Rowland S. Howard

[hag]

Australian rock musician, guitarist, and songwriter, probably best known for his work with the band The Birthday Party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_S._Howard

Rowland Howard was not much longer for this world by the late spring of 2008. His skeletal frame wrapped in a crisp black suit was a familiar sight at a particular corner cafe in St Kilda. Waiters would stop to light the cigarette in his trembling fingers as pale blue eyes surveyed the streets of his best and worst days. “I got sent this questionnaire by a fanzine the other day,” the ailing legend recalled one such morning, “and the first question was ‘Did you believe in [the Sex Pistols’ refrain], “no future”?′ To me, punk rock was very much about believing there was a future, because it legitimised you. It gave you confidence. It said that technical ability wasn’t the important thing. What was important was what you were saying, and the way that you said it. All great rock & roll,” he declared with a wry twist of blood-red lips, “is about the style in which it is said.” [...] “David Bowie was probably his main impetus,” Howard’s younger brother Harry remembers. “I think he wanted to be a fantastic rock & roll creature along those sort of lines: intelligent and artistic and fabulously pop-worthy.”

“I was on the periphery for a long time,” he remembered, “because I’m not somebody who really forces my presence on other people. Eventually, I can’t remember how, but I got invited to this party – there were all these people like Tracy Pew and Nick Cave and various other figures who became important to the scene.”

“He had a way of writing, even in the Young Charlatans, that was from the heart,” she says. “Intensely romantic songs, often. But the songs he wrote for the Birthday Party, because he was writing them for someone else to sing, he wrote in an entirely different way and they became more and more abstract.”

Howard identified his Achilles heel as a person and his strength as an artist in one succinct statement back in 2008: “I’m a person who is totally governed by my emotions,” he confessed. “I just don’t have the ability to hide what I’m feeling.”

“No,” McGuckin reflects now, “he didn’t. He had a lot of sadness. He was also very funny. Hilarious! Which was different to being happy. He used to say to me, ‘Why would I write a song if I was happy?’ He’d say, ‘God, if I wrote a song when I was happy it might turn out like “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”!’”

http://rollingstoneaus.com/music/pos...the-tracks/913

Rowland S. Howard once remarked to Melbourne newspaper The Age "I think that the most important thing about music should be that it expresses some kind of humanity and it should express the personality of the person who is playing it. And if you're good enough, then people will be able to tell it's you, not just anyone."

"When I’m in the studio I often think of Rowland for inspiration," [Nigel Yang] says. "His guitar solos are beautifully confined and speak to me of confinement in general. However his noise guitar sections express a wholly different quality, of freedom and delirium. Rowland exists in my mind as a collection of such qualities, oscillating between romanticism and detachment, endlessly."

http://doublej.net.au/news/features/six-strings-that-drew-blood-rowland-s-howards-unique-legacy

 

Rowland, for a long time, kinda hung around with me at gigs and stuff like that, and had this impression of me as being really inarticulate, kind of punk, or something like that... and he was really impressed with... the kind of ‘idiot savant’ aspect of my nature... Anyway, he was, I think, slightly depressed and disillusioned when he came around to my house and found a whole lot of Dostoevsky books on my shelf. He was like, “You read this stuff?! I thought you were for real!”

We were definitely into the same sorts of things. Left-field literature, the Dadas. He himself was a huge Duchamp guy, much more than I was, actually... Alfred Jarry... This had a big influence over what he did lyrically, for a long time. And had an influence over what I did, for a shorter time. He continued to write in this increasingly absurdist style and went on with quirky guitar lines and absurdist lyrics.

Rowland took London personally... like as if someone had built it just to make him unhappy... but he may well have taken the world in that way.

Hanging out with girls, smoking, fraternizing with girls, talking to girls on the telephone while smoking, smoking with girls.

I think Rowland was in love with pretty much every woman he ever met.

He was always insanely in love with somebody who wasn't in love with him... He was very passionate about things and very deeply romantic... And that's, you know, why all his songs are about pining... [...] Rowland always had good relationships with women and saw them as people, in spite of his mad crushes. They were always intelligent, they've all been very opinionated women, they've all been very strong... they've all been very demanding women.

I guess he wasn't afraid of my aggressiveness, the way that some more macho guys were very confronted by me.

 

[flames]

Don't know but that band's tight.