Dexys founder’s remorseful memoir.

By Mark Cooper.

FILTER BOOKS We need to talk about Kevin: Rowland prepares to go up the ladder, The Venue, London, 1981.

David Corio/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Kevin Rowland

★★★★

Bless Me Father: A Life Story

EBURY. £25

T OWARDS THE end of this brutally candid, intermittently combative, overwhelmingly remorseful autobiography, Kevin Rowland recalls that back in 1980 he’d suggested to bandmates Kevin Archer and Jim Paterson that they follow Dexys’ debut, Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, by making a film, blowing up the Houses of Parliament and going to prison for a very long time. While the drama of the grand gesture certainly appealed, ultimately Rowland was driven more by rage and guilt than politics or art; a 27-year-old loose cannon who cared for nothing, except perhaps his mother.

One of that great flowering of second-generation Irish Catholics in England who reconfigured British pop in the late ’70s, ’80s and beyond (see John Lydon, Elvis Costello, Siobhan Fahey et al), Rowland felt like an outsider from the moment his family left Crossmolina, County Mayo, to join his builder father in Wolverhampton and then Harrow. Soon, he was torn in two: the altar boy who aspired to the priesthood but swore and stole and lied; the swarthy, curly kid who some deemed black and who cleaved to the feminine.

Picking up the local accent was essential to survival and helped make Rowland a people-pleaser but, ever the contrarian, even as he tried to ingratiate himself with his disdainful father or his peers, he constantly rebelled. He lived in fear of his weakness being discovered so he always tried to land the first blow. Forced to write with his right hand despite favouring his left, he now realises he had attention deficit disorder. The only joy is the pop music on the radio. His childhood and teens are a series of failures and scrapes yet he keeps longing for his dad’s approval. It is only the summer of 1969 – the clothes, the hairstyles, the reggae – that briefly make him feel like his own man.