Kevin Rowland, well known for being Dexys frontman, spoke to David Hennessy about his searingly honest memoir, Bless Me Father
Kevin Rowland is well known as the frontman of the influential band Dexys (formerly Dexys Midnight Runners), who rose to prominence in the eighties with their first number one Geno and later with their iconic hit Come On Eileen.
Bless Me Father, his best-selling and critically acclaimed memoir, has just been released on paperback. He launched it with a recent event at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
Growing up the son of Mayo parents, Kevin spent some of his early years in Crossmolina, Co. Mayo.
The family would move to Wolverhampton and finally London, settling in Harrow.
As a young boy, Kevin was an altar boy planning to train to be a priest.
This was contradicted by thieving and fighting that saw him rarely out of trouble.
In the book he takes the reader through the juvenile courts of his troubled teenage years to the early days of the New Romantic scene in the late ’70s.
He writes candidly about his difficult relationship with his father, which he describes as ‘all stick and no carrot’, the band’s ugly break up and his all consuming cocaine addiction leaving him bankrupt and adrift by the 1990s.
Already a Sunday Times bestseller and book of the year for Mojo, Rough Trade and Uncut, Bless Me Father is a deeply personal account of an extraordinary life.
Kevin took time to chat to the Irish World about the book.
He spoke about why he had to proclaim his Irishness at a time when it was unpopular to do so and his confrontation with the late Shane MacGowan.
The book is very personal, was the writing of it cathartic for you?
“Yes, I think so.
“I felt the need to write it.
“I really did need to tell my story.
“A lot of people said they had an emotional reaction to it.
“Quite a few people have told me they burst into tears reading it at certain points, quite often my dad’s funeral or singing Danny Boy over his grave.
“Quite a few people told me they had an emotional reaction but I guess perhaps they relate in some way.”
You write about your difficult relationship with your father, was there healing in that?
“I think it was because I needed to explain my reality, my experience of my dad because he was very different to other people in my family.
“My dad was a very powerful character and my reality was never spoken so I needed to say it, I needed to get it out there.
“I didn’t feel I could really talk to anybody about my relationship with my dad really. I had to write it in a book.
“It was something I needed to do, and I think it’s balanced.
“I’ve admitted my shortcomings around him as well.
“It can’t have been easy for him, me getting in trouble and all of that stuff.”
You write about the trouble you got into as a child, teen and young man which included stealing and fighting and a number of arrests. That must have been your way of rebelling mainly against your father..
“I’d say I was.
“And dad’s criticism of me started way before I was getting in trouble.
“I’d say it was a rebellion.
“I didn’t really care.
“I didn’t care how much my dad hit me. I didn’t care about the punishment from him, it was only breaking my mum’s heart that stopped me rebelling further because I didn’t care if I went to approved school, I didn’t care.”
You had that experience of you and your friend Billy going to Brighton when, unable to afford other accommodation, you found yourself first in a reception centre full of ‘gentlemen of the road’ (drifters, often with drink problems) and then a YMCA. Did that make you see what others didn’t have or what you had at home?
“Maybe what other people didn’t have, not so much what I had.
“I didn’t want to go home, I didn’t really want to be at home.
“I was very torn because I didn’t want to hurt my mum, she wanted me at home.
“I was very torn but I didn’t feel at all comfortable at home.
“But the reception centre with the ‘gentlemen of the road’, that kind of scared me.
“On the last night I was there I said to an old Geordie guy, ‘This will be the last time I stay in one of these places’.
“And he said to me, ‘I said that 20 years ago, son’.
“And I thought, ‘Jesus, I’ve got to be careful’.”
It was your brother Pat who gave you your first chance in his band. Where do you think you would be without that break?
“It’s hard to know.
“I always had artistic tendencies.
“It’s hard to know but I’m lucky that I ended up where I am.”
You write about not being able to enjoy Dexys’ success and that you even feel you missed it, such a shame..
“I know.
“I was talking about that at a book event last night.
“They said to me, ‘What would you say to yourself at the height of your success and fame?’
“I’d say, ‘Relax and enjoy yourself’.
“I just couldn’t.
“I wasn’t even conscious that I wasn’t enjoying it.
“I was so bogged down with worry and anxiety.
“I was out of my depth really.
“I couldn’t deal with success.
“It’s a very intense job and it’s exhausting as well.
“They worked you really hard when you had got a hit record. They send you here, there and everywhere which is great but you don’t really get to see the place, you’re just doing interviews or the gig or whatever.
“I just didn’t think to go out and have a good time, I just didn’t.
“Here and there I’d have periods when I would enjoy it normally when the record was going up the charts but then I would think, ‘Oh my god, we’ve got to follow it up. Have we got a song good enough?’
“I found it all a pressure really.
“I just didn’t have any self-confidence.
“I think that must have been my upbringing.
“I felt like, ‘Part of me doesn’t belong there. Are people going to find me out?’
“And it wasn’t just a thought, it was a very strong feeling.”
You write about the end of the first iteration of Dexys when all but Jim Paterson wanted you out of your own band and even wanted to use the moniker Dexys Midnight Runners. It was terrible but it almost came as a relief, didn’t it?
“It was a relief.
“I thought, ‘Oh God, great, no more struggling. Nothing to worry about so I can let go now’.
“It was a relief.
“And I said to them, ‘Yeah, okay. Carry on’.
“And I meant it.
“I just felt relieved and that night I knew it was going to be my last gig and I put everything into it.
“I hadn’t been enjoying the gigs previous to that, I’d been too much in my head.
“And then after a few days I thought, ‘F**k this. I’m not gonna let them take my band’.”
You write about your addiction to cocaine. I wonder if that was your way of making up for missing the band’s success..
“Don’t Stand Me Down, the third Dexys album, didn’t do as well as everyone hoped, as well as it deserved to do.
“It’s now seen as a really strong album and that’s good it’s been re-evaluated but at that time, I felt burnt out and I just thought, ‘I need to start enjoying myself. I’m 32 now. I haven’t been out for ages’.
“I started to go out.
“I felt really anxious and really nervous and the drink and the drugs, particularly the drugs, helped to alleviate that anxiety initially and then I did have a good time for a little while but then I just got hooked very quickly.
“It wasn’t easy but I’ve been clean a long time now thankfully.”
You didn’t feel very Irish in your youth but you came to claim your Irishness and inject it into your music and tracks like Come On Eileen..
“I felt the need to express my Irishness because at that time, people didn’t want to hear about Ireland, didn’t want to hear about Irishness.
“I wanted to make clear that I was Irish.
“We started off just by playing Irish venues like the National in Kilburn.
“We were the first contemporary band to do that.
“We just did things like that and then eventually, with the second album, I really felt I wanted to put some Irishness in there.
“I was fed up of all the anti-Irish prejudice and I felt the need to just stand up and say, ‘I’m Irish’.
“Around that time, I started to read a lot more about Irish history. I just wanted to try to understand what was going on, particularly in the north.
“There was nothing being said about it in the media and if you expressed a view that didn’t endorse what the Daily Mail or the Sun was saying in their headlines, you were judged.
“There was nothing said about the reasons, about the injustice, nothing said about that, that people were being treated like second class citizens in their own country.
“You couldn’t say anything.
“People were very guarded about it.
“They just had one view.
“Around that time, I did start to get political.
“As well as reading books and going to marches and meetings about Ireland, I went to some meetings of the Communist Party in Birmingham and they didn’t even talk about Ireland.
“They would talk about Nicaragua and some other struggle that was going on but it just seemed like they believed all the media hype.”
As you write in the book the anti- Irish feeling was so prevalent that one radio station that played Come On Eileen apologised afterwards afterwards for its Irishness..
“Yeah, that’s how it was.
“We wrote a song about that called Burn it Down on the first album about Irish jokes.”
That song referenced Irish literary greats like Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey and George Bernard Shaw..
“Exactly, I was basically saying, ‘If they’re so stupid, how can they come up with all these?’
“But it was just such pure f**king racism.
“It really was.
“And you know what? One of the things I’ve realised recently, I’m not proud to admit this but I did grow up in England with a bit of an inferiority complex about being Irish, particularly when I was at a Church of England school.
“It was hard not to have an inferiority complex about being Irish in England and I think it’s only now that’s started to recede that I even know that existed.”
The book goes into how you took unkind comments from a rising Shane MacGowan to heart and it led to a stand off between you both much later. It seems a shame as you had so much in common with Shane..
“I had loads in common.
“The Nips supported us but I hadn’t heard the Pogues, nobody had.
“They hadn’t done any gigs. I’m sure they had done one or two but I hadn’t seen them and I was about to go and see them.
“I heard about them.
“I thought, ‘Oh great, they’re doing a gig at the Hope and Anchor and they’ve got a fiddle, they’ve got an accordion, they’ve got a tin whistle. They’re putting some Irish influence in their music. There’s another second generation Irish (musician). Great, I’ll look forward to that’.
“And then I saw the interview where he slagged me off and that put me off obviously.”
Why do you think he said that because it seems he didn’t have a problem with you or your music?
“The journalist reckoned, and a couple of other people who were close to him told me, the question was, ‘You’ve got an accordion and you’re putting Irish in your music. Surely, that’s ground that has already been covered by Dexys Midnight Runners..’
“This was 18 months after we came through with our Celtic Irish thing so they reckoned that he felt he had to slag us off to justify their existence at the beginning, ‘Well, they’re f**king shit. We’re the real thing’.
“And in many ways they were, there was much more Irish influence in their music than there was in ours.
“And they mixed Irish music with punk, we mixed Irish music with soul, but we were the first.
“There was no second generation Irish musician from my generation that put some Irish in the music before that time.
“Was Shane influenced by us? I don’t mean so much music but the idea of putting Irish in the music- I don’t know but it was a good 18 months after we came out with that first.
“But for some reason, it just hurt.
“I took it personally his comment and I started to believe it.
“But friends told me afterwards that he loved Come On Eileen, people who knew him.
“And the journalist said he said those comments with a smile on his face as if he felt that he had to do it and the journalist told me he looked like he was well prepared for that question.
“And maybe he’d forgotten about it when he came up to me in the Limelight in ’87, ‘How’s it going, how you doing?’ And I just went, ‘What?’
“I took it personally and in some way, I felt usurped by them because I did enjoy that period.
“I met so many second-generation people coming up to me going, ‘Really love that you’re putting some Irish in your music’.
“There was a guy that said, ‘When I heard Dexys, especially Dance Stance (which we later called Burn it Down) for the first time, somebody was speaking to me’.
“And then that happened a lot more with Come on Eileen and Celtic Soul Brothers and I really enjoyed that, all these second generation people coming up to me telling me that. It was great.
“And then, to be honest, when the Pogues came along, I did feel usurped.
“They really took that and ran with it and they did make some really good music but I did feel a bit left behind because what happened then, as the Pogues were coming through, we spent two years making the next album, Don’t Stand Me Down, and then it bombed.
“Meanwhile The Pogues are rising to great success and I did feel envious.”
We spoke about how you didn’t enjoy the band’s success but do you enjoy it more now with things like playing Glastonbury in recent years etc?
“Definitely more.
“I still have a lot of anxiety and I still get overwhelmed very easily.
“Some days I just feel like, ‘God, I can’t cope’.
“But generally I’m enjoying it much more, I really am.
“And I’m enjoying these book events because you meet the fans and they tell you how much the music means to them and it’s really nice.”
And as you say you have the album and tour coming later in the year, you are very busy..
“I am, for a 72-year-old.
“I’m just about staying on top of it but I’m good and I’m much more grateful these days.
“I’m very grateful really that I’ve had a career in music.
“It’s what I always wanted when I was a kid.
“I never thought that was possible for me.
“In my teens, it looked like I could have done the wrong way or at least been in some job I didn’t really want to be in.
“I’ve been gifted to do music and I’m still doing it so I’m blessed, man.”
Bless Me Father, A Life Story by Kevin Rowland is out now on Ebury Publishing.
