On The Rowland S. Howard Laneway, And Reclaiming Public Space

On Wednesday night last week, Melbourne’s City of Port Philip council unanimously approved naming a St. Kilda laneway after Rowland S. Howard. The as-yet-untitled passage between Eildon Road and Jackson Street will pay tribute to arguably one of the most under-recognised and most talented of Australian musicians.

Rowland S. Howard emerged out of the 1970s St Kilda music scene as the guitarist for Nick Cave’s The Birthday Party. The sound of Howard’s guitar is unique, an instantly recognisable reverberating howl that came to define everything he ever produced.

He was a man who lived his life with a glass heart pinned to his sleeve; a spectral figure who, when he died of liver cancer brought on by years of heroin abuse in 2009, betrayed a lifetime of troubles in the topography of his face. He left Australia with The Birthday Party, and moved to London and Berlin in the ‘80s, before joining Crime & The City Solution and These Immortal Souls. Howard didn’t fully come into his own as a solo artist until he moved back to Melbourne in the ‘90s.

‘I Cut Like The Sharpest Knife’: What All The Fuss Is About

Despite being a long-suffering Nick Cave fan, I hadn’t heard any of Howard’s solo work until last year, when I wandered into Cream on King Street in Sydney. Teenage Snuff Film, Howard’s 1999 debut solo album was playing on the sound-system. The first song on the record, ‘Dead Radio’, begins like this: “You’re bad for me, like cigarettes/But I haven’t sucked enough of you yet/Nothing is sacred, and nothing is true/I’m no one that’s nowhere, when I’m here with you.”

I want to marry music like that. I want to smother it in whiskey and set it on fire and fling it out into the ocean on a burning ship.

Rowland S. Howard produced two solo albums, the aforementioned Teenage Snuff Film (number one on Faster Louder’s list of most under-rated albums) and 2009’s Pop Crimes, released shortly before his death. And they are some of the most beautiful pieces of music ever produced by a musician in Australia. Or anywhere.

His music is filled with raw, swooning notes, with broken hearts and bloodshed, with Catholic schoolgirls bearing Uzi’s and “pashing with the devil at the bus stop.” It’s the kind of music I’m so enamoured of that the only way I have of expressing how fucking wonderful it is is by writing this for you.

‘A Poverty Of Care’: Why Was Rowland S. Howard So Under-rated?

Rowland S. Howard lived for most of his professional life in the shadow of Nick Cave. And as brilliant an artist as Cave is, his is a deep, dark and all-encompassing shadow.

As a member of The Birthday Party, Howard’s work became secondary, particularly when it came to songs like ‘Shivers’, which Howard wrote as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy yet which will forever be immortalised on Door, Door (1979) in Nick Cave’s melancholy wail. In Autoluminescent, the excellent 2011 documentary on Howard’s life, you can see Cave have a minor epiphany about ‘Shivers’ on camera: “I was never able to do that song justice. Rowland must have been squirming every time I sang it. I really wish he had sung that when we recorded it. Because it was his song.”

So it was lovely when Nick Cave became one of the biggest supporters of the campaign to have the laneway named after Howard. While Melbourne music producer Nick Haines spearheaded the move, it was given the most publicity when people like Henry Rollins, Shane MacGowan, and yes, Nick Cave, voiced their support.  In a letter to the council, Cave wrote, “Rowland and I were friends, bandmates, collaborators and fellow conspirators in the St Kilda music scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. His artistic legacy endures, and I hope that you can honour him with the cultural recognition he richly deserves.”

‘How Could You Forget The Words I Wrote?’: Keeping The Memory

Rowland S. Howard had a long history with St Kilda. It’s where he lived for many years, where he played his last gig, and where his funeral was held. The Council’s decision not only pays testament to his relationship with St Kilda, but also validates Howard’s legacy by recognising the contribution he made to Australia’s music industry. Because naming something after somebody else is perhaps the ultimate in grand, romantic gestures. That’s why we all have anachronistic middle names – because our parents’ great aunts, mentors and first loves were all named terrible things like Sharon or Warwick.

Names are important. They help us conceive of ourselves. In 2001’s Spirited Away Chihiro can only be free once she recovers the name that has been stolen from her. Similarly, Bastian in The NeverEnding Story (1984) defeats a terrible force called The Nothing by giving the Empress of the kingdom a new name. Names are hugely powerful. They give form and presence, where before there was nothingness.

‘From This Vast Expanse Of Nothing’: Giving Names To Invisible Things

Cities are filled with nothingness – vacant lots, industrial parks, scraps of land beside freeways – all the kind of things that are unlikely to show up on Google Maps. Graham Coreil-Allen is an American artist who investigates just that predicament. Last year he began The New Public Sites Project, which “investigates the ways in which invisible sites and overlooked features exist within our everyday environment.” In The Typology of New Public Sites (check out the free pdf copy here), he bestows names upon things which, until now, we had no words to talk about, like ‘desire line’ and ‘median refuge’. By mapping all of these nowhere, left-over spaces, Coreil-Allen styles himself as a kind of situationist freedom fighter of urban design, intrepidly walking where no man has thought to walk before. The point of his work is that once you give a place a name, you can begin to think about it, and once you can think about it, you can talk about what it might mean.

Australian cities have a problem when it comes to public space. Our rainbow crossings get destroyed, our buses are filled with racist lunatics, and even council-approved sites for delinquency aren’t safe from industrial street cleaners. In reality, our public spaces are only public until The Man wants them back. But if we think about our cities as places that aren’t simply pedestrianised malls and harbour views, but also nothing-spaces like median strips and laneways, we can begin to re-define them. We can begin to talk about what they mean to us, about the people who inhabit them, and the things that are important to them.

And the first step in being able to do that is by giving places names. When you give a ‘nothing’ a name you can re-imagine it as a ‘something’.

That’s why naming a laneway after Rowland S. Howard is so significant. We could have named a concert hall after him or we could have built him a statue and erected it along the St Kilda promenade. But instead, we have taken a nowhere space, an invisible part of the city, and we’re going to give it his name. And surely it’s not a little apt that the passage we’re going to name Rowland S. Howard Lane – one of our most scandalously overlooked and under-appreciated musicians – is one of those often-overlooked spaces in the suburb he spent so much of his life in.

Not only is it an act of recognising Rowland S. Howard as an artist who brought beauty to so many lives, but by giving a laneway in St Kilda a name, we can begin to start telling stories to our cities – about the people who’ve lived and loved and died in their midst, and who still mean so much to those left behind.

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Madeleine Watts is a Sydney-based writer. She is a regular contributor to Concrete Playground and Broadsheet Sydney.