Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners: 'There was a lot of anti-Irish racism'

Irish Examiner

4 days ago

A loss to the Catholic Church, but a great blessing for popular music. Kevin Rowland was turned down for seminary school, but his alternative path did lead him to Dexys Midnight Runners and an impressive output since they broke through in the late 1970s.
You can hear a light Wolverhampton accent, but Rowland, stylish as ever, speaks with a gentle lilt, passed on from his Irish parents. An altar boy in his early days, his calling must have been every Catholic mother's dream?
"Yes, I think it is. She was very pleased and took me to see the bishop,' says Rowland, 72 this month.
'I asked her about it in 2007; she passed in 2016. I told her I was surprised about not getting into priest college. It turned out my parents were surprised too because there was a desperate shortage then, as there is now. I can only presume it was about getting into trouble at school and that they went to the headmistress for a reference."
His impressive new Bless Me Father has a cinematic quality. He describes how a fractious relationship with his disapproving father nudges him into teenage rebellion, with a rap sheet that included arson, stealing a scooter, and violence. But then music and style become his saviour.
As frontman of Dexys Midnight Runners, he is asked to suppress his Irish-ness at the same time as being driven by it. The band's first single, released in 1979, Burn It Down, had its title changed at the insistence of management to Dance Stance.
"When I left school in 1968 and even before the last phase of the conflict kicked off in 1969, there was a lot of anti-Irish racism," explains Rowland.
"At school, there was a lot about 'thick Paddies', and it intensified with the Birmingham pub bombings in '74, which were horrific. The Irish jokes made me fucking angry, which is what Burn It Down was about. I was quoting people like Behan because if the Irish are so fucking stupid, then why have they produced so many great writers? The people making the jokes were as thick as two short planks. I was living in Smethwick, and they would tell me these jokes because I had an English accent. I would tell them the same joke back, but make it about someone from Smethwick. I got so angry one night, I went home and wrote that song."
When the band appeared on Top of the Pops in January 1980, as Rowland points out, this was the first expression from a new generation writing about the Irish diaspora while defining pop culture in Britain. "Yes, there was Shane MacGowan, Johnny Rotten, Elvis Costello, and Chas Smash - who was quite a significant part of Madness — Siobhan Fahey in Bananarama, Boy George, The Smiths, and it goes right up to Oasis; all of them were second generation Irish. It's quite mad."
A few months later, Rowland and co were invited back on Top of the Pops to perform Geno. This time their image was more developed and inspired by Brando's Terry Malloy and the New Jersey dockers from On The Waterfront (1954), as well as the small-time criminals in Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973).
During the performance, they band looked like a gang, and the soulful horns, along with Rowland's 'crying' style vocal would help set the tone for the new decade. The tribute to R&B singer Geno Washington written by Rowland and Kevin Archer was a UK number one. For the release of their debut album, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, they reinstated the original title of the single to Burn It Down.
The cover image was of a 13-year-old Catholic boy being burned out of his home in 1971 during the Troubles.
I suggest it was a brave move.
"Yes, thank-you, it was and I felt it," he replies
"It felt quite subversive because nobody wanted to hear anything about Irish culture. It was a no-no, but at the same time I was sneaking things in."
Rowland felt a kindred spirit in Shane MacGowan, but the relationship would soon turn sour: "We were way before The Pogues, and I knew Shane; we talked about Behan. He had supported us with The Nips, and I thought 'great', but in his first interview, he slagged me off. The guy who interviewed him said it was mischief and that he loved Dexys, but I took it personally."
There were comings and goings in the Dexys line-up, but the departure of Kevin Archer was keenly felt. The band moved on in a new direction, adopting the 'gentlemen of the road' look partly inspired by the Irish Travellers Rowland met during a nomadic time in his teens, and a more Celtic sound was embraced.
Come On Eileen, released in the summer of 1982, would be a global sensation, hitting the number one spot in several countries. It remains a definitive song of the era. After the success of the band's second album Too-Rye-Ay, their third, Don't Stand Me Down, saw another shift in aesthetics with the reduced line-up appearing on the cover in suits.
"There's a song on there, This is What She's Like, I think it's the best song I've ever written," says Rowland.
While the album wasn't a commercial success, its influence has been cited by an eclectic selection of musicians including Taylor Swift's co-songwriter and producer Jack Antonoff, Belfast DJ and producer David Holmes and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.
What followed was a time of despair and addiction after the band split in 1987: "It was really difficult, I'd been doing Dexys obsessively for seven years. It was weird, I was waking up to a bad dream every day. I'd been ripped off, it was horrible, I was wondering what the fuck happened to my life, all the money had gone through my hands and I'd not enjoyed it much, there were bills coming in from everywhere.'
Bless Me Father, which has taken 20 years to write "to get to the truth", delivers rare honesty and self-reflection. It was a final moment of desperation during cocaine addiction when he turned to prayer that eventually led to counselling and recovery. There are many moving moments that deal with the death of his parents and brother Pat.
He writes beautifully of a return to Mayo: "I love it where my family is from close to the mountain, and if it wasn't so cold, I would live there; it's the one place I feel at home."
Rowland, as the only constant member, reformed the band in 2003. He shortened the name to Dexys in 2012 but says they will soon relaunch again as Dexys Midnight Runners.
The mix of performance and spoken word elements which he hinted at on 1985 track This Is What She's Like, were eventually realised. "That song gets the biggest applause when we do it. We don't do revival shows. For the last tour of The Feminine Divine [2022 album], it was in theatres, and we played the whole album in sequence. It was a drama with an interval, and then we played the old stuff, but it was the first half of the show that got the standing ovations."
'I wouldn't do it if there wasn't a new album, you have to keep moving forward, but I'm grateful for the past. I still get money from the old stuff, but that was more than 40 years ago. Van Morrison has a great quote about that when he says: 'It's hard to be someone else's nostalgia'.'