this is the thread where we talk about kevin rowland's solo effort: my beauty

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sell me on this album and you will my promo copy of it. i am listening to it at work - the production is beautiful, crystal clear, his voice fantastic but the flaws, - the dress, the make-up, the tranny gear, the strange talks makes it a novelty mondo-classic. i can't decide if this is the best thing in my collection or up there with william shatner's - the transformed man.

― doom-e, Thursday, 19 June 2003 08:24 (twenty-two years ago)

I never ever ever ever understood why anyone would be put off this record by the femi-gear thing, maybe by the Reading-dancers but not the dress itself. The record is luscious and magnificent and needle-sharp and and and spine-tingling and the attempt to turn himself into The Ultimate Pop Star Performing The Ultimate Standards was maybe the last noblestest-pop-quest of the 1990s. I got into Dexys via Kevin Rowland on this record, rather than the other way around, and I think I probably like this best of anything I've heard him do.

It's grrreat. See how it reduces me to incoherent drivelling. And, y'know, my copy seems to have VANISHED...

― Alex in Rotherham (Alex in Doncaster), Thursday, 19 June 2003 09:10 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes mine has disappeared too! It's great - good songs, good singer, good concept, nice threads I'm sure if that's your thing.

― Tico Tico (Tico Tico), Thursday, 19 June 2003 09:13 (twenty-two years ago)

Wouldn't it be great if that were part of the plan? A record that self destructed after a certain amount of time... or not being played for a certain amount of time. Therefore people are left only with their impressions of it, rather than the art itself, and ultimately the listener is the artist.

Which would be much cooler than what the record actually was. I just don't get Kevin Rowland. Anything he's ever done, ever. His rants about "soul" are something I'd like to erase from the collective consciousness of the nation and specifically indiekids forever.

― kate (kate), Thursday, 19 June 2003 09:17 (twenty-two years ago)

It's mostly tremendous, and I love K. Rowland (MANCHESTER DATE ANNOUNCED!) but I can't listen to the version of "Labelled With Love": the re-wordings seem so ham-fisted and I never think of KR as ham-fisted.

Thanks to another ILXor I've been listening to "The Wanderer" a fair bit recently, and I like that a lot, too, but KR seems to be struggling with the production on that much more than he does on "My Beauty".

― Tim (Tim), Thursday, 19 June 2003 09:57 (twenty-two years ago)

my sleeve is still shiny and new!

― doom-e, Thursday, 19 June 2003 10:00 (twenty-two years ago)

I think the record is extraordinary, but I often feel slightly guilty listening to it. He opens himself up so completely and honestly on the record, and it's so obviously part of his therapy and recovery from drug abuse to do so, that I feel like a bit of a voyeur.

Still, it's genuinely heartening to hear him piece his life back together song by song. He walks a tightrope between openness and cheese in doing so, but you've got to admire the courage.

(And I try not to be put off by the cover, which you can't separate from this opening up thing. Of course he looks completely daft, but if he feels he's being true to himself then good luck to him.)

'The Greatest Love of All' always gives me goosebumps when it starts.

― James Ball (James Ball), Thursday, 19 June 2003 12:03 (twenty-two years ago)

It's both the greatest and worst thing ever but as James says the emotion and the heart of the guy is so laid bare and open for us to see that you have to admire it and love it. Feeling a bit of a voyeur sounds about right.

At times when listening to it though I have visions of KR on Des O'Connor Tonight in the 70's with dancers in colourful nylon flared cat suits dancing along and singing backing vocals. It definitely has a 70's TV arrangement feel to it.

I can just imagine Alan McGee signing him and expecting an album of all new great songs and then being presented with an album of uncommercial covers sung by a man in a stockings and suspenders. You've got to laugh.

Did anyone see the letter from KR in Uncut a couple of months ago? Made me worry that he still wasn't in the best place mentally.

― mms (mms), Thursday, 19 June 2003 14:37 (twenty-two years ago)

...what did he say in the letter?

― RUSS T, Thursday, 19 June 2003 15:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Here in the States, for people like me, My Beauty was like a Holy Grail, since it disappeared so quickly after its release. I eventually got it used for cheap and I must say: if Kevin never does anything ever again--and that's a distinct possibility--his version of "The Greatest Love of All" is just completely magical. I can honestly think of no greater testament to the blessed grandiosity of pop music than this -- taking such a vapid, empty shell of a song and infusing it with such passion, drama and desperation. It should be a complete and utter joke, along the lines of what some have written about the record, but really: it's sounds an awful lot like Kevin's late masterpiece -- heartbreaking, epic and painfully honest.

"Rag Doll" and "Concrete and Clay" keep up the pace brilliantly, the former especially, but thereafter, things drop off rather precipitously -- where Kevin's, er, eccentricities start to get in the way. The aforementioned "Labelled With Love," the "sleepy G" of "Daydream Believer" and a rather torturous "This Guy's In Love With You" (the original being one of my favorite songs).

So as a record, it's FAR from brilliant, I think. And--fairly or not--the marketing campaign and disasterous live shows all but ruined Kevin's reputation. But for "Greatest Love of All," the following two songs and all those lush "Greatest Love" interludes, it more than warrants a place in my collection.

― Naive Teen Idol (Naive Teen Idol), Thursday, 19 June 2003 17:10 (twenty-two years ago)

four years pass...

This record was so ahead of its time even McGee didn't realise what time it was.

Look at what happened after it came out - now it's all Idol/X-Factor/Britain's Got Talent, kids wanting to sing The Great Standards and tie it in with their "personal journeys" - the bullying/the anorexia/the loss/the whatever - but they come through, or try to at any rate.

Isn't this the record which pretty much invented all of this?

MESSAGE TO McGEE: give it a second chance. This new age has made it easier.

― Dingbod Kesterson, Monday, 12 May 2008 11:15 (seventeen years ago)

I wouldn't say it invented the culture - those shows all tap into the enduring legacy of the working man's/social club scene, and you could trace their history back through Stars in Their Eyes to Barrymore to Opportunity Knocks and so on. But My Beauty was a perfectly consistent next step on K Rowland's ongoing dissection of "soul" public and private and the uses of popular song, so I'd say he's always been travelling a parallel trajectory, in his own unique way.

― Noodle Vague, Monday, 12 May 2008 11:34 (seventeen years ago)

Yeah, I was just thinking about the extent to which the "backstory" has become the absolute backbone of these shows in that if you just turn up and do your act you tend not to win (Rhydian) although admittedly Op Knox were big on backstory too with Peters & Lee etc.

― Dingbod Kesterson, Monday, 12 May 2008 12:33 (seventeen years ago)

I heard this sold less than 1000 copies.

― Bodrick III, Monday, 12 May 2008 12:38 (seventeen years ago)

Either 200 or 500, depending on whom you talk to. IIRC I bought my copy at Selfridge's, although THUNDER ROAD INCLUDED promos were virtually being given away at MVE over the next few months (mine cost 50p). I definitely think it will still have its day, though, and if McGee can sweet talk Springsteen's people into getting "Thunder Road" back on the album proper then I think the time will be ripe for a reissue soon.

― Dingbod Kesterson, Monday, 12 May 2008 12:53 (seventeen years ago)

I believe Kevin Rowland actually sweet-talked Bruce himself, who granted Kevin the point that it probably did have artistic integrity, but could not agree to allow it.

So, take that as a fairly definite no.

― Mark G, Monday, 12 May 2008 13:18 (seventeen years ago)

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