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Ebury Spotlight to publish the memoir from Dexys Midnight Runners’ frontman Kevin Rowland
Ebury Spotlight to publish the memoir from Dexys Midnight Runners’ frontman Kevin Rowland. Senior editorial director Lorna Russell acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Bless Me Father from Matthew Hamilton of The Hamilton Agency, with publication scheduled for July 2025.
The publisher described the book as “bracingly honest”, as Rowland tracks his life from his turbulent childhood, where at home, the prayerful eight-year-old altar boy was planning to attend college to train to be a priest. Elsewhere, he was thieving, lying, swearing, fighting and rarely out of trouble. The synopsis continues: “He then emerged from the juvenile courts of his troubled teenage years into the early days of the New Romantic scene in the late ’70s. An unwavering passion for music and keen sense of fashion and style was to ignite an unstoppable drive within him, compelling him down a path that led to his huge chart successes with Dexy’s Midnight Runners in the early 1980s. However, despite being celebrated as a creative genius, inner turmoil was never far away, and a terrifying series of self-sabotaging events were to follow – including a serious cocaine addiction – leaving him in the wilderness in the 1990s, bankrupt, living in a bedsit, on the dole.”
He charts his return journey, from shocking audiences with his pioneering embrace of gender fluidity with My Beauty, right through to Dexys’ appearance at Glastonbury in 2024.
Russell said: “Kevin has dedicated himself to writing his first and only autobiography with all the energy, fearless honesty and incredible storytelling skills a publisher dreams of, especially from a cultural icon with a tale as extraordinary as his. The result is such a compelling memoir that is deeply personal to him, but also resonates universally as the life of a legend whose music has defined our times. It’s brilliant.”
Rowland said: “I’ve changed a few names. Other than that, this is it – warts and all, mainly my own.”
