Kevin Rowland: Beyond Come On Eileen

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0:43hello and welcome to full disclosure a podcast project designed to let me spend more time with interesting people than i would ever get on the radio um kevin roland welcome thanks james uh it's lovely to see you it's lovely to see you looking so well because one thing that i think anyone who reads your new book will come away with is is and i hope you don't find this patronizing is quite a protective feeling that you have well sort of yeah i'm glad i'm glad you're doing so well and sort of a desire people some people might read it and think that they wish they could look after you a bit it's during some of the periods you cover in the book but not now interesting yeah interesting never thought of that well we should start at the beginning um which is in 1953 a brief period in wolverhampton that you're probably too young to remember before you relocated to mayo exactly yeah i went to mayo about one years old i don't really remember it i remember being in mayo those are my first memories because because your dad worked in construction like a lot of irish men in that in that era pretty much all of them did didn't they and then back to britain how old were you when you came back to britain i was four years old I just started school in Ireland and then a couple of months and then over to England and started school.

1:57Do you know why? Why were they moving around so much? Yeah, I do. Not long. I mean, my dad, you know, all power to him. He came over here from Mayo and just before the Second World War. And he was a labourer and he just queued for a day's work. Yeah, you. OK. No, you were lazy yesterday. OK, you. That kind of thing. He worked hard. He became a carpenter. And then before long, he set up his own business in the early 50s, which he lost just before I was born. Right. So he lost the house as well. Everything. So my mum and the four kids, and she was pregnant at the time with my younger sister. We all went back to dad's farm in Ireland.

2:41Gosh. Yeah. To the bosom of the... Tiny farm. For safety. Yeah. Literally. Yeah. But it was always a temporary thing. Temporary thing. He was planning to come back and do it all again. Exactly. he stayed in England in Wolverhampton working staying with my mum's brother working and sending money home to my mum which she saved for another deposit and then we all came back so your mum had faith in him then oh god yeah I guess so to think that I'll give him another go we were very strict Catholics so there was never any no matter what was going on and there wasn't and they were you know they were generally all right um and there's arguments and stuff but divorce or anything like that would never be even an option you know and you mentioned being catholics you were an altar server you went the whole nine yards didn't you did the whole yeah catholic church i got right into the church thing yeah i loved it i was catholic i raised catholic again in a sort of second third generation irish family but when other people read that he thought about being a priest he dreamed of training to be a priest they sort of go wow that's a bit weird but for kids raised in the case i think every boy went through a period of thinking that he possibly had a calling i think so i think so and we're given quite a lot of encouragement really you want to sign us up quick if you're breathing you're in but they didn't let me in but you didn't try very hard to get into it did you i tried pretty hard i did the latin lessons every saturday morning but i was pretty slow on it and i went as far as meeting the bishop in birmingham we got the bus to Birmingham me and my mum we met the bishop I sat the exam but the trouble was simultaneously I'd been getting in quite a lot of trouble at school and I'm sure they would have written to the head nun for a reference who had already told my mum I was going to be going nowhere you know well that was a recurring theme in your childhood that you were going to go nowhere yeah and your dad joined in a bit sometimes very much why was that I have no idea what was it about you that made him and others think that you were destined for well either either well jail actually at some point yeah um i mean it was very confusing because the first time he said it i was eight years old and he said you remember it yeah i remember it well um we were sitting around and i think it was my sister asked the question what do you think i'll be when i grow up dad you'll be a teacher what do you think i'll be when my brother said what do you think i'll be dad i think you'll be a businessman man what about me dad you and he just got serious you'll be married with a kid when you're 17 that's what he said and i pretended to not know what he meant but i did know what he meant because my older brother had already told me about babies and stuff um i mean many years later when i first um stopped taking drugs you know and i was doing some therapy and trying to work everything out and trying to get well i realized i needed to go and talk to my dad and with the therapist we worked out a strategy and i went home and i i said to my dad um dad am i like you he went no i said nothing like you no nothing like me i said who am i like he said you're a mcdonald that's my mum's side gosh so i don't know and i said what were they like and this therapist was clever at work that he said well i wonder what your dad's relationship was like with them so i said to my dad um how did you get on with them and he said yeah all right but they thought they were better than everyone else and they thought i wasn't good enough for her my mum wow yeah so maybe that was it i don't know but he projected that onto you at eight in a way maybe yeah it's hard to know what was in his mind you know well he wouldn't know himself would he that's no exactly exactly you learn all these things about people that you didn't know there you go i can hear the wolverhampton coming out now occasionally yeah probably when i'm talking to another one kid and stuff kiddie it cost me a fortune for my parents for me to have this accent how dare you hide it well because you didn't stay in wolverhampton but but you went to school there and that's where you didn't find school easy at all did you no i did initially i wasn't bad i wasn't bad but to be honest i don't blame my old man because you know i love him and and i want to take responsibility for myself but there was a hell of a lot of pressure being put on me you know and really all of my family but um myself and my my uh one of my brothers we unlike the other three we were just weren't academic really right but i wasn't too bad to begin with but in the end i just felt this is not for me and it's like it's all pressure and i just lost interest in it really and so it's classic immigrant experience is that education was the way for you to climb totally societies totally dad was totally obsessed with it like passing the 11 plus was life or death right i failed yeah yeah and and so these are early formative experiences that i mean you're very very young to be already feeling like a failure already feeling like you because you spent your whole life one of the things you take away from the book is you you you really wanted your dad's approval but you very rarely did anything that was likely to win it i mean i did do things i did try to get his approval you know i did try some people pleasing and doing what he wants and i went to the building school which is what he wanted and i went to work for him in his building firm and and after a year of i left school at 15 that was the school leaving age then and after working in shops and dunn and co dunn and co that's yeah i've got a raincoat from there wow and um other things print and apprenticeship i thought oh he's right I'll go and went to a further education college eventually got a couple of o-levels after a lot of trying but you know but eventually I realized it's not for me that yeah I mean it's just not for me what was for you I mean hairdressing right clothes creativity creativity yeah and where we where would you get to indulge that well eventually I found a job hairdressing I got on a government training course when I was like 20 or 21 what did your dad make of that he didn't say because that time I'd moved they were in London by then and I'd moved back to the Midlands I'd gone to Birmingham and he didn't say anything so I think it was good that I was kind of away and you were earning a wage tell me a bit about the years in London so it goes Wolverhampton, Mayo, Wolverhampton London yeah London at the age, just turned 11 this was your dad's business was it?

9:03yeah they moved him he was working for Lovett big building company he was a site agent by then it's quite a big job quite a big job they really appreciate him they had a big job in London and they said we'll move the whole family I'd have thought you'd be excited by the idea of moving to London I was I loved it the big city great I loved it excitement I loved it did you make friends erm I struggled I had a really broad Wolverhampton accent yes you know a really broad Wolverhampton accent and erm about the second or third day we had a drama class I'd never even heard of the word before in Wolverhampton and erm it was a 64 general election was coming up and we were all asked to make a speech about who we're supporting and I said I'm supporting Labour and I gave a speech why and the drama teacher was I could tell she was quite charmed by my accent and then she said now tell everybody your name and see where you're from and I went the only way I knew how my name is Kevin Rowland and I've come from Wolverhampton and the class just descended into uproar and that became like a catchphrase people would be coming up to me my name is Gary Ryan I'm coming from Wolverham but they got the accent hideously wrong so I had to be a Cockney really quick to fit in did you do that consciously you got code switched totally as they call it these days I think they do so you'd have a different accent at home than you did at school would you come back probably or start shifting and mum and dad had Irish accents as well so there's quite a potpourri going on here there's a lot of influence yeah there is there is and does it mean you didn't know quite where you fitted in you didn't know quite where you were supposed to slot in think so definitely and i was a different person at home because i was supposed to be really good at home and everything like that yeah but i was drawn to the kids who were causing trouble you know well when did you start getting into trouble well i was in trouble in primary school i was in trouble in secondary school and by the time i was 13 possibly 14 i think 13 i made my first appearance at harrow juvenile court that forged a bus pass train pass tube and bus pass quite creative criminality yeah it wasn't hitting people over the head or anything like that i mean you progressed into petty theft and things that yeah a bit harder morally to defend yeah but uh but you had quite a serious smoking habit i did i did i was totally addicted to nicotine i had to get money for them every day so we haven't mentioned music yet and yeah it i mean it was it was in your home growing up but music wasn't running through your childhood like blackpool through a stick of rock or no really i mean it was but if whatever you could hear on the radio or you know read magazines at school but not so much at home like my old man was work is serious music is for enjoyment that's separate it's very separate you know it's that kind of thing and when did you first get i mean i've so i've got this sense now of a of a blossoming creativity that is frustrated by expectations you've got you're getting into trouble probably as a consequence of of that tension inside you maybe but and and not enjoying school not not feeling that school is something you're going to be able to ace so i don't quite know when music began to present itself to you as something that was going to be your life or your future um well it it very young i loved elvis and and you know all the pop singers of the day in the early 60s and um you know i'd be listening to the radio under the bed to the radio luxembourg to the new songs and all of that um and i loved that um and i thought then in those days actually um i mean one of the criticisms one of the nuns you know you can get up here and sing a tommy steel song but you know you won't work out of your lessons it wasn't tommy steel it was elvis but anyway um you you know i would get up and sing and i just thought it comes really easy when i grow up i'm going to be a teenager like my older brothers and then i'm going to be in a band i'm going to play guitar i'm going to sing i just thought it's really easy but then what happened as as i went on i think i just lost confidence in that and right through secondary school i didn't sing i thought it's off the agenda for me i'm going to be doing building or something but it was only later on i was about 20 21 uh my older brother pat i tried to learn i tried to learn a guitar my mum had bought me a guitar a four stringer for my 10th or 11th birthday i had a couple of guitar lessons but by then it was just like maths and I just couldn't concentrate.

13:26I just couldn't play it really. And eventually, when I was 20, my older brother, he was in a three-piece social club band in Birmingham, working men's clubs, and the guitarist, Steve, was leaving and he'd give him six months' notice and my brother said, if you learn all the songs in six months, you're in. So that was enough incentive. Just about was good enough after that six months, yeah, to get on the stage with the band. And when did you start writing stuff? Almost immediately. as soon as you'd mastered the guitar as soon as I could play a few chords and I was going to my brother can I stick this song in in the set and he was like well they don't really want to hear that they want to hear Elvis and Beatles but he let me put one or two in which is kind of him you've described that particular brother as being more like a father figure to you haven't you so he'd look after you would he and quite a nice introduction to performing then really when you've got someone with you you can trust completely Yeah, definitely.

14:24Yeah, he was a mentor in that way.

14:53medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestyllibre.us. I just want to back up a little bit because again something that people of a certain age will struggle to fully understand but the discipline at your Catholic schools was was vicious. It was corporal. Yeah. So you'd get beaten a lot. Yeah. And your dad would sometimes take the belt to you at home. He would. This is what I meant when you sat down about coming away just feeling protective towards little right right little kevin right not you kevin yeah yeah but little kevin had had a pretty tough time with it definitely definitely and you know the belting was one thing but i think the hardest thing was having to be someone else at home yeah just just fit in having to deny my own interest my dad said you're in you've got the you're interested in the wrong things it's a direct quote you know so i had to make out like i'm interested in other things yeah I don't know whether he thought they were effeminate or what he thought.

15:50I don't know. But that's it. It's an incredible way of putting it, isn't it? You're interested in the wrong things because it gives you nowhere to go. What are you supposed to do if someone says you're interested in the wrong thing? Because these are genuine, authentic feelings and enthusiasm. Yeah, passions. I loved them. I loved them. I was drawing pictures of people in clothes. I'd be trying to comb his hair. I'd sit behind him. He's in a chair like you. I'd sit behind him, combing his hair. I think he tolerated it. And he just couldn't see anything worth encouraging or worth cherishing or celebrating.

16:22No. So you talk about confidence a lot. And yet you'd need to be confident. Passions is the right word, isn't it? Because it would have to be a passion for you not to surrender it, really. If you'd had a choice in the matter, you might have been able to be more like what he wanted you to be like. Without doubt. Without doubt. But, yeah, I suppose it was a passion. and to be honest it was really you know no offense to my parents i love them of course it was when i got away that i was able to get into music be a hairdresser you know do the things i really wanted and that involved moving back to the midlands yeah so not moving into soho or something like that which would be a slightly more obvious destination than digworth or whatever it was yeah i don't think i had the confidence to do that you know what i mean i don't think i had the confidence to go up the clubs or whatever in the west end i mean i know a lot of people who did and be involved in whatever scene.

17:13I found that really hard. And you had Pat to keep an eye on you or to keep an arm around you when you went back to Birmingham. So talk to me about the evolution then of being the guitarist in a working man's club band. I mean, the artist you became was incredibly flamboyant, renowned for creativity, for the look as much as the sound. When did that start developing? thing when when did you feel that begin to bloom the the clothes everything just when did you sort of become the person that you'd always wanted to be as opposed to the person that your dad wanted you to be i think it was when i was um when i was doing hairdressing and playing in my brother's band you know i remember just thinking god life is really good it was the summer of 76 and i just thought it's really good i always love the hot weather anyway and uh i'm i'm cutting hair during the day you know i really enjoyed it especially the creative cuts interesting cuts that were around at the time wedges fireflies and all that i loved it and then i'm playing in the in my brother's band in the evenings and i was really passionate about it to me brother and the drummer i think there's a few beers a few quid at the weekend but i was going lads what if we do this and what if we do that you know and were you good uh i wasn't a great guitar player um but um you know I had some good ideas and you knew they were good ideas I felt they were good how do you what do you measure that against how do you know how do you discover whether or not the good ideas you've got are going to translate into a wider audience who are going to bring people in well I wasn't sure but we had a rehearsal once we did that Beatles song and I love her yeah and I remember saying to Pat I said you know that me late bit you know a love like ours will never die I said how about we all just go and cut the instruments and say a love like ours bling will never die and then same again another time bring it back in at the end and that sounds great and he said to me I spoke to mum and I said Kev's got more talent in his little finger than the rest of the family put together that's what he said to me so it's quite moving so he knew and he knew that possibly you might be destined for greater things and he wasn't yeah i'm not sure you you know i said to him i think i'd like to get in a band and do this seriously he was like oh i don't know did you sing with him or did i did i started singing with him i started doing backing vocals first of all and then um people must have noticed the voice no not really i mean the first time i started singing we did it was a cole porter song called True Love.

19:53I give to you and you give to me true love. We did it in rehearsal. It sounded great. At Tamworth, where I was due to sing it, I got up and I sang it and this screeching came out and I thought, bloody hell, I'm not going to sing for a bit. Nerves, do you think? I think it was nerves, yeah. So I just left it for a bit, continued doing backing vocals and then about three or four months, six months later, I did me and Bobby McGee and that sounded, it was easier to sing, it sounded a bit better and then I'd eventually do one or two more, you know I started singing more but I still wasn't you know so this is a happy period then it was this is a nice sort of chapter yeah when you're not kind of setting enormous goals for yourself you're just enjoying what you're doing I was on a stage man I was on a stage singing songs and hairdressing was a bit like a stage for you as well it really was I mean I was like in the there was a glass screen at the front a mirror no a window at the front and I was upstairs cutting hair and dressed in these cool clothes it was good so what changed i mean when did you decide i want more i saw a band called deaf school just before punk happened and um they were about my age and they were using references from the 20s 30s 40s 50s and 60s and had not punk happened when it did i think they would have been absolutely massive oh okay yeah it's just one of them things they just got brushed aside serendipity yeah um but they were way ahead and all that kind of look and what they were doing kind of came back a lot in about 1981.

21:20They were just a few years ahead of their time. I saw them, and that gave me an idea, I'm going to form another band, you know. And while we were forming that band, punk came along. And by the time we were ready to start doing gigs, punk happened. So I kind of joined in with that, really. And set up another band. Yeah. And that, again, we're back to this curious, contradictory relationship with confidence, because you need to be really confident to do some of the things that you've done yeah and yet even not your voice not working properly in tamworth the confidence didn't come naturally to you in other areas no i think i was driven more than confident you know okay yeah i was really driven i was desperate yeah to what to prove to anybody like i remember sitting in bed one day when i was you know lying in bed i talk about it in a book and saying um if i can just get on top of the pops i'll have something nobody else i know was got and i literally thought no one would be able to put me down that's how i felt you know which has got to bring you back to your dad hasn't it i suppose so laceratingly critical it's almost an on the mat appear isn't it it sounds like it's cutting yeah you say laceratingly and also another thing you talk about is possibly undiagnosed dyslexia and knowing on some level that you weren't thick but being treated as if you were by the world well that's how it was then i I mean, ADHD or any of that wasn't a thing.

22:44Yeah. You know, you were just, you know, getting the corner or whatever it was. You know, that's how it was. They didn't have time. But you knew that you weren't. Well, I sometimes, I often thought I was, you know, maybe I am. You believed them. Yeah. Well, you keep hearing it. You're going to believe it. But there was a little spark in me, obviously, that believed I wasn't. I'm going to prove that I'm not. It comes up a lot in these interviews. Around that age, people, particularly with undiagnosed conditions. The last one was Brian Conley, who has gone on to do all sorts of things. But when he did therapy, partly as a consequence of alcoholism, he discovered that he'd spent his whole life on a stage shouting, see, I'm not stupid.

23:25His teachers had told him he was stupid. His parents were very supportive. But it was almost like you're written off at an early age, and something inside you says, this isn't quite fair. This isn't quite right. That's exactly it. I was driven to prove myself that's what it was all about I was so driven yeah and that probably explains why when things began to go right for you you were you frightened of it slipping away is that why you became so well some might say controlling I think it's a word you use yourself 100 % I became really controlling because you didn't want it to slip through your fingers or yeah I was terrified of it slipping through my fingers I also was I did doubt my own talent you know in the first band yeah i was uh the first exes you know i was um uh i i said to the band look i had a mission you know and i said to the guys look we do this we're packing our jobs we rehearse all day we're on the doll you could live on it in those days yeah and um we rehearse nine to five and we'll do well follow this and we're going to do well and they all went okay and we did it and then when we started to do well i was like is this it is this all there is and I thought I've got nothing to show them now I've got nothing there's no carrot to say if we do this this is going to happen and I felt I was losing control because initially I was leading yeah I was leading they were prepared to follow me I didn't I wasn't that controlling to begin with it but I was leading but um when we started to get successful I think I did panic and I just became really controlling and the more I tried to control them the more they resisted and the more they resisted the more i tried to control them it's a vicious circle yeah it was going nowhere you know you can see it happening yeah well i can now stop it you couldn't see it at the time people must have told you what do you mean by controlling i mean enforcing you didn't tell everyone what to wear but you you wanted full rehearsal everyone had to be sober it was a proper professional operation i pretty much did tell everyone what to wear as well yeah i tried to and then they got fed up with that i can't blame them you know i wouldn't want anybody selling me what do you think it was i don't know i there's golf on at the weekend and this fellow who keeps winning the golf yeah um scheffler he gave an interview and it's upset all the other golfs he keeps winning everything at the moment and he said it's not very fulfilling he said i've won it now and i get two minutes of feeling fantastic and then and then and oddly it reminds you're reminding me of him a bit at the moment that idea of i've got it this thing i always want i mean top of the pops and then suddenly it's not changed the way that everything feels yeah and i feel guilty even saying that because as i'm saying it i'm conscious that it's so many people's dream and it was my dream and i and i regret that i wasn't able to relax and enjoy it more you know it would have been a lot better for me for everyone else around me you know it's a recurring theme isn't it that not being able to enjoy it while things were good.

26:28Where do you think that comes from? Catholic guilt? Bit too obvious. Knowing that your dad's not that impressed? Maybe. I mean, my dad was never really happy with whatever he achieved. You know what I mean? He never seemed really happy. I mean, we were in Harrow, North West London, and loads of kids at school, their dads were builders as well. You know, they had small building furnaces just like my dad's. And they seemed a lot more chilled, their dads. and do you know what I mean? And my dad was always, work, work, work. I would work for him and it would be long hours. It'd be rarely any kind of dinner break.

27:04You know, it was, come on, lads, work. And you'd come home exhausted and that's kind of how it was, you know. And I don't know. Was he frustrated? Was there something else he wanted to be? Was he a frustrated intellectual or a frustrated artist of some sort? He probably was. I think one of my sisters asked him what would he like to have been. He said he'd like to have been a solicitor, a lawyer or something. Right, yeah. Yeah. So very conscious of where class and background and education had put him. I think so. I think he really was, yeah. Which makes it even harder for him to understand someone like you who wants to fly off in completely different directions.

27:37Yeah, yeah. He was obsessed with security as well, you know. Financial security. I think so. Yeah. I mean, even like about 10 or 15 years before he passed, he said to me, you might have been better off if you stayed with me in the building. I said, Dad, I had a number one single in America. and he said i know that but there's no security in that game well he had a point didn't he sort of a sort of a point well who knows if i'd been in the building god knows what i'd have done but you've also talked about thinking that you should that dexies should have been bigger that you should have been the most influential band of your generation i mean this is again why i sat down and used the word protective you never stop beating yourself up do you i think you have now a bit in the book you mean well generally in life you know i mean even when you're in the yeah um but you feel you feel missed opportunities even as so then you said with great confidence i had a number one record in in in america yeah and yeah at the time it was almost like it wasn't reaching the parts you expected it to read i think it didn't you know it didn't it's not fair it's not fair i remember when it happened when we got a number one in america everyone else was celebrating we were on tour somewhere in belgium or somewhere like that and everyone was celebrating and i and i didn't that was come on eileen yeah yeah because gino went to number one in this country it did so you you know you became quite a big deal quite quickly yeah but you never really felt like you were a big enough deal or you never really felt like a big deal at all i felt like a big deal at all and i always felt the pressure to do the next thing you know what are we going to do next and i've got to do it and you know i felt that and i felt alone with that really you know you yeah because i've been watching as a kid i don't i think i don't think i realized dexies was a band band when i was what did you think it was i just thought it was you with with some musicians okay and that's that's what you mean by leading and that's what you mean by the pressure of feeling i mean i was i was tiny i'm 20 years younger than you so yeah you know i wasn't paying that much attention it came on the telly but it did it didn't it wasn't like wasn't like one of those bands where everybody had a clear role and knew what they were supposed to be doing even then as a as a viewer of top of the pops it looked like your project it looked right you were right well i mean i led the first band i think it was a band to begin with it was a band but then when that band broke up it was you know very much okay i think i had all the power then yeah so i was kind of saying we're going to do this going to wear this yeah why did you keep the name why did you not just go solo at that point i considered that um what happened is the first band um where i was like i was talked about previously where i was being really controlling yeah eventually they got really fed up yeah and kevin archer said to me he called me and he said we were in we were in zurich or on the last leg of a european tour and he said they want to carry on without you kev and i was like relief and then like an hour later one of them called my room and said can i meet you in reception and he said we want to carry on dex's uh without you we're going to get another singer and again i was just like what a relief and i could breathe because all of the stress just left me really yeah yeah it all just left me i was like oh it's over thank god because i've been holding so tight onto everything yes anyway and then i was just like great and then the next day i think we did this interview with this guy from le mans le mans yeah french newspaper and he just said the first album he said he said i've just wrote a rave review he said it's the best thing since the first roxy album and he said i've just wrote a review that means you have to buy this album for le mans i was like shit that's great and i started to think god dexies really means something and after a couple of days i was thinking shit i ain't letting them take my band and um i'm gonna form another one right you know and i was like kev are you in jim are you in yeah And they went, yeah.

31:34And so the other five went off and they tried to form, tried to do it as Dex's Me Night Runners, but I registered the name really quickly. After all, I'd thought of it. Yeah, of course. In their company, but I'd thought of it. So I carried on. Probably the wrong thing to do. I think it would have been better if I'd paused, taken a breath and looked at what had happened. But I didn't. I was driven by them trying to take my band. I was just on this mission to form another one. Better. why do you think you needed that journalist to make you appreciate how good the album was i don't know i really don't know because it's i mean the creative process is a strange one isn't it you need some people need external validation some people they always say van gogh didn't sell a single painting in his lifetime but he cracked on with it didn't he so he didn't need true as you kind of did then at that point well he was driven wasn't he he was yeah yeah completely driven but he didn't need anyone i mean you you didn't realize you'd recorded a masterpiece until other people started telling you that you had yeah yeah i've just felt it was as good as we could get it you know and that's all you can ask for when you leave the studio you know if you've got a vision for something and then you fulfill it with any luck it quite often turns about a bit better than new thought.

33:19founded freestyellibre.us so for people who don't know or for people who've discovered you later in life um after you've you know been through addiction and stuff like that tell them what the band was like tell them what dex's midnight runners were bringing to the market or to the screens that no one else had previously that's really uh i felt that when we started in 1978 the plan was we're going to use soul music because soul music was not hip in 1978 you were not reading about soul music in the enemy it was all guitar bass and drums you know maybe post-punk industrially type things and we thought we're going to bring some emotion back into music you know but we're going to do it in a new way we're going to do it in a contemporary way it's not going to be you know your standard soul yeah we're going to have different kinds of lyrics talk about different things not just love or whatever and that's what we did and what were you listening to well i was listening to i went back because i went back to all the old 60s soul records aretha franklin otis reddin to study the arrangements and study what they'd done you know to try and take inspiration from that and obviously i was influenced by what was going on at the time as well punk yes and everything but i wanted to so taking it very seriously totally and and having like a plan as it were 100 knowing what you wanted to put together and that reached into also the aesthetic that also reached into how you wanted it to look totally and and you know you mentioned earlier that i was saying like if we if we'd have followed the original path we could have been the most perhaps biggest band of the 80s i don't know you know i don't want to get into too much of i could have been someone i could have been the contender but the fact of it is when we started off in 1978 summer of 78 i had the vision i had the feeling that after punk it just felt punk was over by then yeah it felt grubby i felt dirty i wanted to dress up i wanted to look good yeah i was inspired by roxy music if there was a prototype it was original roxy 72 we're using the 1950s as an influence but creating something new with it dressed great you know so i thought okay we're going to dress up and other people started to have that feeling as well like the blitz was not about but shortly after it started you know yeah and um we had that look and it was going really well and we felt we were ahead of everybody you know i mean we just had this mission and we rehearsed for six months we started doing gigs first gig was in wolverhampton we went into a pub we said the landlord can we just play here on a saturday afternoon for free yeah all right then yeah so there's all these football fans in there i'm a wolf fan anyway but we're dressed in all this basically new romantic clothes yeah in 1970 early 79 like a year before that happened and um the audience you know we're trying to you know have goes at us and I didn't care because I just felt we're on this mission.

36:13You don't get us. Loads of other people will. We've got this thing under our belt now. We've got another gig. A few technical difficulties have been ironed out. Job done. Next gig. And that's how we rolled. And we were just building an audience in Birmingham. The specials who were further on than us, they hadn't released their first big single, Gangsters, but they were about to. They started coming to our gigs. Now, they were influenced by the 60s, the whole Scar thing. Yeah. but they were wearing like 60s clothes as well now we thought that was too far right we were in two-tone yeah we were wearing basically futuristic clothes right uh but our music was influenced by the 60s they started coming to our gigs and we liked them and we went to their gigs you know and they said can you support us in manchester so we went along and supported him in manchester similar thing happened as in wolverhampton the crowd i don't know what they thought whether we're effeminate or what but they started on us they started trying to pull my microphone and you know and all of that and a fight ensued right and we had to be locked in the dressing room for our own safety because they went and got all their mates there was about 30 guys apparently the bouncers told us patrolling the club looking for us so a few months later the specials released gangsters it's a big hit and um they phoned us up and said we're recording our album and we want to use your brass section and i said no way because it's our sound and if we give it to you then we're going to look second best by the time we put something out we hadn't got anything out by then hardly anybody knew us except in Birmingham and they said well if you don't let us use your brass section we got the message back through the management uh you can't come on our tour on our two-tone tour I said we don't want to go on the tour your audience had lynched us because it was so singular yes uh we got the message back then okay uh it doesn't matter that you won't let us use your brass section for the album we want you on the tour anyway and I sent the message back we don't want to go on the tour you know we want to do our own thing and we turned down and offered to be on two-tone records for the same reason yeah and you didn't have a deal at this point we didn't have a deal so it was really confident quite ballsy that was it was and there was guys in the band going what's he doing we've just been offered a record deal yeah you know but you knew i did know in your bones i did know in my bones i felt it yeah but then i got the message back from uh dave cork was our manager in birmingham and bernard roads who had managed the clash had formed a little record company called oddball and we were signing to them we got the message back from bernard through david saying you have to go on that tour this is going to be the biggest tour of the year if you're not on it you're probably gonna this is your chance you're probably gonna lose it so i started to waver i started to doubt myself and um i think am i gonna blow it here you know i might be in too obstinate so i called a band meeting but i'd already made up my mind really and there was only one guy in the band you know to change the look basically to go on the tour there was only one guy in the band jeff blithe who just said that's a real shame because the whole thing was a vision but anyway we changed we changed and we went on that tour and we kind of come up with that new york docker look yeah which would be just about acceptable to their audience right but would give us some individuality sure and it was a good look but i mean you know a year later the whole new romantic thing exploded and we were kind of made to look old-fashioned really so yeah it's i mean you really you take quite a forensic approach to the industry don't you and is it well at the time you are you're thinking about these things and you're seeing that as a trade-off but really what you're constantly doing is is trying to hold on to your own authenticity yeah in a world that doesn't really want you to exactly in a world that's pressurized me not to exactly that's the same thing that happened at home it totally is i can see that you're trying to be something that you're not and that's compromise kind of felt familiar i was like okay oh boy do you know what i mean yeah of course i do yeah it's weird yeah isn't it yeah and that's why the success didn't probably didn't slap as hard as it should have yeah because i felt we'd cut off our wings really to you know half their potential it didn't help that it worked or well except that you've then got that path not taken thing going on in the back of your mind all the time yeah yeah i didn't i wasn't even aware of it that's how much denial i was in i was just oh them bands are shit they're they're lightweight compared to us you know yeah it was only about 20 years actually when i really started to write the book yes i started to think hang on and i saw it all you know yeah it's when i started to write because i started it 20 years ago i've not been writing for 20 years sure but i i started it and i started to write down all the ideas and it's percolating yeah and the more i looked the more it all came out yeah it was a revelation really well yeah i can see that and for you i mean it's a revelation for the readers but it's a revelation for the writer as well yeah a lot of it yeah and stuff begins to make sense and i suppose if you were carrying all that um it becomes less surprising that that you fell apart later when when the band had kind of dissolved and the solo career hadn't kicked on in the way that you would have wanted yeah you didn't really know what to do with yourself and as for a lot of people before you cocaine became the crutch became the number one priority yeah it was like um the the the the the band had been my addiction kind of thing for about six, seven, eight years, you know?

41:37And when that was sort of over that phase, I was just like, it just became, somebody gave me a line of cocaine. It was just like, yeah, yeah. It really did something for me. You know, I don't have to worry about that for the next hour or two hours or whatever it is. Don't have to worry about the band. I don't have to worry about anything. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all of the anxiety had gone. Yeah. I started to go out because what happened is when I'd been doing Dexies, all during that, hardly socialized. Right. It was everything to me. I remember one New Year's Eve, everybody was going, I just sat in.

42:13I didn't have anywhere to go. You know, the band was everything to me. It was my life. And when that was sort of over, you know, it was just like, and I started to go out and think, I want to go out and enjoy myself. I was so anxious that cocaine gave me confidence initially. Yeah, of course. But every, all the confidence that it gave me initially, it took away. with interest. You didn't help yourself in other ways. I mean, those instincts that you had, that knowledge in your bones of what would work and what wouldn't work. I mean, refusing to put a single out on Don't Stand Me Down. That was quite bold.

42:51Yeah, I mean, initially it was like the idea was, there's a song on the album called This Is What She's Like, which the original demo was seven minutes long. If you took the one-minute conversation off at the front, it would have been... spoken word in the middle of or at the top of the track yeah yeah if you took the spoken word thing off at the front it would have been six minutes and that the original idea was a six minute single you know a real piece of work that goes through different moods and i just thought it's going to blow people away i still think it's a great song yeah and uh and a bohemian rhapsody had done that in the 70s you know of course and that's what i was thinking and then i said it to the manager this is going to be a great single we'll put out this 12 inch single or six minute single and he said, oh, not release a single at all.

43:31I was like, ooh, I thought that'd be good because I was feeling the pressure of doing, you know, going to America and doing interviews all day long and being Mr. Pop and that's what we turned into after Eileen and it was just relentless and I just thought, the bands in the 70s like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, they just did albums and, you know, they were credible and that's what I wanted really, you know, I wanted away from the pop thing, you know. Yeah, so had Eileen become a millstone then by this point i guess you know i hate to say that because i'm grateful for it now but i felt that at the time it got bigger than the band but it was so big it was so big i mean it's one of those once a decade songs in a way isn't it really that just defines it goes beyond the band oh it's bigger than us it's something else now isn't it yeah it's out there isn't it when did that start happening when did you feel that ceasing to be yours running out of your control as it were I think when around 83, 84, a year or two later, when I'd only be asked about that by people in the street, you know what I mean?

44:30Yeah. It was only that one. I was like, oh. That must have been tough. It was. It was, because I knew there were other ones, you know. And because your creativity was arguably at its peak, and everyone's looking in the rearview mirror. Yeah. Yeah. Tricky. Yeah. All of which makes more sense of why, by 1988, you're in a bright old mess, aren't you? Yeah. who describe yourself as a maniac. It's not quite homeless, but landlords turned off your... Well, electricity company turned off the electric. Yeah. I got on making, wired it up past the meter, so I had electric. But yeah, I wasn't opening bills and all that kind of thing.

45:11I mean, how much of that do you remember? Fair bit. You do? Fair bit, because I'm in recovery now for a long time, since August 28th, 1993. three big part of that is um is looking at your past and i've had mentors you know sponsors who've taken me through the program and i do now do that with other people and i share my experience and every time you do you remember more you know of course yeah and and would you have been able to i mean i don't think that's the right question would you have been able to write the book if it wasn't for recovery but oh i don't think no i don't think i think that's rhetorical almost but But did you always have your childhood so close to the surface?

45:50No. Before you got addicted, would you feel connected to the younger you in the way that you do in the book? No, that's all. That's interesting. No, completely. So you have to start unraveling it all to get better. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had no awareness of it. It was all denial, total denial. What prompted that August the 28th moment? What was the… well just to say on that the reason it was denial i think it was too much to face because i just thought you know my dad was down on me he was telling me i was different to the others maybe there's something wrong with me so i just brushed that to the do you know what i mean i just brushed that to the side i wasn't it's a lot to face that you know of course it is yeah so it was only much later i started to look at that and when you start looking at that things actually start making sense and you can start the business of getting better yeah what was the pivot point i mean i mean i don't want to be cliche but you've got to be rock bottom sorry i mean i had so many rock bottoms i mean i'd lost my home yeah do you know what i mean yeah i'd been bankrupted by the government i had to read about that and you know it's no big deal but lots of people have to go through that but you know all of that um and all happened in the space of a few months so many things but i was just in total denial i was in i was in the grip of something more powerful than me you know my girlfriend leaving me and that didn't stop me and then one day it wasn't even the worst day i'd already been to the recovery meetings i've been told about them by a friend who'd been just like me and i just thought and um one day i just carried on doing it and i was about to phone the dealer that's just another day it wasn't the worst day by any means just another day I just I can't do this anymore I just can't live like this anymore and I just thought I'm going back to the meetings tomorrow and this time I'm going to do what they tell me I'm just gonna listen and learn and did you manage to bring the drive that you'd brought to so many other areas of your life to your recovery yeah and I still do yeah you do I'm notorious for it in the in the meetings you know I'm hardcore you know but I love it but you have to be it's the best part of my life is it yeah yeah and has it allowed you to be kinder to yourself about what went before about how much you did actually achieve instead of focusing so much on what you didn't definitely definitely and i'm grateful for what's happened now i'm grateful for it you know i'm you know i'm grateful for the money yeah of course i get you know from songs i wrote years ago i'm grateful for the life i've got you know yeah and i do i do work on that

48:28as you got better you got back into writing and performing yeah again you know you certainly weren't compromising much when you um when you made my beauty were you no sort of or indeed when you started performing was there never a little bit of you that thought i might i might try and be other people's idea of what a star should look like rather than my own idea or had you tried that before and decided you know i think with the uh clothes compromise yeah um similarly with dexie's mark mark one yeah yeah yeah yeah with that and also like the first record label they our first single dance dance which was a good single they'd mess the mix up you know and they'd mixed it without us knowing and you know what i mean so that was a that was a that felt like a god you've got to be careful because i when i grew up i was thinking when i if i get in a band when i'm older i'll have a song maybe that's half decent and then some producer will come along and make it great and what i've discovered is that actually a lot of them just mess it up if you're not really careful there's some good ones but they're very hard to find anyway um so i always had this thing about compromising sorry i forgot where we were I'm thinking about the dress and going on stage in a dress and thinking that the more you know about what had gone before, the easier it is to understand why you weren't going to take it off.

49:57Because that would feel like another compromise. Yeah. Even though it invited quite a lot of negativity at the time. It did. And that surprised me. I don't know why. Perhaps it shouldn't have done, but it did. um but i think um what it is is once i got clean from drugs especially i any kind of intuitive idea which the dress was the way i was you know bringing some more femininity into what i was wearing um just felt so right and natural intuitively back to trusting your instincts i guess exactly yeah and so i did it i think i probably could have i did think about toning it Not so much toning it down, but I made the decision in the photo shoot to drop the kind of chest and pull the kind of skirt up, which wasn't my original plan, but a part of me thought, fuck them, this will get the cat among the pigeons.

50:51So, yeah, that was that. And then you come back around again with the film, you do Nowhere is Home, and you do Let the Record Show, which brings you back to success yeah yeah that must have been nice it was great did you enjoy it more that time more that time yeah a lot of anxiety around the performing massive anxiety around the performing yeah and i still do even as far as glastonbury last year you know i was nervous but these days when i get out on the stage i'm just a whole lot better you know once i start hearing that it's sounding all right you know and i get that feedback from the audience i'm a lot better once it starts just but i'm working on that it's a lot better than it was you know i love that still a work in progress oh totally never sitting on your laurels never kind of i mean cashing the checks of course but trying to write new material as well well i have to i mean i i if i couldn't do the whole thing of just um remember us we would remember us you know yeah i couldn't do that it always has to be about the new stuff and like the last album the feminine divine the first half of the show they're all theater shows the first half of the show was um the whole new album and not just played but acted out because it was it was an had a narrative to it and then the second half of the show was the old stuff well and also talking about the theme of being kind to yourself a track called it's all right kevin yeah it's fairly easy to decode yeah isn't it yeah it's all right kevin yeah yeah exactly telling yourself that sometimes yeah just just that period between those two between both sides now and the feminine divine when you've described yourself as having burnt out when when sort of the end of 2016 you talked about having run out of energy run out of vitality um and if i suppose therapy and recovery involves looking after yourself mentally if i've read the story correctly this is when you started to really look after yourself physically as well i think so i think so i just felt burnt out not so much from the music in fact not from music but just from the music business at the end of 2016 and my mum was very ill and she passed at the end of that year and after that I just thought oh man I just can't face doing music right now I just can't I just can't face it because you never phone it in and because you never just go through the back catalogue if you did and there's some very lovely people who can turn up and do their greatest hits and barely break a sweat but I don't think you were ever going to be one of them were you no no i guess that's true yeah i i and actually i i i realized this in the last few years i can't actually repeat myself you know the idea of doing it it just it just won't it just won't work so um yeah i just thought i need to get away and i did go away i went to thailand and i started doing different courses and working on myself and my body more and eventually the time came and i just thought hmm i think i'd like to write something now did you always know it would no i didn't you thought it might be over i thought it might be over i just thought i mean i can live with that you thought oh totally i live with that i just wanted to be away from it yeah like i went on this course in thailand and it was really good and i said to the instructor i think one of the guys had told him i was a musician because i wouldn't really tell people and it and i said to him i love this course it's really great it's really helping me went yeah he said this will help you with your music i was like no i don't want to be doing music you know and then eventually it felt right well what's that moment like when you feel something bubbling back up to the surface in the back of it you thought might have gone forever it's good because it's like enthusiasm comes back it's like a vitality inside of me comes up you know yeah i've got something to say yeah yeah of course yeah and then when i wrote feminine divine i sat down i just wrote that song it just came out all the lyrics fully formed you know it's a very vulnerable album but i guess it had to be feminine divine yeah yeah and and and you're still very interested in masculinity and femininity and all of those yeah it's almost like we'll never know exactly who we are but you're never going to stop personally trying to find out exactly who you are i suppose so i mean i go through periods you know i don't want to become self-obsessed and over analytical and but it's curiosity it's not self-obsession no how can you not be curious about what's made you who you are yeah and yeah and i go through different phases sometimes i want to feel a bit masculine and other times more feminine you know and society hasn't and certainly not an irish upbringing would not have encouraged that kind of worldview or that attitude and so we're back again to having to pretend to be something that you weren't yeah i can remember there was a time when my sisters were sort of dressing up and i went upstairs and got a dress and put it on and I came down, not to my dad because he'd explode, but my mum even was just like not a good look be careful there you go so I mean you're in your 70s now, in your early 70s, you don't look it thank you, well what's that down to apart from giving up cocaine, what else is that down to, the physical stuff, looking after yourself, yeah looking after yourself reasonably healthy diet, exercising you know more qigong than the gym yeah a bit of gym but mainly qigong i'm lazy you know i have to push myself to do it well you're not i mean one thing you're not as well there's different i've gone through periods of just inactivity and physical exertion you should can be daunting but creativity isn't a question of being lazy if it's there you've got to do it and if it's not you won't yeah so when you i mean we haven't heard anything about ambition today except two things the first that you wanted to be on top of the pops one day and linked to that the idea that that would mean that everything was okay now if i can get on top of the pops that'll show everyone and then it didn't work no have you had ambition since i mean have you ever have you got any boxes that you wanted to tick or or haven't ticked i mean yeah i mean i i i'm you know i'm ambitious i've always been and um every time we do a new record you know i have to try and curb it yeah you know because you just don't know what's going to happen when you put it out there of course you know i mean because when i write something that i think is good i think god everyone's going to think this is amazing but they don't they might not get bastards a lot of them don't even get to hear it of course that's the problem you know there's so many so few outlets now of course yeah it is frustrating it is frustrating it's in an ageist business and it's not even um you know even younger artists It's difficult for them now.

57:18Very much so. Yeah, it's changed a lot. They've ruined it. Well, I mean, no one did it on purpose. No one did it on purpose. No one knew what streaming was going to do, did they? No, not just streaming, but I mean, look, Radio 1 was this sort of cuddly show that played any record. You know, it was down to them. They just chose whatever they wanted. But, you know, they were pretty good at choosing. They didn't care if you were hip, but they'd play Shut Up Are Your Face as much as they'd play the specials. you know what i mean and and but they just thought what was good and that's what they did and i remember going to america in 83 84 and like all they were doing was just playing stuff that was already hits or old stuff and i just thought well this has got no future how interesting this has got no future gosh where's all the new stuff that was the future well that's the become the future for us now we're there yeah so there's no real outlets now they've killed it top of the pops was this incredible thing i mean i'm sounding like an old bloke but what can i tell you you're talking to another slightly less old bloke well look top of the pops was this amazing show they worked down it was it was a formula they worked down from number one the number one record was always on on the show yeah this was the format and then they worked down every record that was going up the chart if you were static or going down yeah you weren't on the show but if your record was going up working down from number one you were on and it sometimes went down to number 45 or whatever yeah and it was just brilliant because everyone had a chance everyone had a chance you know and it's not like that now but there you go that does sound like lamenting the past but what can you do i think i think that was good lamenting it for yourself you're also lamenting it for for young artists yeah yeah i think it's very difficult now close to impossible yeah it's almost like distribution of wealth you're going to have a tiny number of absolutely enormous artists and hardly anybody else yeah which is kind of where we are what was glastonbury like last year oh man great was that a real moment a real moment i just was buzzing when i got off do you know what i mean i mean all the way through it i'm thinking okay this could go wrong it's okay you know what i mean but i was on it and it worked you know and i just got flooded loads of messages and reviews and after it i was just so i couldn't sleep or anything i was just so excited you know so happy it just felt like something you know that's lovely yeah when are you at your happiest do you think moments like that i think so yeah it's what you were put on this earth to do well yeah maybe yeah um bless me father by kevin roland is out now it's a hefty old book it doesn't pull any punches it's all in there all of you is it if you put your whole yeah i wasn't going to edit my life you know i love that come on you can't edit your life and of course the the subtext of bless me father for people raised like us is for i have sinned but you've also atoned yeah i have i have i've made amends even the bankruptcy thing you know all the creditors were paid off i'm glad about that you know and you're in a better place now than ever yeah yeah not perfect but you know that'll do kevin roland thank you thanks james thanks man

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