Kevin Rowland: 'I didn’t even recognise the past, I wasn’t thinking about it at all'

Back in 2016, Kevin Rowland was at a crossroads in life. Grieving the loss of his mother, who had died at the start of the year, the singer, who for nearly four decades had been the lynchpin of the band Dexys, had thrown his energies into making a themed album of covers of Irish and country soul songs.

Although the album had performed well, reaching the band’s highest chart position since the glory days of Too-Rye-Ay, 34 years earlier, they only played two gigs to support it – one at the Irish Embassy in London and the other at Rough Trade East record store – and Rowland found himself listless.

“I just wanted to get away from music,” he recalls in a video call to The Yorkshire Post seven years from that creative impasse. “I had nothing at that point. It seemed such an effort. You know just when you’ve lost your vitality, your interest in something, I just really had lost it and I thought I’ve got to do something else.”

Rowland toyed with the idea of clothing line but “in the end it didn’t work out”, so he took himself off on a couple of trips to Thailand. The idea, he says, was “not to think about getting into music”, but simply to get away; eventually he sought spiritual enlightment through studying the teachings of the Tao and Tantra. While there, thoughts of returning to his previous career seemed anathema. “In fact, when I did a course out there somebody said to me, ‘Once you’ve done all this stuff, you could do music in another way’, I was like no, I don’t want to do music,” he remembers.

In 2020 Cherry Red reissued his long-lost solo album My Beauty, sparking a critical reappraisal of a collection of covers that back in the laddish 1990s had been derided for its cover photograph of Rowland in a dress and stockings. But the pivotal moment for the singer came the following year, when he was able to fulfil a long-held desire to completely remix Too-Rye-Ay. In dealing with the past, he says: “I just had a feeling I could actually do music now. It surprised me as much as anything, and I just thought, ‘wow, I’m going to go with this’ and I rang Jim (Paterson, Dexys’ trombonist through various incarnations of the band since 1978) and said ‘let’s go’.”

The process of revisiting Dexys Midnight Runners’ 1982 landmark, which involved extensive communication with enginer Pete Schwier and his former partner Helen O’Hara, who’d arranged the strings, was certainly inspiring, but another factor, Rowland says, was “working on myself a bit”. “I felt I had something to say at that point, as opposed to just doing music for the sake of it.”

Dexys’ new album, The Feminine Divine, is a concept record of sorts. Rowland says: “I just thought of it first of all as a bunch of songs, I wasn’t thinking in terms of anything, and then I sat down one night and wrote the words to Feminine Divine and I was like ‘Oh wow, where did that come from? That’s interesting’ and then I started to write other bits and pieces and at some point I had them all listed on my laptop in the Notes app and I thought, ‘Hang on a minute, if I put that song first and that song second it tells a story’. When I saw that I went with it and then we started to do a few little touches to make that flow more.”

Alongside Paterson, who played on Dexys Midnight Runners’ classics such as Geno, Come On Eileen and This is What She’s Like and whom Rowland describes as “a rock – he’s just Dexys, really, he gets it on such a deep level”, the band’s present-day nucleus includes Sean Read (“who has been there since One Day I’m Going To Soar, he’s great to have around and write with”) and Mike Timothy. “It just felt good with those guys, the four of us,” Rowland says.

Key track It’s Alright (Manhood) has been around since the early 1990s – and was recorded once before, on a 2003 ‘best of’. Here, the singer “took a while” to revise its lyrics. “It knew it was a really important track and I just felt yes, it had been out before but that was on a compilation and never on a proper album,” he says. “I really liked the music for it and thought we could use that.”

Rowland believes his views on masculinity and femininity have evolved substantially since the 1990s. “When I got into recovery from cocaine addiction, I felt like I had a blank slate, it was a new start,” he explains. “I didn’t even recognise the past, I wasn’t thinking about it at all. When (My Beauty) came out people just linked it to the past; it was no continuation, for me, it was a new start. I almost wished I didn’t have a past because I felt it was dragging me down and back to that, which is not what I was. I was quite surprised by some of the reactions.

“But I had this new start. One day it just came to me – I think I’m going to paint my nails and toenails, I’m going to wear a kilt, I’m going to wear some sandals, which gives it a kind of ancient Greek look. Just as I was going off to sleep one night, I imagined a dress, so I woke up and got a pen and paper and drew it and had it made, and that was it. I was just following inspiration, like I do with everything else.”

Rowland has previously said that growing up in Wolverhampton and Harrow, he found it “hard” to be himself at home. His father worked in the building trade and although close to his mother, it was only through clothes and later music that he was able to properly express himself. He believes that’s true “more now than ever” – indeed he designed the suit he wore in the video for I’m Going To Get Free. “I’ve got the confidence to do whatever I want, wear whatever I want,” he says. “It took a long time. I think I was still quite influenced by my parents in adult life, really.”

As a teenager he drew inspiration from the likes of David Bowie and Bryan Ferry, whose look evolved from record to record. “Especially Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music, he was in his heyday in the 70s. When he wore that white tuxedo in ’73 that was radical because most bands looked like Status Quo then,” he says. “He was just so far ahead of his time and a big influence on all the New Romantics and all of that. Bowie too – the Young Americans look, the David Live look, Low, they were just great, I was bang up for all of that.”

Today, Rowland makes a conscious effort to rein in his “control freak” tendencies. It is, he believes, a sign that he has mellowed as he nears 70. “I think I have – I’ll find out when we get out on this tour (for The Feminine Divine) – but certainly this album has been easier than the last two because I was a total control freak on the last two. I’m happy with them but I didn’t like the way I felt at the end of it. I was just thinking ‘I don’t know if I can keep doing this’, it was so much effort. From doing the vocal to recording everything live, thinking about the drummer’s hi-hat pattern, the bass player’s notes, thinking of all of these things, it was just too much. I felt more like a film director than a singer.”

With a September tour that starts in York on the horizon, Rowland is busy with preparations. He says he finds the build-up “very” stressful, adding he is “already quite nervous”, but he says he’s “doing stuff to try and calm down”. On a good night, the moment of release occurs onstage. “If it’s going well, it’s great, I love it,” he says. “It’s like it’s effortless, the audience are with you. It’s an absolute magic that happens. I can’t really get that anywhere else.”

The first half of the shows on this tour will be dedicated to the new record, and the band will be performing with a female singer. “The first half is going to be the whole of the new album, and we’re going to act it out as well, it’ll be a theatrical performance, and then there’s an interval and then we come back and do the old stuff.”

The Feminine Divine is out now. Dexys play at York Barbican on Tuesday September 5. https://dexysofficial.com/