Dexys Midnight Runners frontman Kevin Rowland recently got featured in NME‘s ‘Does Rock ‘N’ Roll Kill Braincells?!’, where artists are asked questions about themselves to test their memory.
Rowland, in the interview, was asked if he remembered who he called a bad copy of Bryan Ferry in a 1983 show. The frontman said David Bowie as the answer, and he was correct.
The band first thought the chants and the applause coming from the audience were for them. Rowland explained:
“We were about five songs into our 12-song set and it was going well, and I could see the applause going right back in this massive open-air venue. After we’d finish each song, around 50 people in the front were chanting and waving their hands in the air, so I’m thinking: ‘This is great! They’re really into it!'”
Apparently, the chants were not for his band, it was for Bowie. He recalled being disappointed and said:
“I thought they were chanting in French, and went over to the drummer Seb [Shelton] and asked: ‘What are they saying?’. He replied: ‘They’re shouting ‘Bowie! Bowie! Bowie!’ at you. So I just lost it! I was really disappointed. Because we were going down really well apart from these 50 people in the front, who were all half-naked, muddy and looked like hippies – not what you’d think of as Bowie fans.”
After accusing Bowie of imitating someone else, the frontman later realized what he had caused. He explained:
“So I went up to them and said something along the lines of: ‘You’re sitting in a f*cking field all day in a load of mud waiting for f*cking David Bowie! He’s just a pale imitation of Bryan Ferry!’ As we went to start the next song, the plugs were pulled. Bowie had been at the back of the stage and heard it. We were supposed to do two nights, but they didn’t want us back for the second.”
After many years, Rowland tried to reach out to Bowie about the matter. He described what happened next:
“Apparently Bowie was really upset about it. Many years later when I got into recovery from cocaine addiction, I wrote him a letter apologising, to make amends, and said if he ever wanted to talk about it, please contact me. I know he got the letter, but I didn’t hear back. But that’s OK.”
Rowland, at the beginning of his answer to the same question, revealed the reason why he acted like that on the stage:
“Nobody’s ever asked me about this before. We had to be escorted out of the area! I’d been taking strong sleeping tablets prescribed by a private New York doctor. Whenever I took them, I’d be grumpy and didn’t give a shit about anything.”
Rowland, reportedly, told the British press that they agreed to be a part of the show only because of the marketing. He said:
“We only agreed to the show because France is an important market for us – not because I have any respect for Bowie.”
Dexys will start their tour on September 5, for which you can get tickets here.
