In the summer of 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners were a band you would have been hard-pushed to describe as anything other than unique. Their sound was a pugilistic update of classic 60s soul, topped with frontman Kevin Rowland’s extraordinary vocals, impassioned to the point that he permanently sounded on the verge of tears. It was fervent and a little retro, perfect for a musical climate in which mod and ska revivals were already bubbling. But Dexys’ image threw a spanner in the works. “I wore a white 1930s shirt and big baggy light-grey trousers tucked into white football socks just below the knee to give the effect of ‘plus fours’,” writes Rowland of a typical outfit. “I wore pink Mary Jane ballet shoes and my hair swept back, Valentino style.”
Other members appear on stage clad in jodhpurs and satin harem pants. The disparity between how they sound and how they look is so disconcerting, even their manager seems baffled. After a gig supporting the Specials, at which their appearance so enrages the crowd that the band have to be locked in a dressing room (“for our own safety”), they tone things down completely and begin taking to the stage in donkey jackets and mariner-style beanie hats.
Within months, they’re at No 1 with Geno, both one of pop’s great hymns to itself and a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: a moving exploration of the galvanising effect music can have on a young mind that sounded tough enough to guarantee youth club dancefloors were flooded with teenage boys the second its horn riff kicked in. But Rowland is disappointed: he hankers after the days of ballet shoes and harem pants. “As a result of that decision to change our look,” he writes, “I feel we missed the opportunity to become the most culturally significant and coolest group of the 1980s … I’ve tortured myself about it over the years.”
As the reader of Bless Me Father swiftly realises, this is a characteristic response: Rowland really doesn’t appear to have enjoyed being the mastermind of Dexys Midnight Runners at all during their 80s heyday. There were some standard problems: poor management, terrible contracts and intra-band turbulence (someone is always mutinying against Rowland’s autocratic leadership). But there’s also the sense that Rowland was hellbent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The success of the 1982 single Come on Eileen – a transatlantic No 1 – is marred by his belief that he’s stolen its soul-meets-Irish-folk sound from a former Dexys member’s new band. When their ambitious next album, Don’t Stand Me Down, fails commercially, Rowland seems utterly crushed, baffled that the public who happily ta-loo-rye-ayed along to Come on Eileen can’t stomach 12-minute songs replete with spoken-word dialogue, lyrics that explore Anglo-Irish politics and indeed the band’s new clean-cut Ivy League image. He descends into a ruinous cocaine addiction, which is recounted in harrowing detail. By the early 90s, he’s effectively squatting in a bedsit: unable to pay his rent, his landlord has turned off the electricity and gas.
The root of Rowland’s problems appears to lie in his background. The youngest son of an Irish immigrant family, his labourer father seems to have decided he was trouble virtually the minute he was born, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Rowland initially tries to please, but when that fails, sets about living up to the billing. Insecurity plays out as screw-you aggression: compulsively thieving and fighting, he is a regular fixture in the juvenile courts. It makes for a picaresque story, albeit one that you occasionally read in a state of dread – oh God, what’s he going to do next? – and Rowland tells it with an impressive lack of self-pity. Quite the opposite. Before, during and after Dexys’ success, Rowland’s tone is almost self-lacerating, filled with apologies directed at everyone from the girlfriend he gets pregnant, then abandons (he finally meets his daughter in her 30s) to David Bowie (who offers Dexys a support slot, only for Rowland to call him “a poor man’s Bryan Ferry” on stage). “I was,” he offers flatly at one point, “such a dick.”
If anything, the reader could do with hearing more about what Rowland got right: the actual music Dexys released is almost uniformly magnificent, but here it often feels a little overshadowed, drowned out by the ructions surrounding its making, or by the author’s nagging sense of “what if?” But Bless Me Father is still powerful and oddly persuasive. Even as he seems to despair of himself, you wind up rooting for Rowland, never more so than when he conquers his addictions and releases his 1999 comeback album, My Beauty. A collection of cover versions, he promotes it while exploring his “feminine side”, in makeup, dresses and heels. The incredulity and hostility this provokes makes for sobering reading: a useful corrective to the current wave of rosy-hued 90s nostalgia. The album itself was reissued in 2020 to widespread acclaim, part of a fresh, if intermittent, wave of Dexys activity that sober and reflective Rowland seems less minded to find fault with: he ends Bless Me Father as content as you expect he’s ever going to be.
• Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland is published by Ebury Spotlight (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
