Kevin, Up Here

What a return. Cheers and jublilation in the festival marquee. Kevin Rowland and Dexys playing at their best. A sold out event and every believer in here knows it’s a privilege to at it. It may have been 28 years since the previous Dexys album, but ‘One Day I’m Going To Soar’ is a fierce statement from an artist who won't be denied. Now it’s developed into a live revue that brings out the drama, the heartache and contrary vigour of those songs.

So we give him love and wait for the dialogue, the set pieces, the moments of startling emotion. It’s not a regular gig. The singer is channeling Marvin Gaye and the busted honesty of records like ‘Here, My Dear’. He swoons like Al Green and he spirals out of the tunes like Van Morrison, mystic-bound. In return, the music carries him, gives him energy and allows him to throw down the passionate shapes that once graced the Harlem Apollo and those other receptacles of soul.

The Kevin Rowland story is all about a search for a home, a belonging, a community. The flip side is a sense of disconnection and that’s how he rolls on the recent record. He’s part of the Irish diaspora, from Kiltimagh roots to the UK Midlands, but he refuses to be anybody’s stereotype. Hence ‘Nowhere Is Home’ and the pained account of this rolling stone. The album is also about loneliness and the right to be alone, an oddly modern notion. But all of this is suspended when the band cracks into ‘She’s Got A Wiggle’ and Madeline Hyland shimmies over like Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Now we view the courtship, the politics and the twisted fall-out of the final songs. Such a deal.

Thus Kevin keeps us alert, hardly bothered that there’s no classic material in this part of the set. But he delivers this in the second part. ‘Geno’ has a Latino rumble and it wears its new threads with style. Old guys are weeping. And finally there is ‘What’s She Like’ from the previous Dexys record, back in 1985, a song that tries to scale the face of love from so many different angles. It’s about the crashing sentiments, the coup de foudre, the royal confusion, the bliss and the spirit unconfined. And ultimately, Kevin soars, just like he promised he would.