BOOK REVIEW: Bless Me Father: A Life Story by Kevin Rowland

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in September 2025.

Bless Me Father: A Life Story, Kevin Rowland, out now, Ebury Spotlight, £19.65

As far back as he can remember, Dexys Midnight Runners lynchpin Kevin Rowland has struggled with anxiety and a deep-seated inferiority complex. Even while topping the early '80s charts with irrefutable pop classics Geno and Come on Eileen, Rowland was beset by doubt, guilt, paranoia and self-destructive impulses.

But he also pursued his singular creative vision with a burning and utterly dedicated intensity. He believed, quite rightly, that Dexys were something special. He just didn't particularly like himself.

In Bless Me Father: A Life Story, Rowland bares his sensitive soul with commendable - if sometimes alarming - honesty. An addict who's been in recovery for over thirty years, his autobiography is full of touchingly sincere apologies to everyone he mistreated as an angry, difficult, insular young man. It's also full of praise and gratitude, and he never wallows in self-pity or mealy-mouthed excuses.

Rowland's devout Irish Catholic father, who never blessed his wayward son with a single word of praise, would usually be cast as the villain in a lesser, more self-serving memoir. Rowland does, of course, understand that he was always seeking his father's approval - "I was desperate to prove I wasn't useless" - but he clearly loved the man, faults and all. Their relationship is at the heart of this story.

The chapters devoted to Rowland's post-Dexys years of cocaine addiction are relentlessly grim. On the dole and living in a threadbare flat, he'd been royally screwed by a former manager and had to declare bankruptcy. But he survived, got clean, and now lives comfortably on his songwriting royalties. He's in a better place.

Rowland is a true artist, an idiosyncratic aesthete who flourished during an era when working-class 'weirdos' were allowed to gatecrash the mainstream. We will not see his like again.

BOOK REVIEW: Comedy Samurai: 40 Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter by Larry Charles

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in September 2025.

Comedy Samurai: 40 Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter, Larry Charles, out now, Grand Central Publishing, £22.15

Comedy guru Larry Charles is a celebrated writer/director whose credits include Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the Borat movie. He's an inherently subversive countercultural dude with a dark, absurdist sense of humour.

In Comedy Samurai: Forty Years of Blood, Guts and Laughter, he analyses his craft with good-natured intensity. Charles takes comedy seriously, as all great comic artisans do. It's a fascinating, colourful book.

He lavishes praise upon his "accidental mentors" Larry David, Sacha Baron Cohen and Bob Dylan (Charles co-wrote and directed the 2003 Dylan vehicle Masked and Anonymous, the making of which sounds just as bewildering as the film itself).

But he also writes, with palpable sadness and exasperation, about the disintegration of his relationships with David and Cohen.

He hasn't spoken to David, with whom he'd been friends for over 40 years, since 2022, when David put the last minute kibosh on a documentary Charles had made about him. According to Charles, his subject felt he came across as too serious and emotional in the film, an image he wasn't keen to share with fans of the fictional Larry David from Curb. Ironically, the real Larry David's petty, neurotic and cowardly handling of this situation was entirely on-brand.

As for Cohen, by the time he made his third and final film with Charles, The Dictator, he'd apparently become an egomaniacal control freak surrounded by yes-men who was impossible to deal with. Charles writes about the experience like someone with PTSD.

I see no reason to doubt his version of events in both these cases, as he comes across as a very honest, thoughtful, generous and decent man of integrity who tends to criticise himself more than anyone else.

Comedy, it's a joyous, painful business.