There were three boyhood heroes I always wanted to interview. Georgie Best and Raymond Carver I met in the late 80s. Kevin Rowland was the last, and I finally ran up against him last year. The occasion was the release of his long-awaited comeback album (the marvellously over-ambitious My Beauty). The location was a restaurant by the Thames. For reasons he never got round to explaining, Kevin required the proximity of a river to talk. Only we were not close enough to the water for his liking. For Kevin to be inspired, we needed to get closer.
All well and good. Except for the fact that between us and the river stands a 25-foot concrete bank. And there's no easy way down. After some deep contemplation, Kevin suggests, half-jokingly, that we take a run at it. Well, why not? If your boyhood hero suggests you take a running jump at a steep concrete slope, you do it without thinking. Even if you're decked out in your favourite Hugo Boss suit.
The jump is spectacularly un- successful. Halfway down the slope I lose my balance and fall tit over teakettle. It's a bumpy ride down and, at the bottom, my forehead cracks against jagged rock. En route, my £800 suit is ripped to shreds and splattered with mud. As if this wasn't enough, the entire calamity has been witnessed by the clientele of the restaurant who, as one, stand and applaud, as if this was the funniest thing that had ever happened in the entire history of the civilised world.
So there I stand, best suit ruined, blood pouring from all manner of places, a bruise on my head the size of a Jaffa orange, having the rise taken out of me by a crowd of Sunday afternoon revellers. It doesn't get much more undignified. But, hell, why worry? It's not every day you get to spend the day with Kevin Rowland, listen to his rollercoaster life story and be reminded at every turn why he was always a man to believe in.
If you ever believed in Kevin Rowland and Dexy's Midnight Runners, you did so with a passion. The kind of passion that is probably considered terribly old-fashioned these days, when cool detachment, combined with withering cynicism, is deemed to be the most dignified stance.
Dexy's hit the ground running in 1979. Their impact was fierce, intense and brutally immediate. The music, the image, the attitude - it was all there, as though they'd come out of the womb fully formed. They seemed to possess the intellectual weight of Bob Dylan, the artistic purity of Van Morrison, the revolutionary spirit of The Clash and the soulfulness of the best Stax music. They were, it has to be said, one hell of a band.
In many ways the musical landscape of the early 80s resembled the dry season of the early 60s, the drab bit between the Big Bang of Little Richard and the arrival of the Beatles. Back in 1980, with punk having come and gone, it was virtually a straight choice between the suicidal gloom of Joy Division and the frills and fancies of the New Romantics. No choice at all, really.
Then Dexy's came swaggering in, shaking things up, and they really were something to believe in. They were smash-and-grab artists, profound misfits, wild-hearted outsiders to a man. Kevin Rowland was the most wild-hearted of them all. Intense emotion, that was his thing, and highly infectious it was too. At a time of post-punk conformity, when playing it safe and preening with ironic detachment was the order of the day, Dexy's did things differently.
Pronouncing rock'n'roll dead, they dressed like New York dockers in worn donkey jackets and woolly hats - the first of many bewildering image changes. Next up, there were the ponytails, hooded sweatshirts and brawler's boots that made them look like members of a shady Sicilian boxing club. After that came the Too-Rye-Ay look: denim dungarees, Romany threads, soul-searching expressions. Then, to accompany their Don't Stand Me Down album, clean-cut Ivy League clobber.
As Rowland explains in tonight's near-perfect BBC2 documentary on the band, Don't Stand Me Down was intended to be his magnum opus, his ultimate statement of soulful intent. And so it proved. It also turned out to be a dramatic commercial failure and hastened the band's demise, followed by Rowland's hectic descent into a cold, soundless abyss of poverty, drug-addiction and depression.
What kind of mark did Dexy's leave in the sand? Well, quite simply, a collection of songs that continue to amaze and inspire to this day. From the fervid call-to-arms that was 1980's Searching For The Young Soul Rebels, through the deep-thinking Celtic swing of 1982's Too-Rye-Ay, to the sprawling genius that was 1985's Don't Stand Me Down, Dexy's aimed to outperform themselves every time. In those five years, they produced a body of work that - in its random brilliance - stands fair comparison with the Fab Four's 1965-1969 period.
During tonight's documentary, Dexy's Kevin "Al" Archer is asked whether, 15 years on, he still believes in Kevin Rowland's self-styled soul vision. "Of course I still believe in it," he says with cast-iron certainty. "I believe that Dexy's were easily the best group of the 80s."
Ultimately, I suppose, Dexy's were one of those bands that you either got or you didn't. And those who did get it... well, they believed in it with the charged intensity and thrilling certainty of a rash moment, followed by a steep fall and the sharp crack of bone against rock.
Young Guns Go For It, tonight, BBC2, 9.50pm
