“Back in 95/96 I was going to the Strasbourg School in Holborn,” he says. Rowland credits a method acting course he took for being able to “get to the truth” of the songs. That’s what I was wearing, that’s what I was into, that was who I am He said, ‘This puts us into Radio 1 land.’” It was a lifestyle choice, not a career move. When Creation records signed him to make another Dexys record, Rowland told label boss Alan McGee he needed to record a solo album of covers first, documenting his bleakest period. Yet the songs he’d found himself reappraising during his darkest period – You’ll Never Walk Alone, This Guy’s In Love With You, Labelled With Love – remained in his head. Photograph: Andre Csillag/Rex Featuresīy the mid 90s, Rowland had put the drugs behind him and bought a flat in Brighton. But I just burst into tears, the first time I’d cried in years.”Ĭhange of pace … with Dexys Midnight Runners in the early 80s. “I don’t know what happened, man, it was highly unusual, because I’d never registered that song before, if anything I thought it was corny. One day he drove out to the West Country to get away from it all – en route, he put a tape on and heard George Benson’s version of The Greatest Love of All. You had to shout up to me to get in, the electric was wired up to bypass the meter, that kind of place.” He became hooked on cocaine – “not doing too many drugs, hopelessly addicted”, he emphasises – and was living in a squat. Yes, he says, the project sprang from a dark place: by the end of the 80s, Dexys had split following a lacklustre reaction to what many now regard as their masterpiece, Don’t Stand Me Down.
There’s no listlessness on show as he spends an hour setting the record straight about My Beauty. It’s only now that it’s started slightly to come back again, a lot of fatigue.” “One in particular I woke up at 3am with my chest so tight I thought that was it – ‘Have I got everything sorted out, is everything OK with my daughter?’ But that didn’t last long.
“I was only really bad for a few nights,” he says. Today Rowland is in good spirits, despite having struggled since lockdown with what he thinks must be a persistent case of Covid-19. Reissued … Kevin Rowland’s album My Beauty.