Photo of Rowland S. Howard by Stefan De Batselier

I’ve been a big Birthday Party fan since Prayers on Fire first came out—which is 38 years ago, if you are keeping count—and lately I’ve been in a real BP kick again, buying up original Aussie singles on Discogs. When the offer to review Fat Possum Records’ 2-LP vinyl reissue of Rowland S. Howard’s 1999 solo album Teenage Snuff Film came my way, I said “yes please.”

I’m embarrassed to admit that this album had passed me by, which is strange as I continued to follow Howard’s music after the Birthday Party imploded. Crime & The City Solution.These Immortal Souls. His two albums with Lydia Lunch are amongst my top favorite records. And you’d think a title like Teenage Snuff Film would’ve been intriguing enough, but apparently I was otherwise engaged in 1999. (In my defense, it wasn’t released in North America.)

Better late than never. This album is a motherfucker!

Teenage Snuff Film kicks off with the brilliant “Dead Radio” and these lyrics:

You’re bad for me
Like cigarettes
But I haven’t sucked
Enough of you yet

Did Raymond Chandler ever write anything that good? No. No he never did.

In the very next song, “Breakdown (And Then…),” the crown prince of the crying Jag intones:

Crown prince of the crying Jag
Stuffed the towel in his mouth to gag,
Oh my darling I never knew
How hard it was to get rid of you

The opening lyrics of the third song are equally as strong as what preceded them, if not stronger still:

I had no knife but myself
It was me I cut but you bled as well
How could I help dear sweet pretty one
When I could not put down the gun.

The title of that last one takes the notion of the famous six word story attributed to Ernest Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”) and cuts it down to just three: “I Burned Your Clothes.”

You really don’t have to wonder too much what that one’s all about do you? Does it come as any surprise that an album with a title like Teenage Snuff Film is a tad on the dark side? Probably not for most people, Howard clearly being a firm believer in truth-in-advertising. TSF is a bleak and diseased chronicle of an obsessive, toxic relationship and self-destruction. It delivers a payload of the very noirest noir. File it next to Marc Almond’s Torment and Toreros and Lou Reed’s Berlin under “Music to Slit Your Wrists To.” (This is a big compliment, if that’s not clear!)

The music lives up to the standard set by the lyrics. Howard is backed here by Mick Harvey on drums, organ and guitar, Brian Hooper (The Beasts of Bourbon) on bass and six string players. His longtime partner Genevieve McGuckin co-wrote and played organ on “Silver Chain.” There is a thick Phil Spectoresque Wall of Guitars-style production by Lindsay Gravina. I always found that the weakest part of These Immortal Souls was Howard’s singing—he always seemed more of a phantom than a frontman—but here I think his ravaged voice is just about the only one I could ever imagine hearing sing these songs. (At least the ones he wrote, there are also ace covers of the Shangri-Las’ “He Cried” and Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” which is set to a gothic blues dirge that really brings out a different side of that particular song.)

Teenage Snuff Film is out now in North and South America on Fat Possum Records as a 2-LP set newly remastered by producer Lindsay Gravina from the original tapes. It comes out in the UK and Europe on MUTE Records. Autoluminescent, Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn’s documentary about the life of Rowland S. Howard is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Both are highly recommended.
 

“Exit Everything”
 
More Rowland S. Howard after the jump…

 
This is fascinating: An early—1978—interview with Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard back when the group that would eventually gain infamy as the Birthday Party were still known as the Boys Next Door. Cave would have been 20 years of age here and 18-year-old Howard hadn’t even been in the group very long at all at that point. The YouTube poster speculates that this might be the very first Nick Cave interview—at least one captured on videotape—and I reckon this might be so.

The Boys Next Door formed in 1973, when Cave, Mick Harvey and Phill Calvert were all students at the Caulfield Grammar School, a private boys school in suburban Melbourne.  Although their repertoire originally consisted of David Bowie, Alice Cooper and Lou Reed covers, the Boys started performing Ramones songs as early as 1975 when bassist Tracy Pew, another student at the school joined, along with punky originals with titles like “Sex Crimes” and “Masturbation Generation.” With Howard’s arrival, his trademark feedback guitar sound gave a violence to their music that had been missing. He also brought along a song they’d be closely associated with, “Shivers,” a number the group performs below with Howard singing.

In the interview footage (a handmade title card near the end identifies it as “Conversations”) the kid asking the questions seems quite drunk. I’ve seen dozens, probably hundreds of interviews with Nick Cave and he’s always been a cool customer. Here his persona seems already quite fully-formed, even at this tender young age, as he gives the “interviewer” bemused looks and takes a long time to answer his goofy questions.
 

 
More after the jump…
 

The last few years have formed a tiny goldmine of music documentaries for fringe music fans, ranging from the previously covered “Bastard Art” to the harrowing Wild Man Fisher film, “Derailroaded” to the Faces-of-Death-trip of the Johnny Thunders documentary, “Born to Lose.” Somewhere in the middle was the Jeffrey Lee Pierce centered work, “Ghost on the Highway” and more recently, is “Autoluminescent,” about the life and work of guitarist, singer and songwriter extraordinaire, Rowland S. Howard.

The figure of Rowland was and forever is, unlike any, in music. The slight, ethereal looking figure, with a shock of dark hair and a cigarette permanently attached to his fingers, approached guitar like a musical whirlwind, sounding almost devoid of any proper musical forefathers. He elevated the Boys Next Door and was the needed catalyst to take them from basic pop-rock to the infernal swamp-rock of The Birthday Party. (A fact that is acknowledged in the film by Nick Cave himself.)

“Autoluminescent” not only documents this, starting from Rowland’s first band, The Young Charlatans all the way to his work with Lydia Lunch, Crime & the City Solution, These Immortal Souls and his own solo career. The later produced two albums, 1999’s “Teenage Snuff Film” and “Pop Crimes,” made ten years later as Howard was dying from liver cancer. What his solo career may have lacked in quantity it is epic in its brilliance. Like a true rock & roll alchemist, the man was able to take a schmaltzy song like “She Cried” (made famous by Jay & the Americans) and make it layered and real.

One of my biggest personal pet peeves with music documentaries is often the lack of actual music. Sometimes it is a legal issue, which was the case for both “Ghost on the Highway” and the Runaways film, “Edgeplay.” That is one thing, but then there are films where they just tease you with scraps, despite the fact that the whole reason you are watching is inadvertently tied to the music itself. Thankfully, that is not a huge issue here, as the balance between the music, interviews and atmospherically poetic interludes is well thought out. (Of course, I wouldn’t have minded even more music, but if it was up to me, all good music documentaries would be 8 hours long. With Rowland S. Howard, we’re talking “Berlin Alexanderplatz” lengths.)

Another thing that is obscenely beautiful about “Autoluminscent” is the way that it is weaved together, merging more traditional documentary elements, like interviews and archival footage, along with the pseudo-cinematic interstitial scenes of smoke and swampy filigree, as Rowland off screen reads narrative bits. The brilliance about this, as well as the marked prominence of the music, is that with artists, the only purely honest truths you are going to get is the art. With anyone, artists and laymen alike, you could talk to eighty different people that know you, but each one of them will get something wrong. It’s rarely an intentional dishonesty but everyone, at one point or time, ends up a victim of round robin.

That said, there are some great interviews here, featuring a veritable who’s who of cool, alternative artists, including Greg Perano from Hunters & Collectors, filmmaker Wim Wenders (whose film “Wings of Desire” featured both Crime & the City Solution and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds), longtime collaborator, member of These Immortal Souls and ex-romantic partner Genevieve McGuckin,  Honeymoon in Red collaborator and ex-paramour Lydia Lunch, Birthday Party band mates Cave and Mick Harvey, Barry Adamson and more. There’s also documentary-stalwart Henry Rollins, whom coincidentally appears in about 95% of the documentaries I have seen in my entire lifetime. The most effective out of the great lot, however, is McGuckin and Rowland himself. It is those interviews that reveal Rowland the most as both layered and flawed (as are we all) human and creative force of nature.

“Autoluminscent” will break your heart and though I knew it was an inevitable heartbreak because Rowland S. Howard died only a scant three years ago, the pain and loss are tangible by the end. It doesn’t revel in Rowland’s sickness and keeps an outright respectable distance while still acknowledging the various factors that hindered the man. Anyone dying at 50 is sad but when it is someone as beautiful and brilliant as this man, it just feels like the whole damned world was robbed.

Despite the sadness of it all, at the end of the day what matters is the work and Rowland S. Howard left behind a discography that is timeless, textured and striking. “Autoluminescent” is a fitting film document of a musician that should still be here.

 
The Boys Next Door, Nick Cave, Tracy Pew, Phill Calvert, Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard in footage shot at the Tiger Lounge, Swineburne College and Preston Institute of Technology, 1977-78.

This is a mixed bag of raw video that captures the pure punk energy of a group of teenage badasses that would eventually evolve into The Birthday Party, Bad Seeds and beyond…

There’s a belligerent little watermark that pops up now and then, but it doesn’t stick around for very long.
 

 
Sad news from Australia: Rowland S. Howard, the guitarist for post-punk legends, The Birthday Party, died of liver cancer on December 30th, 2009. Since the Birthday Party’s break-up in 1983 over his “creative differences” with Nick Cave, Howard’s distinctive, angular, “broken glass” style of guitar-playing has featured in groups such as These Immortal Souls, Crime and the City Solution, Nikki Sudden and the Jacobites and in collaboration with Lydia Lunch on their astonishing goth-tinged cover version of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood’s classic, Some Velvet Morning.

Howard told the Australian edition of Rolling Stone that he had liver cancer and was on the waiting list for a donor. “If you’re trying to write about the human condition there is only so many things you can choose from. 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] makes things so much closer.” Howard was 50.

Below: The Boys Next Door (the original name of The Birthday Party) with a young Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave, perform their cult hit Shivers: