Then, in 1999, he released a new album, Teenage Snuff Film, the first to be released under his own name. A lot of the songs people think are about drugs are actually about stopping taking drugs.” Rowland’s brother, Harry Howard, said “ Whenever he came off heroin he’d get this massive nerve-jangling awakening. The main reason for this near disappearance would appear to be a terrible heroin addiction that became the centre of his attention and interfered with his creativeness. When These Immortal Souls also split up, Rowland seemed to retreat and fade from public view, although he did manage to reconnect with Nick Cave as he sang backing vocals on the Let Love In album. In one particularly heartbreaking development, the club’s DJ announced that the band and crew were looking for someone to put them up for the night, the tour revenues presumably not being enough to cover things such as hotel rooms.Ĭrime and the City Solution’s Paradise Discotheque revisted The club held only a few hundred people and was far from sold out. Rowland S Howard joined the wonderful Crime and the City Solutionfor a while, playing on two albums and delivering his distinctive stylings to such classics as Six Bells Chime, before leaving to form These Immortal Souls.Īs I have recounted elsewhere in these pages, while Nick Cave built up an audience, playing larger venues and moving up festival bills, I saw These Immortal Souls play Liverpool’s Planet X while promoting their excellent second album, I’m Never Gonna Die Again. As we know, his creative arc has been constantly upwards since, creating some of the best and most powerful music ever set down. When the band split, Cave went on to form The Cavemen who soon changed their name to The Bad Seeds after a handful of gigs. I thought: ‘Well, now we’re fucked, aren’t we?’ When the two main songwriters aren’t talking to each other much, it was all kind of inevitable.” I said: ‘Why don’t you write it with Rowland?’ He said: ‘I don’t want to write with Rowland any more.’ Rowland was there in the van, so this was a significant historical turning point. “ Nick collared me in the van on tour, probably in Germany, and said: ‘Would you write this song with me?’ He had the lyrics. Mick Harvey remembers what was perhaps the beginning of the end when Cave asked him to write the music for Deep in the Woods, rather than ask Rowland.

With Rowland and Nick Cave in the band, they were both cursed and blessed with two uniquely creative individuals who soon began to pull in different directions. The Birthday Party were a band who were doomed to split up sooner rather than later. He suited the sound he made onstage, looking lean and angular himself. It cut through the noise that surrounded it like a knife. The sound he got out of his guitar was razor-sharp, almost all treble and soaked in reverb. He has been a major influence for many years, from those strange days when dozens of Birthday Party copyists stalked the earth, through the like of The Horrors and into the modern day with bands like The Blinders and Psycho Comedy taking their cue from Howard’s guitar lines. Rowland S Howard was the visionary whose innovative guitar work drove The Birthday Party, whether it was the feral, scathing guitar lines of Zoo Music Girl or the delicate, barely there work of Wildworld, Howard approached his guitar like you expected he approached everything else, trying to create something new and awkward from what was familiar.

Partly because they give me a good reason to revisit some of my favourite records, but also because they allow me to turn a spotlight onto something that I feel has been overlooked or neglected.īut what we have here is not so much a couple of lost albums, but more of a lost performer. As I have mentioned before, I love writing these Lost Albums features.

Forgotten spat