For the recording of “Release the Bats,” Rowland S. Howard ran his guitar through a 24-band graphic equaliser, surrounded the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier with a tunnel of corrugated iron, and then attached contact microphones to the corrugated iron to capture the resulting sound. “You just couldn’t be in the room,” he recalled, “it was so unbelievably offensive.” This is the specific recording technique of a musician who understood that the guitar’s potential for sonic extremity had not been fully explored and who was willing to build a corrugated iron tunnel around his amplifier in a professional London recording studio to explore it. The result — the specific corrugated-iron-filtered, 24-band-EQ-processed, Fender-Twin-driven guitar sound of “Release the Bats” — is the most extreme single recording moment in the Birthday Party’s catalog and one of the most extreme single recording moments in the post-punk tradition. The Fender Twin Reverb was Howard’s constant companion throughout his career: “Rowland always used a Fender Twin Reverb,” as the Australian Guitar interview documents. “I would just turn the reverb up high and hit the guitar. On the neck, behind the bridge.” The high reverb. The neck of the guitar used as a secondary percussion instrument behind the bridge. The corrugated iron tunnel when a specific song required a specific sound that no available equipment could produce. This is Rowland S. Howard’s approach to the guitar: the Fender Twin at maximum reverb as the baseline, and whatever additional extremity the specific song required as the modification. Lydia Lunch described the color of his music as “a deep-purple bruise.” His guitar playing was like “the stab of a switchblade.” The corrugated iron tunnel was the recording environment. The offensive, unlistenable room was the studio. The record is called “Release the Bats.” This is the correct approach.
Rowland Stuart Howard was born on October 24, 1959, in Melbourne, Australia, and died on December 30, 2009, at the age of fifty, in Melbourne, from liver cancer. He wrote “Shivers” at the age of sixteen while a member of the Young Charlatans — the song that would later become famous when Nick Cave sang it with the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party, and which Howard lamented was still what people asked him about in 1999, twenty-three years after he wrote it as a teenager. He joined the Boys Next Door (which became the Birthday Party) in Melbourne, and the band relocated to London in 1980, then to West Berlin in 1982, tracing the specific geographic arc of the post-punk avant-garde that moved from the punk’s commercial center in London to the divided city that was the specific location of the European avant-garde underground of the early 1980s. Nick Cave described Howard’s guitar playing as “one of the most unique and extraordinary guitar sounds I have ever heard.” Thurston Moore described him as “the greatest guitar player of the 20th century.” Lydia Lunch said the color of his music was a deep-purple bruise. Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace said his guitar playing was like the stab of a switchblade. These assessments, from four musicians across different traditions and different decades, constitute one of the more remarkable posthumous critical consensuses in this series: the man who played through corrugated iron and called himself “technically limited” was considered by his peers to be among the most extraordinary guitarists of the century.
The “technically limited” self-assessment is one of the more consequential pieces of guitar philosophy in the post-punk tradition: his distinctive style of technically limited, audio feedback-laden, blues guitar playing is regarded very highly by aficionados of the Southern Gothic-inspired rock. The technique was not the point. The sound was the point. The specific quality of the sound — the feedback, the high reverb, the guitar neck hit behind the bridge, the eastern-tinged melodic lines of the Birthday Party’s more delicate passages, the brutal abrasive noise of the corrugated-iron sessions — was entirely the point, and the specific limitation of conventional guitar technique was not a deficit but an enabling condition: someone with more conventional technique might have been less likely to run the guitar through a 24-band graphic EQ and build a corrugated iron tunnel around the amplifier. The limitation freed him for the extremity. The extremity produced the music. The music influenced everyone from Lydia Lunch to Laura Jane Grace, and that influence chain still runs forward.
He died at fifty from liver cancer. The documentary Autoluminescent (2011) — made shortly before his death and released after it — is the primary biographical document of a musician whose specific guitar approach has influenced the post-punk, gothic rock, noise rock, and alternative traditions without his name being known outside the enthusiast community the way it deserves to be. “The ultimate underdog fuck-up,” as the Rolling Stone Australia retrospective described him — a term Howard seems to have used about himself and that captures both the specific character of a musician who chose the oblique and the extreme over the commercially accessible and the ordinary, and the specific quality of self-awareness that made him able to observe his own position accurately. The Fender Twin. The corrugated iron. The 24-band graphic EQ. The deep-purple bruise. The switchblade. The Ibanez Firebird copy with the highest reverb available and the neck of the guitar struck behind the bridge. Rowland S. Howard.
Background: Melbourne, the Boys Next Door, and the Trans-European Underground
Melbourne in the late 1970s — the specific Australian city that produced the Birthday Party’s creative core — was geographically isolated from the European and American post-punk scenes it was in conversation with, which paradoxically gave the Birthday Party a specific independence of development. Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, and Rowland S. Howard were in dialogue with the New York punk tradition of Television and the Velvet Underground, with the British punk tradition, with the blues and gospel of the American South — but they were developing in Melbourne, where proximity to the commercial centers of those traditions was not a practical possibility. The specific combination of influences and the specific geographic isolation produced something that was simultaneously recognizable as post-punk and genuinely unlike anything being made in London or New York.
Howard’s specific musical development — writing “Shivers” at sixteen, joining the Boys Next Door, developing the specific guitar approach that the Birthday Party’s sound required — was shaped by the Melbourne scene’s specific characteristics and by the specific listening that the teenage Howard did in geographic isolation from the sources of what he was hearing. The specific eastern-tinged melodic lines that characterize the more delicate Birthday Party guitar work — the “spindly, delicate, often eastern-tinged lines” of Prayers on Fire — reflect the specific quality of a musician who absorbed multiple musical traditions and combined them in a personal synthesis rather than in the received context of any single tradition. This is the art-school-adjacent quality of the Birthday Party’s music that Howard’s guitar most directly embodies: the guitar is an instrument for personal expression rather than a vehicle for the received vocabulary of any established genre.
The Birthday Party’s specific recording and performance history — the 4AD records in the UK, the relocation to London, the resettlement in West Berlin, the increasing violence and extremity of the live shows as the band became “resolutely unignorable” — is the specific biographical context in which the corrugated iron recording technique and the 24-band EQ processing developed. The band was pursuing “extremes of sound” — Howard’s own description of the Junkyard period’s aims — and the specific technical methods employed were in service of those extremes rather than in service of conventional recording quality. The Nick Launay session that produced “Release the Bats” at the Townhouse in London is the canonical Birthday Party recording moment: the corrugated iron tunnel, the contact microphones, the room that you couldn’t be in, and the result that became one of the most immediately distinctive guitar sounds in post-punk history.
Crime and the City Solution — formed after Howard left the Birthday Party following creative differences with Cave — continued the Birthday Party’s Southern Gothic-influenced approach in a different creative context. These Immortal Souls continued further, with Howard as the primary creative force. The two solo albums of his final decade — Teenage Snuff Film (1999/2009) and Pop Crimes (2009, released shortly before his death) — are the most recent documents of the specific guitar approach that the Birthday Party established: the high reverb, the feedback, the deep-purple bruise of the melodic style, applied in a more intimate solo context where the guitar voice was more exposed and more directly personal than in the Birthday Party’s collective extremity.
The Rig: Rowland S. Howard’s Guitars, Amps, and Effects
Guitars
The primary guitar documented for Rowland S. Howard’s Birthday Party period is an Ibanez No. 2348 — a copy of the Gibson Firebird model made by Ibanez during the lawsuit era of Japanese guitar manufacturing, when multiple Japanese companies were producing copies of American guitars of varying quality and specification. The Ibanez Firebird copy’s specific character: the through-neck construction of the Gibson Firebird original (or set-neck in some copies), the reverse-headstock design, and the specific Ibanez pickups of the period. The Firebird’s acoustic character — bright for a Gibson, with a specific forward-punching clarity from the through-neck construction and mini-humbucker pickups — produced the specific guitar voice that the Birthday Party’s recordings document: cutting, bright, with the specific sustain of through-neck construction and the specific harmonic character of the mini-humbucker’s articulate, forward-projecting voice. The Ibanez copy rather than the Gibson original reflects the same pragmatic, non-prestige approach that other post-punk guitarists — Bernard Sumner with the Shergold, John McGeoch with the Yamaha SG — brought to their instrument choices: use what is available, what sounds right, and what is affordable, rather than what is prestigious.
Howard’s specific technique of hitting the guitar “on the neck, behind the bridge” — documented in the Australian Guitar interview — is one of the more unusual instrument-as-percussion-instrument techniques documented in this series. Striking the guitar neck behind the bridge produces a specific percussive, wooden-toned sound that is not a pitched guitar note but a physical impact on the instrument’s resonating body. This technique — used with the Fender Twin’s high reverb setting — produces the specific percussive, reverb-drenched texture that appears in Birthday Party recordings as a foreground element rather than as a background texture. The guitar is being used as a drum alongside its function as a melodic and harmonic instrument. This is the “technically limited” guitarist’s creative workaround for the specific sounds that conventional guitar technique doesn’t produce: hit the guitar in a different place, let the reverb do the rest.
Amps
Rowland S. Howard always used a Fender Twin Reverb — the consistent amplification throughout his career with the Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution, These Immortal Souls, and his solo work. “I would just turn the reverb up high and hit the guitar. On the neck, behind the bridge.” The Fender Twin Reverb’s specific character at high reverb settings: the built-in spring reverb at maximum creates a washing, sustaining spatial quality that transforms individual guitar notes and percussive strikes into the specific atmospheric, reverb-drenched character of the Howard guitar sound. The high reverb setting is not a production effect added in the mixing stage; it is the foundational tonal choice of the guitar-into-amplifier signal chain, present in the live performance and the recording alike. The Fender Twin’s clean, powerful 6L6-powered amplification provides the full, clear amplification of the guitar signal before the spring reverb processes it — the clean signal is the canvas, the reverb is the first layer of paint, and everything that follows (the feedback, the 24-band EQ, the corrugated iron) adds further layers.
For the specific recording of “Release the Bats,” Howard and the Birthday Party surrounded the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier with a tunnel of corrugated iron and attached contact microphones to the corrugated iron to capture the vibrations. “As you can imagine it was extremely thin and unpleasant. The first time we did it we did it with Nick Launay at the Townhouse when we were doing ‘Release The Bats’. I was running the guitar through a 24-band graphic equaliser and you just couldn’t be in the room, it was so unbelievably offensive!” The corrugated iron tunnel is the specific recording technique that transforms the standard guitar-into-amplifier signal into the specific industrial-noise, contact-mic-captured sound of “Release the Bats.” The corrugated iron vibrates in response to the amplifier’s sound; the contact microphones capture the specific frequency-filtered character of those vibrations; the 24-band graphic EQ shapes the signal before it reaches the amplifier. The combined result is the specific sonic violence of the recording that, as Howard noted, made the room itself unlivable during the take.
Effects and Techniques
24-Band Graphic Equaliser (“Release the Bats” — Extreme Frequency Shaping)
Howard ran his guitar through a 24-band graphic equaliser for the “Release the Bats” recording — the specific frequency-shaping tool that allowed him to sculpt the guitar’s frequency content in ways that a standard tone control or basic EQ cannot achieve. A 24-band graphic EQ provides 24 separate frequency band controls, each adjustable independently, allowing the specific boosting and cutting of individual frequency ranges that produces either subtle tonal refinement or extreme, offensive frequency shaping. The “offensive” quality that Howard describes — the room you couldn’t be in — came from the specific combination of the 24-band EQ’s extreme frequency shaping, the corrugated iron’s resonant filtering, and the contact microphones’ specific non-standard pickup of the result.
High Reverb (Primary “Effect” — Career-Defining Choice)
The Fender Twin Reverb’s built-in spring reverb at high settings is the single most defining element of the Howard guitar sound across his entire career. “I would just turn the reverb up high” — this is both the complete effects philosophy and the complete technical instruction. The high reverb transforms the guitar’s direct signal into the specific washing, atmospheric, spatially expansive character that distinguishes the Howard guitar from post-punk contemporaries who used minimal reverb or effects-processed reverb. The spring reverb’s specific character — warmer and more organic than digital reverb, with the specific mechanical sound of the springs that gives spring reverb its characteristic “twang” at extreme settings — combined with the Fender Twin’s clean amplification and the Ibanez Firebird’s bright, cutting character produced the specific sound that Nick Cave described as “one of the most unique and extraordinary guitar sounds I have ever heard.”
Feedback (Signature Technique — “Audio Feedback-Laden” Playing)
The “technically limited, audio feedback-laden” description documents feedback as a primary compositional and expressive tool in Howard’s playing. Feedback — the specific self-sustaining oscillation produced when the guitar’s pickups pick up the sound of the amplifier and feed it back into the amplifier in a loop — produces the specific sustaining, pitch-bending, harmonically complex quality that Howard’s Birthday Party guitar work demonstrates. The high reverb setting facilitates feedback by extending the sustain of notes that might otherwise decay before the feedback cycle establishes itself. The Fender Twin’s clean, powerful amplification provides the sustained signal that the feedback loop requires. The Ibanez Firebird copy’s through-neck construction sustains the feedback longer than a bolt-neck or shorter-scale instrument would. The combination produces the specific controlled-but-wild feedback character of the Birthday Party recordings.
Eastern-Tinged Melodic Approach (Technique — Prayers on Fire Era)
The “spindly, delicate, often eastern-tinged lines of Prayers on Fire” — contrasting with the “more chaotic scribbles of Junkyard” — document the melodic sophistication of Howard’s playing that the extreme noise approach sometimes overshadows. The eastern-tinged quality — the specific modal and microtonal inflections that distinguish Howard’s melodic approach from the diatonic guitar vocabulary of the British post-punk tradition — reflects the same quality of non-convention that John McGeoch’s “occasional disregard for conventional scales” represents in the parallel post-punk tradition. Both guitarists approached the guitar’s modal possibilities outside the received Western rock-guitar vocabulary, and both produced melodic lines of specific, personal character that distinguished them from the post-punk consensus.
The Birthday Party’s specific cultural position — simultaneously influential and commercially marginal, deeply respected by musicians and critics while remaining largely unknown to mainstream audiences — is the specific paradox of post-punk’s avant-garde wing that Howard’s career embodies most completely. The band sold enough records to sustain four studio albums and extensive touring; they did not sell enough to achieve the kind of commercial success that would have made Howard’s name recognizable beyond the enthusiast community. This is the specific position of the musician who is musicians’ musician — the guitarist who influences the guitarists who influence the audiences, while remaining personally unknown to those audiences. Nick Cave became famous; the Birthday Party influenced the musicians who influenced the musicians whose work eventually reached broad audiences; and Rowland S. Howard died at fifty with Thurston Moore calling him the greatest guitar player of the 20th century and most of the world having never heard his name. This is not a tragedy; it is the specific geography of cultural influence, where the most significant contributions are sometimes at the most upstream points rather than the most visible ones.
The Prayers on Fire and Junkyard albums represent the specific poles of Howard’s guitar approach: the eastern-tinged melodic delicacy of the former and the chaotic white-noise extremity of the latter, with the Birthday Party’s creative trajectory moving from one to the other as the band pursued its own specific evolution from the post-punk atmospheric to the noise-rock confrontational. Howard’s guitar was the primary instrument of this evolution: the spindly lines of Prayers on Fire became the “chaotic scribbles” of Junkyard, and the corrugated iron tunnel was the specific technological manifestation of where that evolution had arrived by the time of “Release the Bats.” The deep-purple bruise was always the color of the music. The corrugated iron just made the bruise deeper.
Pop Crimes (2009) — the second solo album, released in the year of his death — is the final document of the Howard guitar approach, and it is the document that demonstrates most clearly what fifty years of the deep-purple bruise approach produces when the extremity of the Birthday Party context is replaced by the intimacy of the solo album: a guitar sound that is both gentler and more heartbreaking than the Birthday Party’s confrontational noise, the Fender Twin’s high reverb providing the same spatial warmth and the Ibanez Firebird’s specific voice providing the same melodic character, but in the service of songs about loss and mortality that the solo context makes more transparent and more direct. The corrugated iron is gone. The 24-band EQ is set aside. The reverb is still turned up high. The guitar is still hit on the neck, behind the bridge. The color is still a deep-purple bruise. This is the correct approach for a guitar player who dies at fifty with the record finished. The light pours out.
Playing Style & Tone Philosophy
Rowland S. Howard plays guitar as a musician who understood that the boundary between music and noise is a convention rather than a physical fact, and that the specific quality of the sound “Release the Bats” required could only be produced by crossing that boundary deliberately and with full commitment. The corrugated iron tunnel and the 24-band graphic EQ are not the tools of a musician who respected the conventional division between music and noise; they are the tools of a musician who had decided that the specific sound he needed was on the other side of that division, and who built the tunnel to reach it.
The “technically limited” self-assessment coexists with Nick Cave’s “most unique and extraordinary guitar sounds I have ever heard” and Thurston Moore’s “greatest guitar player of the 20th century” in a specific combination that makes logical sense only if you understand what the technique was in service of. The limitation was technical in the conventional sense — the specific scales, the specific techniques of the guitar virtuoso tradition — and the freedom it created was artistic: without the virtuoso vocabulary’s gravitational pull, Howard could follow the sound wherever it needed to go, including into the corrugated iron tunnel and the 24-band EQ and the neck-behind-the-bridge percussive technique. The freedom from convention is the gift of the specific limitation.
Lydia Lunch’s description — “the color of Rowland Howard’s music is a deep-purple bruise” — is the most specific available characterization of the emotional character of the guitar sound. A bruise has the specific quality of external trauma that has become internal color: something that happened on the outside is now visible on the inside. Howard’s guitar produces this quality: the externally violent (the corrugated iron, the feedback, the offensive room) becomes internally expressive (the deep-purple bruise of the melodic approach, the high reverb’s washing atmospheric quality). The Fender Twin Reverb with the reverb turned up high is the instrument that makes the external violence beautiful.
How to Sound Like Rowland S. Howard
The Rowland S. Howard tone requires: a guitar with bright, sustaining character (Ibanez Firebird copy or equivalent through-neck guitar, or a Fender single-coil equivalent); a Fender Twin Reverb with the built-in reverb set as high as practical; no standard effects pedals; feedback as a compositional and expressive element rather than as an accident to be controlled; and the willingness to strike the guitar in non-standard positions (the neck, behind the bridge) as a percussive technique. For the “Release the Bats” specific tone: add a 24-band graphic EQ before the amplifier and surround the amplifier with corrugated iron before attaching contact microphones. The resulting sound will be extremely offensive. This is the correct outcome.
| Control | Setting (0–10) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Fender Twin Reverb — Reverb | Reverb: 8–10 (very high) | “I would just turn the reverb up high and hit the guitar.” The foundational Howard approach. High spring reverb transforms the individual guitar note into the washing, atmospheric, spatially expansive character of the Birthday Party guitar sound. At maximum settings, the spring reverb’s own mechanical character adds a specific twang-and-ring quality. This is the beginning. |
| Fender Twin Reverb — Volume | Volume: 6–7 (pushing toward natural saturation) | The Twin at 6–7 is working toward its natural 6L6 saturation point — not clean but not heavily distorted. The high reverb setting’s combined effect with this amplifier volume produces the specific atmospheric, sustaining quality of the Birthday Party guitar, where the reverb and the slight natural saturation of the 6L6 tubes combine to produce a sound larger and more atmospheric than the dry guitar signal would produce. |
| Feedback (Not a Pedal — A Technique) | Physical proximity to amp; position guitar for desired pitch | The “audio feedback-laden” primary technique. Stand closer to the amplifier; point the guitar’s pickups at the speaker. The high reverb extends the guitar’s sustain to the point where the pickup-to-speaker feedback loop establishes itself more readily. Position the guitar’s angle to control which harmonic of the feedback cycle sustains. The feedback is not random; it is specifically chosen and maintained. |
| Neck Behind Bridge (Percussion Technique) | Strike neck below tuners, behind bridge, with palm or fingers | Strike the guitar’s neck (behind the tuners) and the body behind the bridge with the right hand while the reverb sustains the previous notes. The wooden impact through the high reverb produces the specific percussive, resonant texture of the Howard playing approach — the guitar acting simultaneously as melodic instrument and percussion instrument, both voices present in the high-reverb wash. |
| 24-Band Graphic EQ (Release the Bats Mode) | Cut all midrange (boost low 200Hz and high 5kHz+; cut 500Hz–3kHz) | Extreme mid-scoop configuration — cutting the midrange frequencies that normally provide the guitar’s presence and warmth, boosting the low fundamental and the high harmonic overtones. The specific “offensive” character comes from the combination of boosted extreme frequencies with the corrugated iron tunnel’s resonant filtering. Warning: this configuration produces the specific sonic violence that made the recording room unlivable. Apply accordingly. |
| Deep-Purple-Bruise Philosophy | External violence → internal beauty; limitation → freedom | The Howard approach: the specific sound that the song requires, reached by whatever means necessary, including corrugated iron tunnels and contact microphones and 24-band graphic equalisers. The “technically limited” description is not a complaint but a description of the specific freedom that enabled the extremity. Begin with what you cannot do; find what that freedom allows. Turn the reverb up high and hit the guitar. On the neck, behind the bridge. |
Influence & Legacy
Rowland S. Howard’s influence on post-punk, gothic rock, noise rock, and alternative guitar is the influence of the specific individual who demonstrated that the guitar’s potential for sonic extremity and emotional beauty exist on the same continuum, separated only by the specific choice of what to emphasize in a given moment. The deep-purple bruise of his melodic approach and the corrugated-iron violence of “Release the Bats” are the same guitar player making the same fundamental choice in different emotional contexts: the choice to produce the specific sound the specific song requires, regardless of what that requires.
Nick Cave and Mick Harvey — who worked with Howard throughout the Birthday Party period and who went on to their own celebrated careers with the Bad Seeds — have both acknowledged Howard’s guitar as the specific element that most defined the Birthday Party’s sonic identity. Thurston Moore’s “greatest guitar player of the 20th century” assessment is the most extreme of the available peer testimonials; its extravagance is not characteristic of Moore’s typical critical register, suggesting that the Howard guitar approach produced an assessment in the person who thought most about experimental guitar in the 20th century that exceeded his usual vocabulary for such assessments.
The documentary Autoluminescent (2011) — filmed during Howard’s final months and released after his death — is the primary available document of his own assessment of his career, his approach, and his place in the tradition. Its title, from the specific quality of something that produces its own light rather than reflecting another source, is the appropriate description of a guitarist who created a genuinely personal approach to an instrument that most people use to reproduce existing vocabularies. The Ibanez Firebird copy through the Fender Twin with the reverb turned up high, striking the neck behind the bridge, producing feedback, surrounding the amplifier with corrugated iron when the song required it: this is the autoluminescent guitar, creating its own light rather than reflecting the conventional illumination. For the Birthday Party context within the broader post-punk tradition, see John McGeoch’s Magazine and Siouxsie entry at #77 — a parallel post-punk guitarist from the same cultural moment whose horse-falling-off-a-cliff imagination was the British equivalent of Howard’s corrugated-iron-tunnel extremity. The high reverb that defines Howard’s approach connects to Robert Smith’s Cure Jazzmaster approach at #75 — both guitarists using reverb as a primary atmospheric compositional tool rather than as a subtle spatial enhancer. And the “technically limited but emotionally extreme” position connects to Bernard Sumner’s Joy Division minimalism at #76 — the post-punk guitarist’s specific understanding that technical limitation is not a deficit but a condition of possibility.
He called himself technically limited and was Thurston Moore’s greatest guitarist of the 20th century. He wrote “Shivers” at sixteen and lamented that people still asked about it twenty years later. He turned the reverb up high and hit the guitar on the neck behind the bridge. He surrounded the amplifier with corrugated iron and attached contact microphones and made a recording that you couldn’t be in the room for. The color of his music was a deep-purple bruise. His guitar playing was like the stab of a switchblade. He died at fifty from liver cancer, in December 2009, in Melbourne, where he was born. The Fender Twin is still the right amplifier. The reverb is still turned up high. The corrugated iron tunnel is still the most extreme available addition to the standard recording setup. Rowland S. Howard built it first. The offensiveness is still the correct response to the song’s requirements. The light pours out of the corrugated iron.
Frequently Asked Questions: Rowland S. Howard Guitars & Gear
What guitar did Rowland S. Howard use with the Birthday Party?
Rowland S. Howard’s primary guitar with the Birthday Party was an Ibanez No. 2348 — a Japanese-made copy of the Gibson Firebird model, produced during the lawsuit era when multiple Japanese companies were producing American guitar copies. The Ibanez Firebird copy’s through-neck construction, reverse headstock, and Ibanez pickups provided the specific bright, sustaining character of the Firebird design at an accessible price. The Alchetron documentation specifically identifies this instrument, and its through-neck construction contributed to the feedback-sustaining and high-reverb character of Howard’s playing approach.
What amplifier did Rowland S. Howard use?
Rowland S. Howard always used a Fender Twin Reverb — “Ampwise, Rowland’s always used a Fender Twin Reverb,” as documented in the Australian Guitar interview. His specific approach: “I would just turn the reverb up high and hit the guitar. On the neck, behind the bridge.” The high spring reverb setting on the Fender Twin is the most defining single element of his guitar tone across his entire career, transforming individual guitar notes into the washing, atmospheric, spatially expansive character that his Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution, and solo recordings all share.
How was “Release the Bats” recorded?
For the recording of “Release the Bats” at the Townhouse in London with producer Nick Launay, Howard ran his guitar through a 24-band graphic equaliser, surrounded the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier with a tunnel of corrugated iron, and attached contact microphones to the corrugated iron to capture the vibrations. “As you can imagine it was extremely thin and unpleasant,” Howard recalled. “I was running the guitar through a 24-band graphic equaliser and you just couldn’t be in the room, it was so unbelievably offensive.” The result is the specific industrial-noise, contact-mic-captured guitar sound that makes “Release the Bats” one of the most extreme recordings in the Birthday Party’s catalog.
What did Nick Cave and Thurston Moore say about Howard’s guitar playing?
Nick Cave described Howard’s guitar sound as “one of the most unique and extraordinary guitar sounds I have ever heard.” Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth described him as “the greatest guitar player of the 20th century.” Lydia Lunch said “the color of Rowland Howard’s music is a deep-purple bruise.” Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace described his guitar playing as “the stab of a switchblade.” These assessments, from four musicians across different traditions and decades, represent one of the more remarkable posthumous critical consensuses in this series.
Who was Rowland S. Howard and what bands did he play in?
Rowland Stuart Howard (October 24, 1959 – December 30, 2009) was an Australian guitarist and songwriter, born and raised in Melbourne. He wrote “Shivers” at sixteen while in the Young Charlatans and joined the Boys Next Door (who became the Birthday Party) with Nick Cave and Mick Harvey. After leaving the Birthday Party following creative differences with Cave, he joined Crime and the City Solution, then formed These Immortal Souls. His solo career produced two albums: Teenage Snuff Film (originally recorded 1999, released 2009) and Pop Crimes (released shortly before his death in 2009). He also collaborated with Lydia Lunch, Barry Adamson, Einstürzende Neubauten, and others. He died from liver cancer on December 30, 2009, at the age of fifty.
What is “Shivers” and why was Howard ambivalent about it?
“Shivers” is a song Howard wrote at the age of sixteen while a member of the Young Charlatans. It became famous when Nick Cave sang it with the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party and was widely recognized as a significant post-punk composition. In a 1999 television interview, Howard lamented that people still asked him about the song twenty-three years after he wrote it as a teenager — expressing the specific creative frustration of an artist whose most publicly recognized work was created at sixteen, before the more developed and more personally meaningful work of the Birthday Party and subsequent years. The lament is not ingratitude; it is the specific frustration of a musician whose mature creative identity was overshadowed by a teenage composition that happened to be performed by a more famous vocalist.
What was the Birthday Party’s recording approach?
The Birthday Party’s recording approach evolved from the “spindly, delicate, often eastern-tinged” guitar work of Prayers on Fire (1981) to the more extreme “chaotic scribbles” of Junkyard (1982), which Howard described as “a flawed experiment in the sense that we were looking for extremes of sound.” The band surrounded amplifiers with corrugated iron, used contact microphones, processed guitars through 24-band graphic equalisers, and generally pursued the specific sonic extremity that the band’s live performances — which became “increasingly violent” according to reports — demanded in the recording context. The documentary Autoluminescent (2011) is the primary available record of Howard’s own account of this period.
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