I met Kevin Rowland for lunch on the day before his 70th birthday. The Dexys frontman had tried hard to ignore the previous 20 or so milestones, he says, hoping they’d go away, but he had plans for a celebration this time around. There are plenty of reasons to cheer his hard-won threescore and 10: he has an album of new music out, a tour of the UK, Europe and the US about to begin, and he has exorcised a fair few of the demons of his past.
We’re at the Riding House Café, a busy brasserie off Oxford Street in London. Rowland is conscious of not straining that soulful, vulnerable voice before the three months of touring, so we have retreated to an outside table away from the indoor clatter. He likes the associations of this place, because it’s where he and the band came after their latest album launch. He’s wearing a large pink cap and a pink T-shirt in the sunshine. The new album, The Feminine Divine, is a classic piece of pop introspection, in which Rowland looks back on his life and provides a mea culpa for his failings over the years, before offering a series of funky devotional odes to the female of the species.
On the way to lunch I’ve been listening to the second track – It’s Alright, Kevin – on repeat (not least because its question and answer format appears to do a lot of my interview prep for me). The song sees the singer in a lively therapy session with his backing chorus: “Were you always feeling edgy?” they wonder.
“Yes,” he admits.
“Afraid the mask would slip and they’d see?”
“I carried so much weight on me / I never truly was myself / Just an amalgam off the shelf …
“And did you ever get found out?”
“All the time”
“Did that compound your sense of doubt?”
“Totally. It was so hard not being real /Let me tell you how for years / I was waking up in fear / What would they think of me, no personality? / A no one from the start …”
The album is a kind of pilgrim’s progress, in which a character not a million miles from our Kev confronts the controlling habits of his earlier masculinity – “I had so much hate in me” – in order to celebrate not only his own freer, feminine side, but the guiding female spirit of the universe. Less Come on Eileen than “Eileen rules, OK.” The creative epiphany arrived, like all of Dexys’ work since the chart-topping 1980s, after a long period of silence (the band shortened their name from Dexys Midnight Runners in 2011).
“After our last album, in 2016, I felt it was all over,” Rowland says. “I was completely burnt out. No vitality, no energy, just very low. I couldn’t ever see myself ever doing the music again. I was violently against it.”
His first step out of that malaise, he says, was to concentrate on his body rather than on the invasive doubts in his head. He had been practising the Qi Gong form of tai chi, and in 2017 took himself off to Thailand for a retreat. “I’m an absolute novice – these guys have been doing it for 40, 50 years – but the thing about the Tao that appealed to me is that it covers everything: spirituality, sex, food, exercise. Some of it is written down, but a lot of it has been passed down from master to student.”
He tried to embrace all aspects of the discipline. He became vegan, though he eats fish these days – and he orders a plate of sea bass and salad. “Normally, breakfast is broccoli or corn on the cob, then a light lunch and maybe a baked potato in the evening,” he says, with a smile. He looks good on it. Even when he got some creative energy back, he still wasn’t thinking about music, he says. But then one morning in 2021, he just sat down and wrote the song The Feminine Divine. That idea is now a full theatrical stage show as well as an album.
I wonder if its message was prompted in part by the #MeToo movement?
“I don’t think it was,” Rowland says. “I’d been thinking about this stuff for a long time.” He talks about his 1999 solo album, My Beauty, a collection of the musical standards that had helped him through a dark period of cocaine addiction and debt (having squandered the fortune he made in his 20s, Rowland had been forced to sign on at the benefits office; a low point was the moment when the rest of the dole queue, spotting him, broke into a chorus of Come on Eileen). That comeback album, he recalls, was widely ridiculed, and mostly because its cover image featured Rowland in fishnets and a string of pearls. “It was open season on me for some reason,” he says. “Even the Guardian album review was headlined ‘Frocky horror’. I think I just battened down the hatches after that.”
He celebrated the fact that time had finally caught up with that record by re-releasing it in 2020, along with a video featuring his grandson, Roo – “who has been wearing dresses since he was 13” – singing the Four Seasons’ classicRag Doll. “I think we are going through a big change,” he says, “different ways of relating. And we can either be entrenched in our old views – ‘I’m not bloody changing’ – or we can go with it…”
We talk a little about the narrower ideas of masculinity he inherited. (Right on cue, an extremely attentive waiter interrupts to wonder if sir would like parmesan and balsamic dressing on the mixed leaves that go with his fish.) His father was a builder, used to hard graft; the family lived in County Mayo, then Wolverhampton and north-west London. “My dad was a very tough man,” he says. “He saw music as something you might do on a Saturday night or at Christmas, not a way of earning a living.”
Rowland had two sisters and a brother who became school teachers but he dropped out of education at 15. “I found the harder kids more exciting. They wore better clothes. So I gravitated towards that.” He never had a music lesson at school or any voice training – “I never even used to warm my voice up,” he says, “just walked out on stage and started singing” – but he also knew he only had one chance for the band he created in Birmingham. “I made them all pack in their jobs, sign on and rehearse all day, every day, for six months,” he says. The dedication worked.
Despite that ambition, he suggests, he never felt quite at home with success. He tells a poignant story from the time about how he couldn’t quite bring himself to say hello to Bryan Ferry when he had the chance.
“I stood next to him once in the studio,” he says, “We were both recording something and Top of the Pops was on and we both came down to watch it. I was dressed in a scruffy old tracksuit and we didn’t speak – I was always very shy in those kind of situations. And Roxy Music were heroes of ours, if you like. If you listen to the early albums, he is really singing from his soul.”
Rowland likes the freedom of living alone in a flat in Hackney, “though it’s sometimes a bit lonely”. For a decade or more, he has been working on and off on a memoir. “I’m on my second edit. But it’s not like ‘I lived in this house, then I bought a guitar, then I formed a band …’ Dexys is only part of it.”
Has setting it all down allowed him to take more pleasure in the past, what he has achieved?
“I don’t like looking back. I don’t have any of our gold discs. I’ve barely even kept any of the records. But just lately, I’ve thought, hang on. We’ve made six albums. And I think they’re all pretty good. And I’ve got another one in mind.”
So, happy birthday, I say, before he heads off. Rowland smiles. Happy is “still a work in progress”, he says, but he will go as far as “grateful”.
“When I was 15, I was often in police cells when I should have been in school, looking like a real no-hoper,“ he says. “If you had said then that I’d be sitting down now and talking to the Observer about my music, no one would have believed you …”
The Feminine Divine is out now (100% Records). Dexys play the London Palladium on Wednesday 20 Sept in the final week of their UK tour
