The New Cue #304 July 24: Kevin Rowland
"If everybody’s saying you’re fucking crazy, you’re kind of left wondering. All I did was wear a fucking dress!"
Good morning,
In today’s TNC, we welcome back Dexys Midnight Runners’ visionary leader Kevin Rowland. It’s a wide-ranging chat where Kevin talks about the new Dexys album, overcoming cocaine addiction in the early ‘90s, his inability to make the same record twice, the abuse he received for wearing women’s clothing on the sleeve of his 1999 solo album My Beauty, almost giving up on music and much more. It’s an interview that really digs into what it means to be an artist which you don’t have to be a member of the Dexys faithful to enjoy (although if you are, you should really enjoy it). Anyway, that’s enough of our jibber-jabbering, we’ll see all you paying New Cue subscribers on Friday for another shed load of new musical recommendations, albums to blow your mind and more.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Kevin Rowland
Picture: Bruno Murari
The word genius gets bandied around a lot in music, but few artists in the history of British pop can match the vision, passion and uncompromising commitment to the transformative power of music than Kevin Rowland. As leader of Dexys Midnight Runners, he’s made some of the most vital and life-affirming music of the past 40 years. You’re probably familiar with this one…
And this…
But if you’ve not fully invested, Rowland’s back catalogue features a body of songs that will change your life. Check out the third Dexys album, 1985’s Don’t Stand Me Down or 1999’s My Beauty, now rightly regarded among the faithful as something of a masterpiece, and thank us later.
This Friday, Dexys release their sixth studio album, The Feminine Divine, a record that loosely charts Kevin’s own changing attitudes towards women and femininity. Chris spoke to Kevin over Zoom a few weeks ago about the album, his own personal journey, addiction, the history of Dexys and why he is physically incapable of staying still artistically. Much to his late dad’s annoyance…
Hi Kevin, how’s it going?
Hello, Chris. Not bad thanks, man. How are you?
I’m good. Last time I spoke to you was at the Q Awards in 2019 and you said you were done with music. What changed?
I was. I guess it was exhaustion. I was trying to work out yesterday when that changed, and it must have been early 2020. I just thought, ‘I can do music again now...’ For quite a few years, from 2017 to 2019, I just thought, ‘I can’t fucking do this anymore.’ I didn’t want to do it. I tried to do a couple of other things that didn’t really happen. But I got to a point where I had the energy and I felt like I had something that I wanted to say, so that shifted. At the end of 2016, my mum passed on New Year’s Eve. I don’t know if that was the catalyst. We’d had [2016 album] Dexys Do Irish And Country Soul out and I found the whole experience of that really draining and I just thought, ‘Fuck it, I need to get away from this.’ I did some other positive stuff and by 2020 I thought, ‘You know what, I wouldn’t mind actually doing this again…’
Was there a spark or a catalyst that started the process of making this record?
I suppose just living. My experiences in that period. I felt I was moving forward, really. There was no catalyst, it was completely organic. There wasn’t really one thing. It was just like, ‘OK, I wouldn’t mind doing some music now, what songs have we got?’ There was some stuff that Jim [Big Jim Patterson, Dexys’ long-serving trombonist] and I had written and I’d started to write some new ones with Mike [Timothy, keyboards] and Sean [Reid, guitarist], and work on arranging those with Jim. I can’t remember at what point it was, but at some point I realised, ‘Oh, hang on. If I put these songs in a certain order, there’s a narrative here…’
Did you notice there was a theme to the songs?
Not just a theme, it’s got a narrative. It’s the journey of a guy who starts off one way - and that was me, because that song the starts the album, The One That Loves You, we wrote that in 1991. I genuinely felt that way [the track describes being possessive over a girl in quite an old school macho way]. That’s how I thought at that point. But now it’s not like that. So it starts there, and then it shifts and ends up in a completely different place. It’s not about me. The journey could be for anybody.
Looking back to where you were at in 1991, did you have that viewpoint?
It was definitely my thing. I can’t blame that on anybody. I’m not saying that other people around me necessarily were that way, but I certainly did. I totally had that. That was the culture that I grew up with.
Given the background you grew up in, was singing in punk bands and becoming a hairdresser a way of bucking against that?
Definitely. Me becoming a hairdresser was a big deal in the environment I came from. There was another guy I knew who was my age, from the same kind of gang, and I remember him saying he was training to become a hairdresser. I thought: that’s brave. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, I was just working and having a good time. But certainly, there were these overall core values that I held and that’s what came out in [that song] And that was down to addiction. In my case, cocaine addiction. You don’t grow when you’re doing that drug to that extent that I was doing it. When you’re addicted to something you ain’t growing, you’re not going anywhere. You’re not open to new ideas. Any ideas you’ve got are just going to be solidified. That’s what happened with me. I don’t think that song was written high on cocaine. We didn’t write any songs high on cocaine, it was always in between binges. But that was clearly my thinking, or my stance.
It must be a very difficult period to look back on, but did hitting that rock bottom then having to start again and rebuild yourself save your life?
It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m still grateful now. I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me when I hit real rock bottom, but now I can see that it made me have to start again and look at my life. I got a lot of help, and still do, because I always felt like I was missing the instruction manual on how to live. Even before I started with the cocaine.
For me, I think that sense of striving for transcendence, of trying and reaching for something better is something that drives so much of your music, right from the very beginning of Dexys.
That’s true, yeah. Definitely. I can’t seem to do it unless I really feel that I’m reaching for something. And I can’t seem to do the same thing twice. People have said to me, ‘When you get somewhere why don’t you just keep going?’ Even my old man, god rest him, said to me one day, ‘That bloody group’ - I won’t mention the group he was talking about, who were around the same time as us - ‘they’re doing the same bloody thing over and over again. Why do you keep changing your bloody music? Why don’t you just keep it going?!’ I just can’t do it. I can’t seem to do the same thing twice. I literally can’t do it. It’s not a choice. If I try to do it, it doesn’t work.
If you’re not feeling it, then you can’t fake it.
Yeah, absolutely. I sound shit if I try to. I must have tried at some points, but it just doesn’t work. I’ve got to be inspired to be able to write something. I’m not that guy who can sit down and write anything. I just can’t do that.
In terms of inspiration on this album, where did the idea of the feminine divine come from?
Like I said, I’d grown up with it and all of my experiences kind of led me not to value women enough. I started doing some spiritual work around 2017, 2018, just some meditations and some body work, that kind of thing. I did some of it in Thailand, and some over here, and they started to refer to women as goddesses. They were like, ‘Oh this goddess…’ At first, I was like, ‘Goddess? Really?’ But after a while as time went on, the penny dropped. I just thought, ‘Yeah, they are goddesses, actually.’ They’re so powerful in so many different ways that I hadn’t been open to. I just wrote that lyric, the feminine divine, and I started to see that they were goddesses. That’s why I wrote that. It just came out, practically in one go.
My Submission is a song that talks about sexuality in a very frank and open way, even for you...
Even for me, what does that mean?
I mean that you’re not exactly someone who shies away from things, but dominance and submission is still quite a bold thing to write a pop song about.
Yeah. Well, I’m not saying that it’s all autobiographical. There’s a character in there. I’m in there, of course, but I’m not saying it’s 100% autobiographical.
It’s not necessarily a subject that’s very often dealt with openly in music.
Yeah, I’ve not heard it if it has. So, I guess that’s good. No point doing the same thing over and over again.
You talk about your views around women, masculinity and femininity being wrong in the past. But if you look back at the controversy around [1999 solo album] My Beauty and all the stick you got for wearing a dress, you were actually ahead of the curve on a lot of conversations people are now having.
That’s true. I’d forgotten about that, but yeah, you’re right. What happened was, that was just after I gotten out of recovery. That was two or three years after I’d gotten clean from cocaine addiction when I first started to acknowledge the softer side, the feminine side or whatever you want to call it. I’ve got some femininity, and I really wanted to express it.
To be quite honest, and I could have probably handled it better, the reaction to that kind of did my head in. I’m not trying to play the victim here, but it actually did really affect me, the reaction to My Beauty. It really did. I just retreated after that. I remember about six months after, I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I grew a beard right after that and I started wearing big heavy boots. I wanted to protect myself. After that I just shelved that side of me. I shelved it and didn’t open that book again for a long time. Until a few years ago, really.
The reaction wasn’t about the album. It was the fact that you were wearing women’s clothing and underwear on the cover. Can you image that getting a similar reaction today?
I know. It wouldn’t happen. There was one guy who actually said in a column in NME or the Melody Maker, he actually said: this guy is the enemy, next time he plays go and throw stuff at him. That would be a hate crime now, wouldn’t it? It’s hard to imagine, but you’ve got social media now where the individual does it.
Did you feel vindicated doing the reissue of My Beauty a few years ago seeing how much people loved that album?
Oh, it was great. It was really great. I did feel vindicated. I felt really good. The problem is when you’re confronted with so many people’s realities that are directly opposed to your own, and you’re the only one with your reality. Even the record label, after first saying, ‘Oh, it’s great!’ They were like, ‘This is crazy...’ If everybody’s saying you’re fucking crazy, you’re kind of left wondering. All I did was wear a fucking dress! It’s absolutely ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s unbelievable. I took it personally. Even now, it’s difficult. I try not to read the comments.
It’s hard not to take it personally though. You’d come out of a very fragile and vulnerable place and put yourself forward and hurling abuse and more at you [Rowland had bottles thrown at him during a performance at Reading Festival in 1999]
You know what. I’m so glad I did it. I’m proud of it and everything about it. Sometimes I think I could have had a slightly softer approach. There was one [cover] option that wasn’t quite so confronting, perhaps, but I’m really glad that I did it. I’m really glad about what I’m doing now, but I try not to read the comments on social media.
Wise move. It’s a cesspit out there.
It’s terrible! I was talking to a friend about it yesterday and he said the difficulty for any artist is that you’re always wanting to move forward. You have to move forward. Like I said, you can’t stand still. You’re about what you’re doing now and you have to be and there’ll be a large portion of the audience who just want to remember the past and when you change, they react.
You’ve probably got people who are still angry at you for dropping the dockers look from Searching For the Young Soul Rebels.
Do you know what? The reaction to My Beauty was actually not that dissimilar to the reaction that we got for [third Dexy LP] Don’t Stand Me Down and the Ivy League look we took. Honestly, that got so much vitriol.
Really?
Yeah man, it really did! I don’t know why. Maybe because it was the antithesis of what rock and roll was because it looked so fucking conservative, which was one of the things that was great about it. Honestly, the reaction that got was similar. It reminded me of it in 1999, ‘Oh, this is just like Don’t Stand Me Down...’ It’s always a surprise to me, it shouldn’t be, but it’s always a surprise to me when that kind of thing happens because I just think that my ideas, for me, they’re pure. They’re clean. They’re fully formed when they come quite often and so I don’t fuck around with them. I don’t edit them too much. I just do it and I think, ‘Yeah, this is great!’ Like you say, you shouldn’t read your reviews. I remember, there was a line from some journalist said about an album we did and it was in my head for fucking years. Many years later I met that bloke and thought, ‘Why was I fucking bothered about this guy?’ He wouldn’t be someone that I even fucking respect.
Last year you went back and revisited Too-Rye-Ay [Rowland remixed and remastered Dexy’s second album]. Are there plans to do something similar with Don’t Stand Me Down?
No, I don’t think so. Because with Don’t Stand Me Down and Searching For The Young Soul Rebels and [2012’s] One Day I’m Going To Soar, when we left the studio we felt we got them as good as we could. I took [Don’t Stand Me Down] home and thought, ‘Fucking hell, that sounds great!’ I was happy with that. With Too-Rye-Ay it wasn’t like that. I took it home and listened to it and a lot of those tracks didn’t sound right. Don’t Stand Me Down was of its time. If we were mixing it now, we’d probably do it differently, I’m sure, but it sounded right at the time. So, no plans.
CC
The Feminine Divine is out this Friday on 100% Records