Tom Dunne: Kevin Rowland of Dexys is one of popular music's great mavericks
Kevin Rowland of Dexys has family roots in Co Mayo. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)
Who would be a maverick talent? Is it a blessing or a curse? It’s often used to describe someone who is a great talent, but a bit of an outlier too. It suggests a uniqueness that comes with a cost, and you can’t have one, sadly, without the other.
Sinead O’Connor was often described as one, and in many ways, she was, but in the week that we mourn her passing, spare a thought for another very similar talent. And again, it is someone with Irish parents, a US number one and who was crucified by the music business. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Kevin Rowland.
He and Dexys are back with a new album, the wonderful The Feminine Divine, and, incredibly, a 40-date US tour. Having not topped the charts there since 1982, that is a comeback worthy of the Miracle of Istanbul: Liverpool v Milan, 2005.
Not bad, for a band with more false dawns than the Kevin Keegan-era Newcastle United.
Dexys are a strange fish. They boast almost as many past members (49) as The Fall (66) and were every bit as much of a “benign dictatorship.” You also suspect that just as Mark E Smith felt about The Fall, Rowland believes that if it’s him and your granny on bongos, it’s Dexys.
He liked to dress his band. By their third album they were on their fourth image change. Rowland also liked to rename group members - fiddle player Helen Bevington became Helen O’Hara. When ‘Geno’ hit the charts, he introduced a press ban. Henceforth all communication would strictly via full page ads in the music press.
Most famously, during the recording of the Too-Rye-Ay album, he banned drinking and introduced a fitness regime that extended to obligatory band running sessions. It must have worked: ‘Come on Eileen’ topped the charts, won a Brit award, and was the biggest selling UK single of 1982.
But the maverick handle comes at a price. The positive bit is the visionary aspect, the ambition, the wanting to achieve something no one else has, the instinctive ability to see the hole in another’s argument and having the drive to do something special.
But the downside is being wilfully independent, truthful to the point of bluntness, easily bored and constantly seeking a new challenge. This can make them hard to work with and exasperate people around them. And, worse of all, they can be wrong as often as they are right. But don’t tell them that.
Rowland’s family were originally from Crossmolina, Co Mayo. He’d been in two bands before the idea of infusing his Irish influences with the energy of Northern Soul inspired him to form Dexys Midnight Runners. Their name was inspired by Dexedrine, the amphetamine-based drug the dancers took to help them dance through the witching hour.
Rowland’s talent was obvious, but even as ‘Eileen' topped the US charts, self-destruction was never far from the surface. Opening for Bowie in Paris, he asked a band member how to say, “We hate Bowie’s music” in French. He then relayed this to the audience who immediately booed them off stage.
But it has been in his solo career where the “eccentricity” has reached eye-watering levels. He became solo soon after 1985’s Don’t Stand Me Down, complete with its middle management office photo sleeve, proved every bit as career-ending as the record company had predicted. But by 1989, Alan McGee, at Creation, was offering him a way back.
He got Rowland to record an album, My Beauty, of tastefully chosen covers of Sixties and Seventies classics. This could easily have served as a reintroduction to a general audience of a much-loved figure, were it not for the sleeve.
Ah yes, the sleeve. A heavily made-up Rowland, all mascara and pouting lipstick, bare-chested and hoisting his skirt up to reveal his fetching lady’s underwear and stockings. If there was a book called Career Ending Record Sleeves, it would occupy entries 1 through 100. Creation, mark 1, folded soon after.
And yet despite the blows, the penury, the man in the dole queue singing ‘Come on Eileen’ to him, Rowland remains resolute and optimistic. The Feminine Divine is a lovely record. Rowland is unhappy with the patriarchy, and is trying to make amends through song, some of them his best in years.
But don’t watch the videos I beg you. The eccentricity, in all its career-bursting magnificence, is as vibrant and alive as ever. Wouldn’t be Dexys without it though, would it?
I totally agree that Christy‘s John O‘Dreams is soulful , moving and heartwarming. Listening to it makes me calm and happy.
Wild Horses by The Sundays, Thunder Road by Cowboy Junkies, Because the Night by 10,000 Maniacs, Only Living Boy in New York by Everything But The Girl.
I can't argue with any of the Tom's choices. Just one I've always enjoyed is the Show of Hands version of Boys of Summer. While Don Henley's original is perfect for a hot summer's day, the Show of Hands version is perfect for a quiet summer evening, with orange sky and the sun slowly disappearing on the horizon...
Disturbed’s version of The Sound of Silence.
Fair play to Christy. But speaking as a Dubliner (now in the US) you have to include Sinead O'Connor singing Molly Malone. She puts her heart and soul into it.
