Poor old Kevin Rowland — the popstar who had no fun

Times

10-07-2025

During the recording of Dexys Midnight Runners' third album, Don't Stand Me Down, their frontman, Kevin Rowland, would spend his nights kerb crawling through Paddington in London. 'I rarely picked anyone up,' he writes in his blazingly honest autobiography, Bless Me Father, 'It was secret, lonely and I hated myself for it.' Mixing the album in New York a couple of months later, he shunned the clubby cross-pollinations of the downtown scene in 1985 and chose to stay in uptown hotels with 'middle-aged businessmen', resentfully paying for company in hostess bars.
It's no surprise that the sex-drugs-rock'n'roll trinity can ruin lives, but few people can have had so little fun being a pop star as Rowland. This, it's important to remember, is a man with two No 1 singles — Geno and Come On Eileen — under his belt, a young soul rebel in his prime grimly forking out for female companionship. When his band broke up in 1987 he had a horrid revelation: 'I'd been a f***ing pop star, the thing I dreamt about when I was a kid, and I missed it! I'd missed the whole f***ing thing.'
With Bless Me Father he unpicks the reasons he so often felt distanced from his own life — wildly uptight, never living in the moment, constantly riddled by doubt and jealousy. As the title suggests, it's a confessional book — at times almost recklessly candid — but it's also a profoundly sad family memoir that grapples with Rowland's lifelong desire for approval from his Irish parents, especially his laceratingly critical father, a man who would frequently take his belt to his son's legs.
Born in Wolverhampton in 1953, Rowland spent three years of his early childhood in his parents' native Co Mayo while his dad was establishing his construction business. After returning to Wolverhampton, he followed his elder brothers into trouble. Here he bracingly recreates a scabby-kneed, bloody-nosed mid-century world of derelict houses, Elvis Presley and penny chews. He was drawn to trouble — fighting and theft, but also fell in love with pop music and clothes, both of which his dad found suspect.
When the family moved to London, the former altar boy slid further into delinquency with trips to the police station for trying the handles of parked cars and stealing a scooter. His dad told him he would never amount to anything because he would get a girl pregnant at 17. He managed to wait until he was 20, not meeting his daughter until she was a teenager.
Nicknamed 'Mary Quant' by Harrow's 'hardnuts', the style-obsessed Rowland had a brief period of contentment as a trainee hairdresser. His alertness to youth culture is a fascinating part of this book. He's as clear on the right kind of tailoring — 'jacket vents,' he writes about the band's 'Ivy League' phase, 'would be four inches and off centre' — as he was then. He cares enough to include an ink drawing of a plaited haircut he had in an early incarnation of Dexys for which no photographic evidence exists.
His punk band the Killjoys didn't fulfil that yearning for precision. It was only when he formed Dexys Midnight Runners with the guitarist Kevin Archer in Birmingham in 1978 that he found the portal to his potent reimagining of Van Morrison's ineffable spiritual soul and the art-pop world-building of Roxy Music. They were, superficially at least, a gang, entering gigs from the front with their holdalls over their shoulders — the team that met in caffs, as their 1980 debut, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, put it, clocking in for work.
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Pop memoirs can be a score-settling opportunity (think of Morrissey's 2013 Autobiography), but Bless Me Father is peppered with apologies to girlfriends, business associates and even the Pogues singer Shane MacGowan, whom Rowland once called 'stage Irish'. The most notable apology comes years after an incident in 1983 when Dexys supported David Bowie in Paris. Rowland was so incensed by the front rows chanting for the headliner he unleashed a tirade: 'You're f***ing stupid because he's nothing but a pale imitation of Bryan Ferry.' Inevitably the band didn't play a second night and years later he wrote Bowie a contrite letter, but 'I didn't get a reply'.
This sense of self-sabotage deepens the melancholy that hangs over his story. Rowland's sins are often less entertaining or acceptable than standard rock'n'roll antics: he admits to controlling behaviour with women and confesses that he scuppered his brother's studio business out of jealousy. He recognises the chill as the industry started to distance itself from him — no interviews and record company employees giving him nothing but a 'quick smile'. His post-Dexys descent into cocaine addiction was brutal, and rock bottom unfolded in a Willesden bedsit where he couldn't scrape together enough coins for a box of fish fingers.
There is redemption: Rowland established a relationship with his daughter and his grandchildren, got clean, acknowledged his feminine side in 1999 with the solo album My Beauty and reunited Dexys for some acclaimed albums (including The Feminine Divine in 2023) and shows. After therapy he was reconciled with his father, finding new sweetness in his old age. However, fans will have to work hard to fill in Dexys' musical power and stage glory when there's so much about masturbation and bankruptcy.
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In 1982, shortly after hitting the top of the charts with Come On Eileen, Dexys Midnight Runners played Coventry Apollo with Rowland's family in attendance. 'I felt truly successful … as I sat in this beautiful dressing room before going out to perform to a sold-out theatre,' Rowland says. Yet as soon as his dad walked backstage he started knocking the brickwork saying, 'These walls aren't built properly,' again diminishing his son. Bless Me Father allows you inside Rowland's remarkable head, but also reveals what happens when the walls aren't built properly from the start, when there's a crack in the foundations that fame can't fill.
Bless Me Father: A Life Story by Kevin Rowland (Ebury £25 pp400). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members