As far back as he can remember, Dexys Midnight Runners lynchpin Kevin Rowland has struggled with anxiety and a deep-seated inferiority complex. Even while topping the early 80s charts with irrefutable pop classics “Geno” and “Come on Eileen”, Rowland was beset by doubt, guilt, paranoia and self-destructive impulses.
But he also pursued his singular creative vision with a burning and utterly dedicated intensity. He believed, quite rightly, that Dexys were something special. He just didn’t particularly like himself.
In Bless Me Father: A Life Story, Kevin Rowland bares his sensitive soul with commendable – if sometimes alarming – honesty. An addict who’s been in recovery for more than 30 years, his autobiography is full of touchingly sincere apologies to everyone he mistreated as an angry, difficult, insular young man. It’s also full of praise and gratitude, and he never wallows in self-pity or mealy-mouthed excuses.
Rowland’s devout Irish Catholic father, who didn’t bless his wayward son with a single word of praise, would usually be cast as the villain in a lesser, more self-serving memoir. Rowland does, of course, understand that he was always seeking his father’s approval – “I was desperate to prove I wasn’t useless” – but he clearly loved the man, faults and all. Their relationship is at the heart of this story.
The chapters devoted to Rowland’s post-Dexys years of cocaine addiction are relentlessly grim. On the dole and living in a threadbare flat, he’d been royally screwed by a former manager and had to declare bankruptcy. But he survived, got clean, and now lives comfortably on his songwriting royalties.
He’s in a better place. Rowland is a true artist, an idiosyncratic aesthete who flourished during an era when working-class weirdos were allowed to gatecrash the mainstream. We will not see his like again.
