6. Kevin Rowland IS Going Out Dressed Like That
As the leader of Dexy's Midnight Runners, Kevin Rowland was used to critical championing. One of the best bands of the 80's, Dexy's released seminal albums and played to large and adoring crowds. Then, it suddenly all stopped. The band's indefinite hiatus hit Rowland hard, with the singer spiralling into a horrific descent of substance abuse and addiction. While his well-received solo debut The Wanderer had showed that the creative rivers still ran deep, Rowland would have to battle his demons for another 11 years before he released a follow-up, 1999's My Beauty. The record consisted entirely of cover versions, including The Long And Winding Road, that had re-written lyrics to illustrate the singer's battles. While this notion showed a worrying decline in Rowland's song-writing productivity, the aspect that worried most fans was the sleeve. Heavily made-up and dressed in drag, Kevin looked like a man who had not so much undergone a transformation as become somebody else entirely and the fans didn't like what they saw. Worse, Rowland insisted on touring the album dressed in the same get-up resulting in him being bottled from the stage at that years Reading Festival. The words 'nervous breakdown' were being whispered loudly around Rowland, and public appearances were a ramshackle affair. Taken in hindsight, there was a distinct and unsavoury whiff of homophobia around most of the abuse that Rowland received at the time. The fact remains, however, that Rowland was either being spectacularly ill-advised, or not advised at all. The Reading crowd is a notoriously macho one, and Rowland's image was always going to be met with hostility, making it an awful booking. As one of the 20,000 people to date who've heard the record, I can vouch that it is actually a decent if unimaginative listen. It's just a shame that Creation Records allowed humiliation to be heaped upon a man who was more talented than most of his peers.