It’s been a long road, but just before the release of his sixth album under the Dexys banner, Kevin Rowland has finally found some peace of mind regarding his identity. He speaks frankly to Natalie Marlin about sexuality, gender and The Feminine Divine. All portraits by Bruno Murari
By Natalie Marlin
“I wish I never had a past,” Kevin Rowland confesses. “It almost dragged me down.” It’s a sentiment he’s routinely expressed before: wanting to break free of the ways his career has often been pigeonholed into the hits birthed by Dexys Midnight Runners records like the northern soul and Stax-influenced Searching For The Young Soul Rebels or the Celtic folk stylings of Too-Rye-Ay. In our interview, Rowland has begun reflecting on My Beauty, his 1999 album consisting of reinterpretations of songs he found personal meaning in over the years, which faced its harshest contemporary backlash for his attire – dresses with stockings and lingerie.
He ascribes the reaction to the preconceived notions Dexys had put upon him: “I wasn’t thinking about the past, but I’d be turning up to interviews and they were asking about some track I did 15 years earlier. They were shocked at what I was wearing because they were comparing it to what I used to wear, but there were 15 years in between. I just felt like a new artist. To me, there was no continuation.” After pausing mull over his thoughts on the matter, he adds: “If anything, I react against what I did in the past.”
The 2020 reissue of My Beauty explicitly dealt in reexamining this element of Rowland’s image in a modern lens, down to a new video for ‘Rag Doll’ about how attitudes toward gender presentation outside the norm shifted since the record’s initial release. It seems only fitting to dig further into this with Rowland, given my background as a trans writer. I ask for Rowland’s perspective on how he has observed times changing since 1999, especially with the gradual creep of anti-trans movements taking aim against all kinds of gender nonconformity since 2020. (At the moment, anti-trans oppression seems to keep finding institutional support internationally, including a recent suggested challenge to the legal definition of “sex” within the Equality Act that would only restrict rights further.)
His response is carefully measured, noting how public acceptance seems to “swing in another direction” from era to era. “We had the ‘80s, and there was a lot of mixing up stuff,” Rowland muses. “I imagined it would’ve stuck, but it didn’t seem to stick by the 90s.” Making note of the reactionary response to the open flamboyance of 80s artists, he adds, “It must have triggered something in them.”
Rowland sees echoes in the rise of anti-trans hate groups so far this decade. “It seemed like things had gotten a lot better,” he continues, talking about the widespread praise the ‘Rag Doll’ video received, prominently featuring Rowland’s grandson Roo, who had been wearing dresses and makeup since teenage years and carries himself with the same pride on camera. “But, in the last three years, certainly my experience has been that the whole anti-trans thing has gotten a lot louder.”
This all feels doubly pertinent with the latest Dexys record The Feminine Divine, a conceptual album about Rowland’s own shifting views toward femininity in recent years. For one thing, the band’s newest video for ‘My Submission’ finds Rowland openly dressing outside gender norms again, this time in a red velvet dress, garter and stockings, and wig, looking more content with this presentation and the freedom it represents than ever. It’s a production just as liberating as My Beauty was, personally-driven and unconcerned with what those who primarily associate Rowland with denim overalls or Ivy League-sharp business suits may think.