“We didn’t want to be part of anyone else’s movement; we’d rather be our own ...” Kevin Rowland, currently lounging on an unmade bed, said this over 40 years ago, when his band – his vision, his passion – Dexys Midnight Runners were ripping up the rule book.
Commandeered by Rowland, they nicked master tapes from EMI, refused to speak to the (then) immensely influential music press (instead taking out ads in their pages to explain their position on various matters) and frequently changed their visual identity. “We wanted to be a group that looked like something – a formed group, a project ...”
Rowland shifts position and readjusts the angle of his laptop. The past is the past, he hints, very much aware that throughout most of the 1980s, his band challenged their fan base like few others. Dexys Midnight Runners split up in 1987, and from that point for many years Rowland’s career veered from poorly received solo albums (1988′s The Wanderer), misunderstood solo albums (1999′s My Beauty, castigated by much of the music media for its cover of a cross-dressing Rowland), and stints on the dole. Simply put, he wasn’t in a good place, telling a journalist in 1999, “People try to romanticise the idea of the suffering artist. At my lowest ebb there was no romance to it at all.”
That was then, of course. For the past 15 or so years, Rowland and Dexys (the band name officially truncated from 2011) have been a visible, sometimes vital proposition with 2012′s One Day I’m Going to Soar and 2016′s Let the Record Show: Dexys Do Irish and Country Soul, repositioning them as a music act that once again refuses to genuflect before music industry altars.
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I went to the cinema to see Small Things Like These. By the time I emerged I had concluded the film was crap
I got into my body and out of my head, and the more I got into the former the clearer things became in the latter – about women, in particular
— Kevin Rowland
The band’s new album, The Feminine Divine, is audaciously distinctive, and Rowland knows it. The songs, I offer, are as vibrant as ever.
“Not to be arrogant,” says Rowland, failing miserably, “but I don’t think that’s in question, do you? I say that because I work hard on the songs to make them sound easy because, frankly, they don’t sound as if they’ve been worked on.” It’s also about continuing to accept challenges, he adds. “In some ways, I feel as if I’m better now as a singer. You don’t have to try to do that because life experience comes through. I know my subject matter and I believe what I’m singing about.”
Rowland is relaxed as he talks about various lead-ins to the making of the new record. He gets up from the bed, picks up his laptop and walks into another room (“it’s more comfortable in here”). He says he took time out to refocus on his life, to recalibrate his lifestyle choices and attitudes. His mother died at the end of 2016 and thoughts of recording an album of her favourite songs withered on the vine.
“I had seriously considered jacking in music because I just didn’t see a way back into it.” He considered doing other things, one of which was (intuitively, considering his reputation as one of the sharpest clothes horses in the stable) a fashion range. “I started working with somebody on it, but after about a year it fizzled out.” A mindful-generated trip to Thailand (“to do some courses, just to get into my body a bit more”) inspired a radical change of thought that completely influenced the concept behind The Feminine Divine.
“I got into my body and out of my head, and the more I got into the former the clearer things became in the latter – about women, in particular.” He admits he had never deeply thought about women (“well, a little bit,” he concedes in a tone best described as regretful) and how as a gender “they might feel, what they’re about”. He says that throughout the various awareness courses he was undertaking in Thailand, “women were referred to as Goddesses, and eventually I started to think very differently about them”.
Rowland, who celebrates his 70th birthday in August, looks suitably abashed. “That had never happened before. I had seen women as, like ... you know ... women. Equal, not equal, however you looked at it. I had listened to women talking about women’s politics and things like that, but I had never really seen them.”
That’s some admission, I offer. Rowland agrees. You need to resolve something like that within yourself, he says. “I can’t talk about other people or society in general but only myself. I grew up ... and effectively used women ... I did, you know. That’s how I saw it. I had a f**ked-up view of women, of life ... Not to be self-piteous, but the fact is that nobody taught me about sex. My parents didn’t tell me, and when I was at school they didn’t mention it, not even in biology, so I had no information about sex apart from my older brother who was six years older than me. That was my sex education. At 13 or 14, your body is exploding with all these feelings – or at least mine was – and it’s one big secret.”
By the time he was 15 – when his Co Mayo parents moved the family south from Wolverhampton to Greater London’s Harrow – Rowland had gravitated “towards the macho guys. I didn’t have to do that but that’s what I did – we would go somewhere, the girls would follow us, and we wouldn’t show them very much respect. That’s how I was. I carried that through into adulthood, and to be honest I didn’t really give it much thought.
“Then Dexys happened, the career, and women were a byproduct of that. I might fall in love, if I ever knew what that was; l certainly knew what passion and obsession were, but real love? I don’t know, that’s something different. That’s how I was – sex was a need to be fulfilled but I see it much more differently now. When I went to Thailand, I was more open to those ideas of sex being a spiritual thing.”
Every day is a school day, right? With such enlightenment, Rowland gradually steered himself back into music, initially by overseeing the bells and whistles reissue of the Dexys (Midnight Runners) 1982 album, Too-Rye-Ay, and then with corralling songs for The Feminine Divine. “I feel I had the vitality, and I was sure I had something to say.”
Not long before Too-Rye-Ay’s release, Rowland recalls a chance encounter in Manchester with a fan who reminded him of a certain gig in Dundalk at time when they simply didn’t want to play Geno.
“I was in Manchester recently and some guy came up to me and told me that in 1980, when Dexys Midnight Runners walked on stage in a hotel in Dundalk, I told the audience that if they had come to the gig expecting to hear us play Geno, then they could all f**k off. Oh, dear – youth, youth is all I can put that down to. In my defence – well, hardly in my defence – the story is this: we had nicked the master tapes for our debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, from EMI.
“The record should have been out by the time we played Dundalk, but because we had the tapes it hadn’t been released, so the only song people knew from us was Geno, and believe me, we had become really fed up with people chanting Geno all through our shows. However, that wasn’t the fault of the audience in Dundalk. In fact, if we were doing that now, I’d take a very different approach. So here goes – Dundalk, I’m sorry!”
Currently fine-tuning Dexys’ forthcoming live shows, which will once again blend theatre and songs (“the first section will be a full in-sequence play through of The Feminine Divine, where we’ll be acting it out. After an intermission, we’ll come back to play the old stuff, a lot of which will be from Too-Rye-Ay.”).
Ah, right – the “old stuff”. Glad he mentioned that. Some musicians keep a distance, some fully engage, and some are pragmatic about rifling through the back catalogue. How does he feel about revisiting?
“When we go back over the older material, we ask ourselves how we feel about certain songs, and, quite honestly, if I feel I can’t bring something to them then I can’t do it. If I did, I’d just do the Rewind festivals and take the money.”
Rowland looks forlorn as he says this, as if such a compromise would kill him. “That would be soul destroying. I just couldn’t do it. I’d be miserable as sin.”
The Feminine Divine is released on Friday, July 28th. Dexys perform in Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre on Monday, September 25th
