Dexys Midnight Runners return with Kevin Rowland’s deeply personal reminiscence of his childhood as an Irish immigrant in 1950s Britain.

I’ve never been one of those with undying devotion towards Dexys and I haven’t followed Kevin Rowland’s career as closely as those who do. But that’s not to say I don’t like them.

I saw them in their original retro-soul guise (with The Specials, The Selector and Madness) back in 1979 and I saw them in the fiddle-playing gypsy-brigand phase that brought them such huge success with Come On Eileen.

After that I moved on; turned off by the increasingly egomaniacal comments of Rowland and the emphasis on image over music (at least that’s how I saw it), and Rowland’s garbled vocals sounding increasingly like Vic Reeves’s club singer on Shooting Stars.

Then I completely lost track of Dexys. I remember reading something about him living on the streeet in Crouch End (was that true?) and I actually encountered him without realising it at the premiere of the Clash film Westway To The World in1999.

It was at The Gate Cinema in Notting Hill and I had just taken my seat when a small, slender figure in a long purple velvet dress, with matching hat and handbag, and hair in a tight bun, shuffled past me to take their seat.

“You know who that was don’t you?” someone said to me. I didn’t until they named him.

Anyway, I hear that Kevin lives not far from me now, down by the banks of the River Lea, though I have not seen him out and about on Hackney Marshes or in the nightspots of Clapton.

And now he is back with this lovely autobiographical song about his childhood, arriving from Ireland in Wolverhampton in the late 1950s before moving down to London, where he would form Dexys Midnight Runners.

Rowland wrote the song a long time ago – it appeared in different form on  2003 compilation. “It’s all memories of my own experiences. Pete, that’s my brother. In my book [Bless Me Father] I changed his name to Pat. There’s quite a lot of overlap with the book in this one.

“We were in England dreaming of America: it was pre-Beatles, so it was Elvis, it was Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay, clothes, all of it was America. In the second verse, I’m remembering being in a social club listening to everyone singing Kevin Barry [a Republican song about a teenage IRA soldier hanged by the British government in 1920] and my mum telling me ‘This song’s not allowed in England’.

“It was daytime, and all the curtains were drawn, everyone drinking, singing an illegal song. I remember thinking, Wow, yes, exciting! My childhood memories, I just wrote them down. You can’t really write on behalf of anybody else.

“Though I realised later that when I was growing up in north-west London, loads of the kids around there were second-generation Irish. All obsessed with being up the front with the best clothes, with dancing to the new records.”