Henry Rollins

Mutiny in Heaven: the Birthday Party from hell

In 1981, at a garbage dump on the outskirts of Melbourne, a band is making a video. The idea is to recreate a vision of hell. A cartoon death’s head with six limbs flashes on the screen. We see a young and scrawny Nick Cave – “a fat little insect” – pole-dancing in the middle of a circus tent. The song is an ode to self-loathing called Nick The Stripper.

Behind him, the Birthday Party swings and stumbles. After a year in London, the band once dubbed the Boys Next Door have returned to their home town a very different and much more menacing beast, ready to cut their first full album, Prayers On Fire. The tune, if you can call it that, hangs on a ghostly three-note refrain by the guitarist Rowland S Howard.

The action moves outside the tent. Along with friends, the band has bussed in residents of a mental health facility; one of them stands atop a gallows. Cave is wearing a loincloth. There’s a disturbing scene involving a goat.

A new documentary on the band, Mutiny In Heaven, lingers over this grotesque carnival of souls for the clip’s full four minutes. The film’s director, Ian White, says it would have been a shame not to use it in its entirety.… Read more..

Mutiny in Heaven: the Birthday Party from hell Read More »

Still going hard

If you were growing up in the Australian suburbs in the 1980s and early 1990s and had any interest at all in what later became known as alternative music, you have probably heard the Hard-Ons. Against considerable odds – starting with their name – the band once racked up an astonishing run of 17 consecutive No. 1 songs on the independent charts.

It’s tempting to say they’re back. But the priapic Hard-Ons never really went away. They did break up in 1994, but bassist Ray Ahn and guitarist Peter Black (known to all as Blackie), soldiered on as Nunchukka Superfly. They reunited with singing drummer Keish de Silva in 1997, but de Silva quickly became disenchanted and moved on again.

Still, the band carried on, with Murray Ruse on drums and the prolific Blackie singing. Actually, prolific doesn’t begin to describe Blackie: the influential guitarist recorded a song every single day in 2016, adding a cover of Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water on New Year’s Day 2017 for good measure.

It’s de Silva – whose honey-sweet vocals and energetic drumming style was a big part of the band’s appeal – who’s back, with the release of the band’s 12th studio album So I Could Have Them Destroyed today.… Read more..

Still going hard Read More »

Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine: Get Yer Dag On!

DAMIAN COWELL was the guy in TISM. We know because he told us so (in a song called I Was The Guy In TISM, recorded with the DC3). Anonymity can be a tough mask to shed. Think of Kiss without the war paint, or the Residents without the eyeballs: what lies beneath can only be a disappointment. Years ago, a friend of mine ripped off Ron Hitler-Barassi’s balaclava in a mosh pit. Stupidly, I asked him who it was. “Some guy,” he replied. Who did I expect?

But amid the constant clamour for TISM to reform (how many original members would it take? Who would know? Would anyone care?) Cowell, the artist formerly known as Humphrey B Flaubert, has been quietly building a catalogue that’s not far short of his old band. And if people aren’t as interested in listening to an advertising copywriter in his mid 50s as they are in TISM, maybe they’ll listen to him alongside a supergroup featuring the cream of Australian satire. Hence the Disco Machine.

The first Disco Machine album boasted cameos from Shaun Micallef, Tony Martin, Kathy Lette, John Safran and the Bedroom Philosopher, along with a bunch of other celebrities and fellow musicians: Lee Lin Chin, Julia Zemiro, Tim Rogers and Kate Miller-Heidke.… Read more..

Damian Cowell’s Disco Machine: Get Yer Dag On! Read More »

Henry Rollins: “I seek not to squander”

Henry Rollins likes to talk. Actually, saying Rollins likes to talk is a bit like saying an anteater enjoys ants, or a boxer doesn’t mind getting into a punch-on. On top of countless books and a column in the LA Weekly, his spoken-word performances can run upwards of three hours. On average, he says, he writes about 1000 words a day, a habit he describes as “awful, it’s just ridiculous”.

So it seems odd that a man with as much to say as Rollins could ever run out of lyrics, but it happened. “It was trippy,” he says. “I woke up going, ‘Wow. Am I done? And I soberly assessed it and went ‘Damn. I’m done.’ And I stopped.” He phoned his manager to inform him and hasn’t written a song since. That was more than 10 years ago now.

He has no interest in playing the old songs either; not those by the Rollins Band or Black Flag, the pioneering West Coast hardcore punk/metal band he fronted in the early 1980s. “It must be nice to be able to go out and play Satisfaction and Brown Sugar and all of that every night and have girls lift their T-shirts up and have everyone roar with approval but that’s not how I’m going to live my life,” he says.… Read more..

Henry Rollins: “I seek not to squander” Read More »

Autoluminescent

A few days ago I bumped into an old friend in the city. He manages a well-known local band here in Brisbane, and he asked me if I’d be prepared to participate in the making of a documentary about the group. He wanted to do something a bit edgier than the standard rock doco, though. “Every documentary I’ve seen lately it’s just a bunch of people saying how great [band/performer X] was,” he said. “It’s really boring.”

He had a point, and I was reminded of it last night when I saw Autoluminescent, Lee-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein’s documentary about former Birthday Party/These Immortal Souls guitarist Rowland S. Howard. The first half of this two-hour film is weighed down with luminaries (not only peers and former bandmates like Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Phil Calvert but also Henry Rollins, Thurston Moore, Bobby Gillespie, etc, etc) generally crapping on about how great Rowland was.

And that’s validating, sure, but if you’re seeing this film in the first place you probably have some idea of who Rowland S. Howard is and why he mattered. Most likely you already think he’s fabulous. The film survives this slightly creaky beginning mainly due to the late guitarist’s outrageous charisma (with his high cheekbones and extraordinarily brilliant blue eyes, rarely has a dying man looked so beautiful) and the sumptuous direction.… Read more..

Autoluminescent Read More »

Scroll to Top