'I was nuts'
Four years agoKevin Rowland took the stage at the Reading festival to sing Whitney Houston's The Greatest Love of All, wearing a white dress that whipped open to reveal stockings. As he sang, he was caressed by a pair of similarly clad female dancers. As boos gradually got louder, bottles hit the stage. It was a curious ignominy for someone who had been one of the biggest stars of the 1980s.
"A voice inside said to me 'Don't do it. It's not right for you'," he says now. "But I wanted it to be dramatic. I shouldn't have done it. Having said that I was happy with my own performance.
"Do I regret the dancers?" he sighs. "Not at all. So what? There's bloody wars going on."
Rowland's life has taken innumerable twists since the halcyon days of Dexy's Midnight Runners. He's been a drug addict and a vagrant, and was once humiliatingly pursued by police over an unpaid cafe bill. But his latest development is possibly the most eyebrow-raising.
Just turned 50 ("I didn't celebrate"), Rowland is regrouping the hallowed band of his youth - not reforming, because a band that saw 30-odd musicians pass through its ranks can hardly reform. But 17 years after a messy demise, there's a new Dexy's single (the camply confessional Manhood, which shows Rowland's gift for memorable songwriting is undiminished), a best-of album and even a forthcoming biography. Rowland's new Dexy's are touring, but not on the revival circuit. He's unflinching on this: the restoration of his reputation is at stake.
"I was always very conscious that you can't just do what you did before," he says. "There's no way it could ever be like it was. I'm 20 years older. It would be stupid to try and emulate 1981."
Rowland isn't giving much away, but says that apart from faithful versions of Dexy's two number ones, Geno and Come On Eileen, the tour won't be greatest hits. Some songs have been rejected because the lyrics aren't relevant any more, others radically reworked. There will be two or three new songs. The decision to play real theatres is important because Rowland is promising "outfits, dialogue... a show".
He always was one of pop's most able chameleons. Dexy's gave pop several memorable "looks", notably the Mean Streets chic of their first incarnation and the raggle-taggle costumes of the Celtic Soul Brothers/Come On Eileen period. Today, he's wearing a herringbone jacket, white shirt and tiny crucifix - part of the look of the new nine-piece Dexy's, based on the 1947 film Brighton Rock.
Rowland once beat up a journalist and stopped giving interviews in favour of full-page "statements" to the music press, but now restricts himself to giving a verbal punch on the nose when questions get too personal. "Yow should have been a bloody psychiatrist!" Otherwise he chats about his beloved Wolves and favourite films ("Citizen Kane, I like my old classics") and says: "I've come to terms with my past," referring to the devastating fallout from Dexy's.
They only made three albums - Searching for the Young Soul Rebels (1980), Too-Rye-Ay (1982) and Don't Stand Me Down (1985) - but their catalogue stands comparison with any British group. The central thrust was Rowland's pathological passion. In Manhood, the first Dexy's single since 1986, he describes himself as a "stranger at the door". He plays this down - "there's loads of outsiders" - but the prejudicial England of the late 1970s was an unforgiving place for a son of Irish immigrants whose Black Country accent matches Noddy Holder's.
His alienation found its first outlet through crime. Before and during Dexy's, he was arrested 13 times, once for attacking a group of men with an iron bar. He makes no excuses. "I came from a culture where if somebody insulted you, you hit them," he says. "I suppose in the music business it was weird." He discovered a "deeper power" of music through Van Morrison, and poured himself into it.
Dexy's entire approach was radical. Self-styling themselves as a team - more like robbers than a pop group - the dole queue-spawned band met in caffs and planned their strategies. Signing to EMI, the band thought the royalties were too low and stole their own master tapes until the label relented (Rowland deposited them at his mum's). Drugs were banned and seen as hippie (although Dexy's was short for northern soul drug Dexedrine, which Rowland dabbled with in his youth). The band stayed in guesthouses, adhered to Rowland's notorious fitness regimes and fare-dodged on the train, even on the way to Top of the Pops.
"I've missed the banter. It keeps you grounded. I've been quite lonely," says Rowland. But it was also a very intense time. The first Dexy's effectively folded when the band left their singer. However many times Rowland regrouped Dexy's, he never felt comfortable with success. "You think it'll sort everything out but it brings a new set of problems. You'd do a 50-date tour, have a week off and there's another 50 dates." But he refutes the accusation that he deliberately sabotaged the chances of Dexy's third album, Don't Stand Me Down, by refusing to release an accompanying single.
"I honestly felt that it would stand up on its own," he says of his favourite Dexy's album, conceding that "there was someone at the record company pushing and I rebelled". Hailed as a masterpiece on its 1997 reissue, the album was originally slated. Devastated, Rowland felt he had "nothing left" and plunged towards cocaine. For nearly a decade, drugs - four grams a night - were a big problem. He lost his house and ended up begging on the street.
But Rowland's biggest problem was guilt - over his past behaviour and, particularly, about Dexy's. In 1993 he gave a harrowing interview to Q magazine in which he confessed to have "stolen" the ideas for Too Rye-Ay - featuring Come On Eileen - from former bandmate Kevin Archer, who had played Rowland his own demos for a new sound. Today, Rowland admits that he went too far and that, far from blocking out guilt, substances had made it "bigger and bigger and bigger".
"I'd been pretty mood-altered for some time. For years I thought my part in everything was bigger than it was. Then I went through a longer period of feeling I was the worst piece of shit in the world, that I was nothing of the group's talent, that it was all other people and that I was a fraud. But the truth of it is this: Kevin played me his demo tape and I was more influenced by it than I should have been - specifically his idea of combining a couple of violins with a Tamla-sounding piano, and speeding up a song and slowing it down. And that's it. I didn't steal one note of his music, not one lyric or a melody."
And now? "I'm clear of guilt." A chuckle. "Most of the time."
Even at his most ravaged, Rowland never lost touch with music. In the early 1990s, impassioned missives appeared in the letters pages of the music press, signed "Kevin Rowland, Harlesden" - or wherever he was squatting at the time. "Little things annoyed me," he shrugs. Equally, this is not the first reappearance of Dexy's. In 1993, an incarnation featuring Rowland and founder trombonist Jimmy Paterson appeared on Channel 4's Big City Zoo and demoed songs including a version of Manhood, but it fizzled out. "It wasn't the right time," says Rowland. "I had a problem with substances, I had treatment and I'm all right now."
Treatment involved hours of therapy, another explanation for Rowland's new regular blokedom. He doesn't like to analyse anything now because he went through a period of "analysing everything and it doesn't make you any wiser." He does, candidly, admit: "Four years ago I was nuts."
He signed to Creation for 1999's solo comeback My Beauty. It was a poorly received album of covers that meant something to him during his recovery. Was it something he needed to do?
"I find it slightly disturbing, that whole 'He needed to do that' thing," he spits. "Patronising. It was a record and a sleeve." I wonder aloud if part of Rowland's appearance at Reading and on the My Beauty sleeve in feminine undergarments was subconsciously inviting ridicule, as some final penance? "Aw bloody 'ell," he replies.
As the My Beauty sleeve testifies, Kevin Rowland has never lacked balls, but it seems a brave decision to call-up former Dexy's, in some cases after 20-odd years. Some have new lives in America, others were "unavailable". Was Kevin Archer "unavailable?" "You're a prober, ain't ya?!"
Williams had to think very long and hard, but was gradually convinced by Rowland's notion of doing something that would be true to the memory of Dexy's but "take it somewhere else". More than anything, Rowland simply wants to get back to work. "That's why Dexy's was good," he says. "It wasn't a coincidence. We worked our arses off. Other bands would say 'What, you practice for eight hours day?' Look, if I was in a factory I'd work eight hours a day, so if it's the thing I love, I'm gonna do it. That was always the case, and it hasn' t changed."
· Let's Make This Precious - the Best of Dexy's Midnight Runners is out on EMI on Monday. Manhood is out on September 29.