Rowland S. Howard (1959 - 2009)
The iconic Australian guitarist Rowland
S. Howard passed away on 30 December, losing a fight with
liver cancer whilst awaiting a transplant operation. Described by
Nick
Cave, Howard's partner in crime in The Boys
Next Door and The Birthday Party, as 'Australia's
most unique, gifted and uncompromising guitarist', Howard's precision
playing was part of the incendiary mix of punk aggression and bluesy
bleakness that coloured The Birthday Party's sound, and made their
music so important to so many people.
Howard's contribution to The Boys Next Door and
their sudden transformation into The Birthday Party is often viewed
as somehow smaller than Cave's position as de facto front man, but
in fact without Howard's early contribution to The Boys Next Door
would have never even got off the ground. The band, consisting of
Cave, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey,
bassist Tracey Pew and drummer Phil Calvert
– school friends from Victoria – lacked one defining ingredient:
songs. When Howard joined the band he brought with him ready-made
songs, including the thoroughly miserable anthem 'Shivers', which
would turn out to be the band's strongest track on their hastily-recorded
album Door, Door. There are few songs whose opening lyrics
can grab you quite so effectively as on 'Shivers': 'I've been
contemplating suicide / But it really doesn't suit my style.'
Door, Door was originally released in
1979 by Australia's Mushroom Records imprint and can be broadly
dumped into the 'punk' category, if only because of its uncompromising
attitude, but its aspirations were clearly more broad. Door, Door
is an album that can be divided neatly in half – the first side
of the original LP is mostly a collection of urgent punk-pleasing
rock tracks drawing together the jangly punk guitars of Buzzcocks
with early Roxy Music saxophones and the post-glam sound of the
New York Dolls, while the second side contains slower, more emotional
numbers (including 'Shivers', which closes out the LP).
The mutation of The Boys Next Door into The Birthday
Party brought with it a greater emphasis on experimentation, finding
Howard developing new techniques of guitar playing amidst a backdrop
of spiralling drug use among several members of the band. The controlled
feedback howl that opens the early track 'The Friend Catcher' is
one of the most thrilling things I have ever heard, conjured up
using what Howard called 'infinite guitar', a technique for looping
and applying heavy reverb to his guitar playing. The sound The Birthday
Party produced was singularly influential, finding fans among punks
and goths alike, aided and abetted by their gargantuan excesses
and Cave's confrontational stage persona. At the heart of this was
not a bunch of egos, but musical dexterity and skill – Pew's low-slung
basslines, Harvey's precision (especially when he replaced the ousted
Calvert on drums), Cave's hellish lyrical imagination and finally,
the consistent guitar inventiveness of Rowland S. Howard.
Howard would go on to work, often with Mick Harvey,
in other bands such as Crime And The City Solution
and These Immortal Souls and collaborate with other
influential artists emerging from the punk scenes (such as Lydia
Lunch), applying his signature guitar style wherever he
went. Howard was promoting Pop Crimes, his second solo
album, when he passed away.
Of his battle with liver cancer he told Rolling
Stone that 'being told that you've only got a couple of years
to live without a transplant is a pretty frightening experience
and certainly changes the way you feel about your life.' It seems
appropriate that the album includes a cover of Talk Talk's seminal
'Life's What You Make It', as good an epitaph as you could imagine.
  
|
