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.

LIVE REVIEW: Franz Ferdinand

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Franz Ferdinand

SWG3, Glasgow

****

Glasgow's Franz Ferdinand have always been steeped in the post-modern spirit of their art-pop idols, Roxy Music, Talking Heads, ABC, Pulp, and former supergroup collaborators Sparks (their 2015 album FFS is an underrated gem).

These are bands who sincerely love disco-friendly pop while operating behind a veneer of arch self-awareness. When done right - and Franz Ferdinand at their best get it absolutely right - the results of that approach are often rather glorious.

There was a whole lotta glory to be found at this sold-out homecoming party, held outdoors during the last sticky gasp of the summer heatwave. 

The set was packed with all their bangers: The Dark of the Matinee; Michael; Do You Want To; and, of course, Take Me Out (such is their assurance as live performers, the energy levels never subsided after the played that with 30 more minutes still to go).

But Franz Ferdinand are no mere '00s nostalgia act. Two of the standout tracks were plucked from recent album The Human Fear. Bolstered by a guest spot from rapper Master Peace, Hooked can comfortably take its place alongside the crowd-pleasing hits, as can the traditional Greek music-influenced Black Eyelashes (scissor-kicking frontman Alex Kapranos is half-Greek).

And I suppose you have to admire them for stubbornly refusing to correct the "So I'm on BBC Two now, telling Terry Wogan how I made it" lyric in The Dark of the Matinee, despite having presumably been told countless times over the years - by people like me - that Wogan never had a chat show on BBC Two, and that they could've easily replaced it with "Radio 2" instead.

But that's Franz Ferdinand for you. They shimmy to the beat of their own dance floor-filling drum.

LIVE REVIEW: Elbow

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Elbow

Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow

****

Elbow frontman Guy Garvey has a lot of charm and stage presence for a man who looks like Ed Balls shopping at Homebase.

But that, of course, is all part of this Greater Manchester band's mass appeal. They're unassuming everymen with big romantic bear-hugging hearts. No wonder they're so successful. I get it.

In a world overstuffed with earnest peddlers of arena-sized 'anthems', Elbow are clearly so much better at This Sort of Thing than most of their peers. They mean it, man.

It helps that Garvey is a good lyricist who, broadly speaking, belongs to a lineage of working-class northern songwriters which also includes Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker (but not Noel Gallagher).

During the first of three sold-out nights at the Bandstand they were embellished by two backing singers and a three-woman brass section, who at one point performed a warm 'n' woozy snippet of Gershwin's Summertime.

The baroque strings which occasionally adorn their records were handled by the keyboards (Elbow are like a Tindersticks you could take home to meet your mother).

Their default setting is nocturnal rain-swept ballads - set highlights The Birds and Lippy Kids are quintessential Elbow - but they do 'rock' at times. Adriana At Last, with its surging, swirling chanted chorus, suggests they're familiar with the bonkers '70s concept album 666 by Greek prog-rockers Aphrodite's Child.

And Garvey - who also works as a BBC 6 Music presenter - is an avuncular pro who chats to the crowd like they're sat in his living room.

I particularly enjoyed his running gag about spotting someone in the crowd who looks exactly like his brother Marcus. That's the actor Marcus Garvey, not the legendary Jamaican political activist, just in case there was any doubt.

Elbow, then. They're good company.

LIVE REVIEW: Public Service Broadcasting

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Public Service Broadcasting

Kelvingrove Bandstand, Glasgow

****

Public Service Broadcasting are one of those bands who came up with a fairly distinctive idea at the start of their career and decided to doggedly stick with it. This is almost certainly the only way in which they resemble the monomaniacal likes of Motorhead and the Ramones.

As any regular listener of BBC 6 Music will tell you – if they didn't already exist, that station would have to invent them - PSB's retro-futurist shtick involves festooning their crisp synths and guitar-driven art rock with audio clips taken from old films, documentaries and news sources.

While this isn't an entirely original conceit - PSB are basically '70s Pink Floyd with a laptop and unlimited access to the BFI archive - the overall effect is often quite haunting and powerful.

But there's no denying that their second album, 2015's typically conceptual The Race for Space, is still the high watermark of everything they set out to achieve. Fortunately, it featured quite heavily during this balmy summer evening outdoor performance.

Although I quite like some of their music, I wasn't expecting to be particularly moved tonight, and especially not by the sight of several hundred people holding their twinkling white light smartphones aloft.

But when they did just that - in what would appear to be a band-endorsed fan ritual - at the precise moment during The Other Side when a late '60s NASA operative welcomes Apollo 8 as it emerges from the dark side of the moon, well, it was a genuinely magical moment.

The other spirit-lifting highlights: an unexpected cameo from a boisterous brass section, a joyous race through signature tune Go!, and every time guest contributor EERA blessed us with her crystalline Sandy Denny floating in space vocals.

In a word: cosmic.

BOOK REVIEW: I Love You, Byeee by Adam Buxton

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

I Love You, Byeee, Adam Buxton, out now, Mudlark, £18.73

When Adam Buxton interviewed Paul Weller live on BBC Radio 2 in 2010, he hit upon the brilliant idea of singing, Grease-style, "Paul Weller, Weller, Weller, ooh! Tell me more! Tell me more!" to his guest's face. The notoriously truculent Modfather was not amused and the rest of the interview continued under a cloud of extreme awkwardness.

This is typical of the anecdotes you'll find in I Love You, Byeee, the second enjoyable volume of Buxton's memoir, in which the genial comedian and podcaster presents a litany of blunders for our amusement.

His almost constant self-deprecation would be wearing were it not for the fact that Buckles - as he's affectionately known to his large cult fan-base - is a self-evidently genuine, thoughtful and naturally funny man who's also justifiably proud of the work he created with his 'comedy wife' Joe Cornish.

The detailed chapters on the making of their inventive low-budget DIY comedy opus The Adam and Joe Show are catnip for comedy nerds. A pair of old schoolfriends steeped in pop culture and silly creativity, they were given carte blanche by Channel 4 to make the show they wanted to make.

The acutely self-aware Buxton admits that being privately-educated, well-spoken white men gave them an automatic head-start. He also reveals that working with Cornish sometimes put a strain on their friendship. Both insecure and competitive - Buxton secretly worried that Cornish was more talented than him - the accounts of their occasional 'wobbly voiced' arguments will resonate with anyone who hates confrontation. But they love each other, clearly.

Buxton also writes movingly about his mother, who passed away in 2020; the book, for all its mirth and nonsense, is essentially a sincere tribute to her.

Celebrity memoirs are often mired in hilarious hubris, but Buxton - maverick subversive that he is - has gone in the opposite direction. His memoirs are charming and endearingly honest.

BOOK REVIEW: Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil by Harry Freedman

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

Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil, Harry Freedman, out now, Bloomsbury Continuum, £15.99

No cliche is left unturned in Bob Dylan: Jewish Roots, American Soil, a workmanlike and rather pointless retelling of Robert Zimmerman's journey from Hibbing, Minnesota to global superstardom in the mid-1960s.

Author and Jewish cultural historian Harry Freedman attempts to reframe this extremely well-worn tale through the prism of Dylan's Jewishness, and the important role it played in his early life and work. An interesting angle in theory, but as Freedman concedes - practically from page one - it doesn't bear much scrutiny. So why write a book about it?

Dylan isn't ashamed of his Jewish identity, it just isn't something he's ever really thought about. It neither interests nor defines him. That may or may not be true, I'm none the wiser after reading the book, but it's effectively what Freedman tells us whenever he remembers to return to his ostensible theme.

What we end up with is a passable piece of sociopolitical post-war history - Freedman is quite good on contextualising detail - peppered with some cursory hand-me-down analysis of Dylan's work.

Freedman's prose is often clunky, repetitious and rife with vague supposition. He dutifully hits every familiar narrative beat - voice of a generation, going electric, Newport '65, 'Judas!' etc. - while adding no fresh insight.

For Dylan completists, this is just another book to add to the pile. For anyone who's recently discovered him via James Mangold's film A Complete Unknown - and that would appear to be the target audience - it will at least fill in some gaps. But other, better Dylan books are available.