Dexys Kelvingrove Bandstand **** I cried the last time I saw Kevin Rowland, the earnest front man and ringleader of Dexys, formerly Dexys Midnight Runners. It was the 1999 Reading Festival, and Kevin Rowland made one of his first public appearances in over a decade off the back of releasing My Beauty , a bewildering set of covers that addressed a period of mental illness in his life. Those tears were not of joy that the man behind more than THAT Come on Eileen song was back on stage .
It was of despair. It certainly was not because he dared to go on stage with a dress and pearls - after appearing similarly and with lingerie on the cover of My Beauty. This was a time when mental illness and an acceptance of crossdressing was not front and centre of people's minds.
But Eddie Izzard had long since broken down some barriers over what was acceptable as a regular cross-dresser by then. It wasn't even that his voice was flat and there was a disbelief that he would resort to being an awful cabaret sideshow, singing an out of key George Benson and Whitney Houston song The Greatest Love Of All. More to the point, this true icon of UK popular culture and a national treasure was bottled off from an unforgiving section of the crowd.
He just didn't deserve it. This undoubted UK pop music icon appeared totally and utterly fragile. I always felt that Alan McGee, the redoubtable Scots pop mogul and his by then struggling Creation label shouldn't have gone through with the project at that time.