STATISTICALLY speaking, there’s a high percentage possibility that violinist Helen O’Hara may be the only person in the UK who has never danced to Come On Eileen at a wedding.

“Umm, gosh, I don’t go to many weddings,” she tells me when I ask. “I did go to a wedding a couple of years ago and they asked me, ‘Can we play it?’ And I said, ‘Please don’t.’”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t love the song, though. “It’s an absolute joy. I just felt so proud to have played on the record. It just lifts me every time.”

Today, O’Hara is at home in Greenwich, talking about her pop past and present and the bits in between. She has written a memoir, What’s She Like, named after the Dexys Midnight Runners song that she herself inspired. It’s an exuberant, joyful account of a classical musical student who suddenly finds herself on Top of the Pops.

What’s She Like takes in O’Hara’s time working with Tanita Tikaram and Graham Parker before she walked away from music for more than two decades at the start of the 1990s. But inevitably her relationship with Dexys front man Kevin Rowland –both personal and professional – is at the heart of the book. It is even emblazoned on the cover, in both the image used and the name on the spine. Helen O’Hara is, after all, her Dexys name, the one Rowland gave to her.

She was born Helen Bevington in Bristol in 1956. But when Rowland invited her to play with his band as part of a string section given the title the Emerald Express (in reality, the violinist and a couple of her fellow music students) he renamed her O’Hara and claimed she came from Ballymena. Have you ever actually been to Ballymena, Helen? “I have not. I believe it is in the north of Ireland.”

O’Hara began playing the violin when she was nine. After playing in bands in Bristol and studying at the Birmingham School of Music, she made a decision that changed her life. She had been offered a position with the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra in Spain. But she went with her gut and hitched her wagon to Dexys.

At the time Bilbao must have looked the safer option. Dexys may have had a number one single (Geno) in the bag, but they were on their last chance with their record label. There was a lot of tension within the band too. The brass section certainly wasn’t thrilled about the arrival of a string section, as O’Hara found out at the first rehearsal.

“I knocked on the door and entered and there was this full band of blokes who weren’t particularly smiley, put it that way,” she recalls. “And I had to walk to the other side of the room, where Kevin wanted me to stand and play. And the silence … It didn’t feel hugely welcoming.”

As it happened, the brass section would soon be replaced. O’Hara stayed and got to work on Too-Rye-Ay, which would prove a commercial high point, powered, of course, by Come On Eileen. To do so Rowland reinvented the band’s sound with the help of O’Hara and the rest of the Emerald Express.

“What Kevin created was very unique. He asked us to imitate the brass section. Use very little vibrato, play the notes straight and, like the brass, play really hard and finish the phrase. It was these little details – which are actually huge things all combined – that made the Emerald Express quite a unique sound.”

Come On Eileen was the song of the summer of 1982. I was 19 at the time and Too-Rye-Ay became one of the key romantic texts of my student life. Which means this month’s re-release of the album under the title Too-Rye-Ay As It Should Have Sounded is a little disconcerting. There never seemed that much wrong with it back then.

The 40th anniversary remix was Rowland’s idea, O’Hara says. “He felt some of the songs were fine. But he felt the overall sound was quite harsh. It was very much an 80s mix I suppose … [the producers] Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley did a brilliant job and Kevin recognises that. But when Kevin said to the record company in 1982, ‘Do you think we could remix it a bit?’ They said, ‘No, there’s no more money.’ And it’s just been bugging him ever since.”

There’s a question I have to ask about Rowland, Helen. The one you’re always asked. What’s he like? She laughs. “He’s a genius, isn’t he? Kevin has extremely high standards and sometimes he’s unfairly criticised for being difficult and I think that is very unfair. I think having high standards is something to be admired. What people don’t realise is he’s got an incredible sense of humour.”

For a while they were an item. Rowland first told her he had feelings while on a walk when the band were on tour in Ireland late in 1982.

“I wasn’t expecting it. And it was just so bizarre, especially when you’re on tour,” O’Hara recalls. “And I didn’t have any friends I could contact either, because all my friends had gone different ways after college and we didn’t have mobile phones and emails then. You couldn’t phone up a mate and say, ‘What do you think? I’ve just been propositioned by the lead singer.’

“And I certainly couldn’t talk to any of the band about it, so I had to work it out myself. But what I did was just go with my gut feeling. It was a bit of a surprise, but give it a go.”

What followed were a heady couple of years in which life and work fused. “It was incredibly intense because he was fully switched on creatively and I just felt I was constantly responding to that.” The result was an album, Don’t Stand Me Down, most notable for the 12-minute epic, This Is What She’s Like, written by Rowland about O’Hara. The album’s recording process outlasted the relationship.

“I do look back and think that was pretty amazing from both of us. The music came first. Kevin and I do share lots of similar traits and one of them is our way we can concentrate and focus on what needs to be focused on and put other things to the side and that’s exactly what we did. It was a really difficult time and I’m sure it was tough for him as well, but it kind of worked out.”

“Don’t Stand Me Down was astonishing, but like nothing else around in 1985. Maybe that was why it struggled to find an audience at the time. It was very disappointing. We knew it was maybe going to be a challenge. Now I think of what was in the charts at the time … Phil Collins, Madonna and everything. This Is What’s She’s Like must have been quite extraordinary for a lot of people. It did get a bit of a knocking from some.”

Burnt by the response, Dexys began to wind down. After recording a solo instrumental album, Romanza, O’Hara was approached to work with a new 18-year-old singer called Tanita Tikaram. “I feel very privileged to have met Tanita literally at the beginning of her career,” O’Hara says. “And she was and still is a really lovely person to work with.”

In 1991, O’Hara walked away from music. She wouldn’t return for 23 years. In the interim, life happened. O’Hara got married and had two children. Rowland, meanwhile, struggled with addiction and depression. But in 2012 Dexys returned with a new album, One Day I’m Going To Soar.

It was seeing her former band perform again that prompted O’Hara to pick up her violin once more in 2014. Playing again, she says, was both exhilarating and nerve-wracking. “It was a lot of hard work getting the muscle memory back and the confidence as well.”

And now here we are in 2022. The memoir is in shops, the remix of Too-Rye-Ay is ready for release and O’Hara, as well as working with Charlatans front man Tim Burgess, has been reunited with Rowland.

You may have noticed. Dexys played Come On Eileen in front of a TV audience of millions at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony in the summer. “I just couldn’t stop smiling,” O’Hara says, “because the moment we were up on that stage … It sounds very hippyish … I just felt this love and this warmth for Dexys, for Birmingham, for life.”

Helen O’Hara has come home to music. Ring out the bells.

What’s She Like by Helen O’Hara, Route, £20. Too-Rye-Ay As It Should Have Sounded is released on October 14