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Bless Me Father by Kevin Rowland review – the Dexys Midnight Runners frontman tells all
A picaresque story of massive success and deep despair that Rowland narrates with an impressive lack of self-pity
Within months, they’re at No 1 with Geno, both one of pop’s great hymns to itself and a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: a moving exploration of the galvanising effect music can have on a young mind that sounded tough enough to guarantee youth club dancefloors were flooded with teenage boys the second its horn riff kicked in. When their ambitious next album, Don’t Stand Me Down, fails commercially, Rowland seems utterly crushed, baffled that the public who happily ta-loo-rye-ayed along to Come on Eileen can’t stomach 12-minute songs replete with spoken-word dialogue, lyrics that explore Anglo-Irish politics and indeed the band’s new clean-cut Ivy League image. If anything, the reader could do with hearing more about what Rowland got right: the actual music Dexys released is almost uniformly magnificent, but here it often feels a little overshadowed, drowned out by the ructions surrounding its making, or by the author’s nagging sense of “what if?” But Bless Me Father is still powerful and oddly persuasive.
Or read this on The Guardian