Deathblog:
Rowland S. Howard, 1959-2009

It sure is sad that Roland S. Howard didn’t make it through to the new decade, and it sure is sad that I’ve had to interrupt my chart run-down for a second time to bid farewell to an innovative guitarist.

This will be a short and somewhat disingenuous eulogy, simply because to be honest I’ve never found the time to check out any of the stuff Howard has done since his Birthday Party days, excepting some tracks with Lydia Lunch and a pretty good collaboration with Nikki Sudden. Damn, it’s depressing that they’re both dead now (Rowland and Nikki I mean, not Lydia). I mean, they looked dead when they were making the album, but that was just their style, I don’t think they meant it.

Anyway – The Birthday Party – briefly and frenziedly adopted as my favourite ever band aged nineteen-ish, and Rowland with his mentalist feedback, pre-stabbing alley creep and literal guitar-bludgeoning was always my favourite within their ranks – the key fright-wrangler in this all-time scariest of scary rock n’ roll bands.

Why I never followed him through to Crime & The City Solution I’ll never know – for a while in the pre-internet era I was avidly seeking their records without much luck, but then I just kinda lost interest I guess. Maybe I should make amends and give ‘em a whirl, sometime later when it seems less ghoulish.

I suppose it could equally have been the lurching, unheimlich rhythms or Cave’s slobbering histrionics that did it, but I’d like to think it was Rowland’s destructive racket that caused by brother to knock on my bedroom door and ask me to turn off ‘Hamlet Pow Pow Pow’ because it was upsetting him – a singular achievement. Also, check out earlier track ‘The Friend Catcher’ for a definitive demonstration of Evil Guitar, ripped to perfection, sounding like a spirit rising from the grave.

Mp3s>

The Birthday Party – Hamlet (Pow Pow Pow)
The Birthday Party – The Friend Catcher

Labels: deathblog, Rowland S Howard, The Birthday Party