Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time...

, under the new title 'Burn It Down'.

The song was released in 1979 on the independent label Oddball Records.