The art that makes life worth living, according to Rowland S. Howard
Before Nick Cave reestablished himself as a dynamic, independent force of introspective songwriting, he was a sneering punk vocalist alongside Rowland S. Howard in The Birthday Party. Though they formed in Australia, the band relocated to London in 1980 to join the country’s burgeoning post-punk scene. They had related to Joy Division and saw eye to eye with The Fall but were otherwise unimpressed and soon moved to West Berlin, tracing David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s trail.
As the band’s alignment with Joy Division and The Fall might betray, The Birthday Party enjoyed their dense literature and often ruminated on macabre themes. In a 2022 interview with Far Out, Peter Hook remembered meeting The Birthday party while on tour in Europe in the early 1980s. “The myth is generally just as interesting as the truth,” he said before recalling the brief interaction.
The Birthday Party had a reputation as a particularly hedonistic group who enjoyed the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of sex, drugs and hard partying. Although there was obviously some truth to this, New Order’s exposure was somewhat underwhelming. “Where’s the party?” Hook remembered thinking after knocking on the band’s hotel room door. “We went in, and they were all sat around reading their books. I suppose you have to look behind the image.”
Some fans would have you believe that The Birthday Party named themselves after the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party, while others claim it was derived from a party sequence in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel Crime and Punishment. “The name The Birthday Party came up in conversation between Nick [Cave] and myself,” Howard asserted in a 2008 conversation with Mojo. “There’s this apocryphal story about it coming from a Dostoyevsky novel. It may have had various connotations, but what he and I spoke about was a sense of celebration and making things into more an occasion and ritual.”
So, it seems the band name actually does relate to the joys of the partying lifestyle. Still, as Hook recalls, the band was very literarily inclined. Throughout the band’s weird and wonderful catalogue, frontman Cave adopts a shrieking voice akin to his heroes Iggy Pop and Alan Vega to deliver poetic lyrics often inspired by the band’s favourite writers.
The classic 1982 album Junkyard was notably influenced by Southern Gothic themes as popularised by William Faulkner. Elsewhere, The Birthday Party’s lyrics paid homage to the great French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire. Howard was particularly fond of the former, whom he listed among the “things that make life worth living” in an interview feature with the NME in the 1980s.
Elsewhere in his selections, Howard revealed his love for Dashiell Hammett, famed for his 20th-century detective novels; Lydia Lunch, the author behind Adulterers Anonymous; and Raymond Queneau for his 1933 novel The Bark Tree. Outside of literature, he named some of his favourite actors and musicians, including the influential Australian bands The Saints and Crime And The City Solution.
The things that made life worth living for Rowland S. Howard:
- Hypnosis
- Carolyn Jones (As an alcoholic and Morticia Addams)
- Night Of The Hunter (The book/the film. L.O.V.E./H.A.T.E, across the knuckles of Robert Mitchum/The Preacher)
- ‘The Story Of Love’ (Song (original) The Saints)
- Raymond Chandler
- Dashiell Hammett
- Anaesthetists
- Lee Hazelwood (‘Some Velvet Morning’ – put manic surrealism and reversed country and western guitars in the American Top 40)
- Manhattan Island (Loud volley of jazz drum fire)
- Crime And The City Solution (Hypnotists)
- ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (A song. American radio promote the practice of suicide)
- The Bark Tree (Book by Raymond Queneau)
- ‘Fireworks’ (Song by The Tuff Monks/Emotion/Dirt/One damn fine mess.
- Chuckle Buster (Anything. Writing. Drawing etc.)
- Klaus Kinski (and all other practising vampires)
- ‘Walk On By’ (Song Pain and the Anaesthetic)
- Adulterers Anonymous (Book by Lydia Lunch)
- ‘The End’ (Song by The Doors. End of this list.)
