What an amazing story! Thanks.“This is not a masterpiece,” she wrote on the sleeve of one of her records, “but it could be so bad you’ll like it.”
Overlooked No More: Cordell Jackson, Elder Stateswoman of Rock ’n’ Roll
A pioneering record-label owner and engineer, she played guitar in a raw and unapologetically abrasive way. “Whatever song it was,” she said, “I always creamed it.”www.nytimes.com
Absolutely. If you throw Bowie into the mix you have the DNA of so many bands from the era covered.
Love the song, the artist, all or most the albums, the writing, the tunes etc.
beat.com.au
Rowland Howard 1959-2009
Failure is hard, but success is far more dangerous
When a song you write at the age of 16 which leads you to be dubbed Melbourne's Rimbaud and you wear it like a crown of thorns forever after.
The FB algorithm is serving me a huge dose of RH at the moment because it's been eaves dropping so like Pavlovs dog I will obey Big Brother
CROWNED IN BLACK - a post memorial of the immortal soul of Rowland S Howard
Reflections on Rowland
"I want to write a bit about Rowland S Howard, who I knew a little in person — he was good friends with my ex-girlfriend’s mother — and whose music I love. His wonderful 1999 album Teenage Snuff Film was recently released for the first time in the USA; I wanted to write about it, but for various reasons that didn’t happen, so I’m writing something here instead.
I admired Rowland so, so much. It’s hard for most of us not to think of his career without thinking of Nick Cave, who had enjoyed much more commercial success — but Rowland always struck me as the more interesting one, the John Cale to Cave’s Lou Reed, the Brian Eno to Cave’s Bryan Ferry. His songs were every bit as dark as his old bandmate’s, but they were leavened by a bone-dry sense of humour and a sense of fragility, both of which Cave’s often lacked. That fragility seemed to underpin his relative lack of commercial success; it takes a certain sort of person to really go after fame and success, a certain single-mindedness and ruthlessness.
I didn’t know Rowland well enough to say if he lacked those things, but I related to what I perceived in him. And I just loved his music: lyrics as acerbic as they were deeply compassionate, songs that didn’t really sound like anyone else. And then, of course, there was his guitar playing… he’s one of the rare players with a tone all his own, a coruscating sound that makes his records instantly recognizable.
When Rowland died, I was working as the editor of Inpress magazine, a Melbourne street press publication that was basically the city’s equivalent to the Village Voice. Because I had met Rowland a few times, I largely recused myself from writing about his work. However, when we got the news he was releasing a new album, we found a cover spot for him, and I decided I’d do the interview myself.
Note; Personally I would start reading here because the opening half is pretty much self aggrandizing trough water.
It turned out to be what I am pretty sure was Rowland’s final interview before he died. And I bottled it. Completely.
A couple of months before he died, he came to our office in Richmond to sit for a cover shoot with our photographer Kane Hibberd and then talk to me for the accompanying story. He was extremely frail. We tried to keep the shoot as short as possible — although Kane still managed to take a really lovely portrait, which he has generously agreed to let me use here and which you can see above — but by the time we went upstairs to speak, he was clearly flagging.
The interview only lasted for about ten minutes. I asked fairly superficial questions, finishing with the observation that, hilariously, Rowland had been nominated for that year’s “Best Breakthrough Artist” ARIA award. It was almost too bitterly ironic to be true — at the age of 50, in the last months of his life, a dying man was being acclaimed as a hot new artist. When I read back through my feature, it’s clear how much I had to pad it out to meet the word count — cover stories were 1250 words, and of those, perhaps 200 are direct quotes.
Even Rowland seemed surprised by how brief the interview was. He was clearly proud of his new record, Pop Crimes, as well he might have been — the simple fact of its existence was remarkable, considering how sick its creator was. I asked him about the process of making it, and the musicians he worked with, and blah blah blah.
I couldn’t find the words to ask the questions I really wanted to ask, though — and honestly, I wasn’t sure if I really did want to ask those questions anyway. Listening back to Pop Crimes now, I get the same feeling I did then: that as the album progresses, there’s a growing feeling feeling of complete, utter despair, the despair of a man who knew he was dying and was desperate not to do so. At times the feeling of impending loss, and of Rowland’s awareness of what he was about to lose, is so clear that listening almost feels intrusive.
How do you ask about something like that? How do you ask about an impending and premature death? About oblivion? About regret? I don’t know now, and I certainly didn’t know in 2009. And honestly, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t. Such questions are for trusted friends, not for me."
Tom Hawking May 7, 2020
View attachment 1883889
Rowland S.Howard
Photo by Kane Hibberd.
I generally scan FB comments so this:
Comment..by a FB mate of Mark Mordue’s Writer of Boy on Fire I noted.
Ross N. Clelland
I got to interview Rowland for the old Dum Media about a decade earlier, and a lot of the quotes came between lighting up smokes, and coughing fits.
And he gave me what I still count as one of the best quotes I ever got from an artist:
"I understand that it is so much easier to write about someone who is larger than life. As much as I said I wouldn't mention it, that's exactly what we did in the Birthday Party. It was a conscious decision to become caricatures, which is fun, but not particularly artistically rewarding...The problem there was some of us forgot where the artifice stopped and we began." R. Howard
&
Probably due to the anniversary of his passing, that same quote and story came up on another site as well. So I dug out the original and posted it - I'm still getting over he's been gone 15 years, and and maybe more that I wrote this 25 ago…”
Full Article;
Rowland S. Howard, the wraith's progress.
B'cause Lydia Lunch is also about to hit Melb's...ok they're all coming to town now.
This is starting to feel like it's the Zombie Apocalypse Marketting tour(s) of the 80's Scene Survivors.
Lydia Lunch and Joseph Keckler are coming to Australia
Combining the dynamic spoken word of Lunch and the dark humour and unnerving musicality of Keckler, Tales of Lust & Madness brings two of New York’s most notorious performers together to create an intimate evening of provocative musical poetry. Passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether...
1987 Wings of Desire. Crime and The City Solution
