This Graun piece a bit more revealing
“Can you believe it? That people got so worked up about what someone was wearing?” he says today. But they did, and even those sympathetic to Rowland’s vision seemed baffled. One marketing guy at Creation sent him a bunch of material about cross-dressing. “And I was like, no, I don’t wanna wear a wig! I had sideburns on, a male haircut. I just wanted to wear a dress.”
He sighs. “Someone else at the label thought it was about sexuality. It may have been a bit. But I remember having to write something, saying it’s not a gay thing, it’s not this, it’s not that. I kind of defined it through people misinterpreting it. Because I’m not the kind of guy to go, ‘This is a statement and it means this.’ It was all intuitive.”
... Even today, Rowland says people just don’t get it. “Irvine Welsh, who is a friend and I respect him, put a tweet up recently saying it was an amazing album but the cover was a mistake. He doesn’t understand me! It was a lifestyle choice, not a fucking career move. That’s what I was wearing, that’s what I was into, that was who I am. All of my looks, everything I do, is like that. It’s not a gimmick.”
Perhaps the peak of the criticism came during his infamous appearance at Reading and Leeds festival where he performed a short guest spot dressed in a white dress and stockings.... The Leeds leg he admits was trickier. “I was about to go on, and then a woman called Hobbs … Mary Anne Hobbs? … introduced me. She said, ‘Here’s a legend in his own lingerie!’ And I thought, ‘What the fuck?’ It threw me, to be honest. I think Alan [McGee] thought the confrontation would be punk rock, but I didn’t want that. I’d done all that 20 years earlier.”
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