The Vinyl Monologues Podcast

I had gone with all the intentions and wonder of my own sonic youth.

Smoothing my ‘grown up goth’ Alannah Hill dress over my knees on a packed tram, anticipating everything but expecting nothing. I got off at the right stop in a then unfamiliar town and was drawn towards the art deco time capsule that is the St Kilda Memo.

We all had on the right uniform as we milled about, waiting for the right sounds to emanate from the stage and transport us back to that otherworldly time when good, no GREAT music was allowed to be everything you lived for, more than justifying your nocturnal excesses.

Crown Prince of the Crying Jag was a monumental, reverent and respectful mix tape of songs once performed by Rowland S. Howard – reimagined in loving tribute by past collaborators, partners, family members and well wishers covering most of Howard’s career as guitarist, lyricist and vocalist.

The list of participants would make you weep, JP Shilo, Mick Harvey, Spencer P Jones, Gareth Liddiard, Jonnine and Conrad Standish, Brian Hooper, Phil Calvert, Bronwyn Bonney, Genevieve McGuckin, Tex Napalm, Dimi Dero, Dave Graney (as self deprecating and acerbic MC) Harry and Angela Howard etc etc etc.

To me, Rowland had initially been the slight and androgynous figure on the back of my ‘Door Door’ vinyl cover. He wielded a menacing guitar against his small frame and angular face, the planes of which were not conventionally attractive, rendering them quite exquisite as a result. He grew to mean more as I heard more: The Birthday Party, These Immortal Souls, Young Charlatans, Crime and The City Solution; the too cool for words smoke-in-mouth swagger in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, culminating in his two solo albums, Pop Crimes and Teenage Snuff film being thrashed to death wherever I could press play and discover more nuance with every listen.

He was always linked with, and then almost emancipated from, the prolific juggernaut that is Nick Cave after their huge tandem success in England with the Birthday Party.

His brother Harry Howard acknowledges what an immense guitar hero Rowland had been overseas, often unbeknownst to those back in Oz.

‘There’s some youtube footage of Rowland playing with the Bad Seeds in Manchester where a footy like crowd of fans chanted Rowland, Rowland, Rowland – which was really nice to see’.

It was rumoured that Nick was going to attend that night; would it have enhanced or altered the spirit of the evening?

Whilst my voice recorder would have delighted in including his and Barry Adamson’s dulcet tones as they remembered their time with Rowland, the night wasn’t about them – and may have even detracted from the celebration of lesser known craftsmen.

Maybe Nick knew this all along.

At a festival show a year before his death, I had met Rowland and pulled off the anecdote that would be trotted out at all future gatherings (including on the tribute night itself to anyone who was drunk enough to listen). When I mentioned to Rowland the appallingly fanatical reality that I had named my second son after him, he simply asked if I had included the ‘W’ in my living tribute. I happily pushed my unsuspecting then husband towards him and stated sweetly ‘No, but meet the man who wouldn’t let me’..Poor guy was sacrificed to the altar of fan worship. Neither of us remember how he even responded.

He was arresting in person, whilst still able to carry on a regular conversation (imagine!). He and collaborator JP Shilo (the tribute night’s acknowledged genius, welcomed this tragic author into the backstage catacombs of Cockatoo Island after that show. Rowland politely examined the picture of my toddler frozen on my little phone and said ‘He looks nice’ as if my then 18 month old was a fully formed person who understood things and participated in life as equally as the adults that orchestrated his life around him did.

Rowland by all accounts did this when he was a young boy – his brother Harry says he was incredibly stylish at an early age despite no one around him guiding those choices. His confidence was even more remarkable in the context of an Australia Harry remembers as ‘confined and mono cultural’.

‘In a post war greyness people didn’t know how to process or register someone like Rowland’.

So where did the self-assuredness come from I wonder?

‘Not sure, it could have been a reaction to the strained relationship with our father. His drawings, his writings, his fashion sense. He was reinventing himself from the age of 8, his humour was absurd, caustic and clever’ says a rightly proud Harry.

‘He wore all black, with white socks and a badge saying ‘October’ with an armband saying ‘The model of youth’.

Simple garb nowadays that Harry reminds me was incredibly subversive, in an era where the colour of your socks could have you beaten up at the train station.

It was a far larger and more accepting Melbourne creative community that greeted Drones’ frontman Gareth Liddiard, when he met Rowland on his first ever trip to St Kilda in 2000.

‘Some fuckwit walked in front of our van and it was Rowland’.

‘He was a tall, private school boy who was very well spoken compared to us WA state school boys. Charming and hilarious’.

Before that he remembers hearing Rowland’s song ‘Hyperspace’ as a teen, ‘In an actual girl’s bedroom!’(said with much vigour and amazement).

Which we all know can only make a good tune better (and may have enhanced Liddiard’s excellent performance of that now hormone laden These Immortal Souls classic on the night).

That fun encounter led to mutual musical appreciation; always hidden behind a wry muso ‘never let on you like his stuff’ attitude….when Rowland asked Gareth why on earth he had such a large pickup on his guitar (Humbucker) he answered ‘Cos I just sounded like you all the fucking time so I replaced it’.

‘But then I ended up just sounded like Neil Young which Rowland thought was pretty funny’.

Bless.

Liddiard also acknowledged how competitive Rowland was. ‘That’s why he was that good, he had it all figured out’.

When I asked him what Rowland would have made of a night like this Gareth acknowledges that the grief of his death is an ‘extinguisher’ of all that was ever petty and difficult in their mutual music scene – that everyone in the room loved him and wished him well.

Long time music promoter, friend of Rowland and tireless tribute organiser Lorinda Jane, received a phone call before the event from a famous promoter who rightly commended her efforts, saying that the lineup would have been an impossible dream for anyone else to realise. My teenage fantasies were executed effortlessly on stage as I drank my beer and lost myself in melodic feedback before interviewing some musical heroes, but the dedication and passion behind the scenes cannot go unacknowledged.

Not many stones were left unturned musically – and the ‘caustic’ irony was taken care of in the form of hot pink lanyards and stubby holders at the merch stand – with stall holder Nick Haines admitting he was the only person in the world to ever sit Rowland down in front of a football game.

‘I was screaming at the telly and Rowland said quite seriously, Nick – you know they can’t hear you’.

Indeed.

It is at once ludicrous and understandable that only a special few become autopsied magicians in death – their tricks and cards dealt on the table for all to see. But far from ruining the mystique, it sometimes only enhances it. To finally appreciate what was there all along, what had driven that person to strive against the norm and create tangible, wondrous art that will continue to be enjoyed by anyone willing to try something new.

The last word goes to brother Harry though, who spoke openly and beautifully about what the event might have meant to his late brother.

‘Rowland would have been in stitches about tonight, he would have had enough to gossip about for a year. He was so responsive to how other people behaved – he would be highly amused and hopefully touched as well’.