“Until about five years ago I would have said that I didn’t regret what I’ve done, all my time spent taking drugs, but now I really regret it,” admits Rowland S Howard in Autoluminescent, the 2011 documentary film about him directed by Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein. “It’s changed my life forever, and I’ve just lost so much of my life and so much time that I could have spent doing things that would have been really meaningful for me, or… yeah, has just been wasted, has just… yeah, just wasted. Thrown away.”

On balance, the two handfuls of albums Howard made with The Birthday Party, Crime & The City Solution, Nikki Sudden and his own group These Immortal Souls would seem to bear out that devastating summary of a creative life shaped and blighted by heroin use. The stick-thin six foot plus dandy guitarist arguably cut the most striking figure within The Birthday Party when that group upped sticks from Melbourne, Australia, and seared the moribund UK post-punk scene of the early 1980s with rock resembling napalm fire. As The Birthday Party’s second main songwriter, Howard contributed or co-wrote some of their most memorable tracks, even as his songs were in truth far too idiosyncratic to be sung by any other voice than that of their creator. But as the group’s vocalist, Nick Cave insisted that he sung them, and then not always in the spirit Howard intended them – check the parodic teen angst torment of “Shivers”, written by a pre-BP Rowland when he was 16 years old. Featured twice on the soundtrack of Autoluminescent co-director Lowenstein’s 1986 Australian post-punk film Dogs In Space, “Shivers” at least helped sustain Howard through a few otherwise extremely lean decades.

No other group turned messily falling apart into such a fine art as The Birthday Party; with their members scattered between London and West Berlin, where they’d fallen in with Einstürzende Neubauten, the group inevitably broke up in 1983. A few years before the split, I recall writing a Birthday Party cover feature for NME, pieced together from interviews with individual members conducted wherever they had managed to lay their hats and call home. Back then Howard and his partner Genevieve McGuckin were living in a Kilburn flat just around the corner from Shoot-up Hill – you really can’t make this stuff up! After the piece was published, Howard remarked somewhat self-deprecatingly on how self-pitying he sounded (well, he did and he didn’t).

His post-BP wilderness years were occasionally brightened by guitar sessions on the recordings of fellow Mute label artists such as AC Marias, Fad Gadget and Barry Adamson. His ex-BP colleague Mick Harvey recruited him for Crime & The City Solution, reconstructed from the legendary Australian group led by vocalist Simon Bonney. On paper, they were a fantastic proposition but their first few Mute records featuring Howard were as rigid as they were glum. The reconstituted Crime only really came alive after Howard and drummer Epic Soundtracks left, leading to a new line-up including Neubauten’s Alex Hacke and violinist Bronwyn Adams. More positively, Howard went on to form his own group These Immortal Souls with his brother Harry on bass, Epic Soundtracks on drums and Genevieve McGuckin on keyboards. They recorded two giddying and precarious rollercoaster rock albums for Mute before crashing to the ground while making their third. In between times, Howard’s lifelong friend Lydia Lunch, with whom he recorded a beguiling cover version of Lee Hazlewood’s “Some Velvet Morning” back in 1982, called him out of his doldrums to record their duo album Shotgun Wedding in her then hometown New Orleans in 1991.

After These Immortal Souls broke up, Howard returned to Australia, where he struggled and finally succeeded to kick his addiction. In Melbourne he made his first solo album Teenage Snuff Film in 1999; he also became a benign godfather to the region’s underground scene, going out performing solo and working with local musicians, most notably with HTRK, whose 2009 album Marry Me Tonight he co-produced and played on.

Shortly before his death at the age of 50 from liver cancer caused by cirrhosis and hepatitis C, he released his second solo album Pop Crimes, a heartbreakingly good collection of awkwardly elegant absurdist rock songs, made with his longtime Birthday Party and Crime & City Solution colleague Mick Harvey to hand. Somewhat poignantly, all Rowland S Howard’s what might have beens were erased by this last will and testament, set in stone by such memorable songs as the title track, “Golden Age Of Bloodshed” and “(I Know) A Girl Called Jonny”, among others. In 2013 the Melbourne district of St Kilda named a pathway Rowland S Howard Lane in his honour.

Rowland S Howard

From Pop Crimes

Howard’s cover of the 1986 Talk Talk song would have been all the more ironic if it had opened or closed the album he knew would be his last. As he was in the advanced stages of liver cancer when he was making Pop Crimes (2009), he couldn’t have chosen a more mordant means of addressing all the what might have beens of his life through a song otherwise bereft of irony before Howard’s windblown, mock lugubrious baritone take of it.

Released in 1980 by 4AD, The Birthday Party’s second single “The Friend Catcher” is framed by the most stunning showcase of untouched by human hands feedback noise Howard ever came up with. Frustratingly, he claimed to have lost the device through which he made it, so the group seldom if ever performed it live. Regardless, after just one hit of it, this listener has been hooked on Howard’s guitar sound ever since.

Einstürzende Neubauten self-released their volcanic one-off collaboration with Howard and Lydia Lunch as a maxi single backed with “Durstiges Tier” in 1982. That Blixa Bargeld later became the non-guitarist in Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds after The Birthday Party broke up must have left a bitter aftertaste to this session for Howard.

Lydia Lunch & Rowland S Howard

Released in 1982, “Some Velvet Morning” is the first and by far the best of the two Lee Hazlewood covers featured here. The track marked the beginnings of Lunch and Howard’s lifelong friendship, which saw them record further early 1980s tracks for Lunch’s 1987 Honeymoon In Red, their 1991 album Shotgun Wedding and its later live souvenir follow-up. Lunch has also been participating in the Rowland S Howard tribute concerts in France and London.

From Gag

After The Birthday Party split, Howard played on various fellow Mute artist sessions, contributing guitar to two tracks on Fad Gadget’s Gag. The other one’s called “Ad Nauseam”. (1984)

Barry Adamson

From Delusion

The playlist’s second Lee Hazlewood cover sees Howard contributing “post production guitar” to Adamson’s romping, stomping electro-step take featuring Anita Lane on lead vocal. (1991)

From One Of Our Girls (Has Gone Missing)

Film maker Angela Conway’s music project AC Marias is best known for her Wire connections, with guitarist Bruce Gilbert in particular, but her cover of the Canned Heat song “Time Was” is sent tumbling past other unknown worlds by Howard’s guitar at its most sizzlingly acidic. (1989)

From Get Lost (Don’t Lie!)

Howard’s self-led post-BP and Crime & The City Solution quartet These Immortal Souls started out so strong at first, it’s kinda criminal that they ended it all two albums later looking just like ghosts. Released in Europe by Mute and in the US by SST, they certainly had plenty going for them and the music was by turns beguiling, haunting and hurtling. All these traits epitomise this single taken from their 1987 album, if only for the way you can’t tell whether Howard’s then partner Genevieve McGuckin’s keyboards are keeping the song on track or derailing it. Also recommended: “Black Milk” and “Imsomnicide” from I’m Never Gonna Die Again.

From Marry Me Tonight

Co-produced by Howard with Lindsay Gravina and released in May 2009 by Blast First Petite, the album also features Howard on guitar and keyboards. HTRK’s vocalist Jonnine Standish is the girl called Jonny referenced in and appearing on the closing track in this playlist.

From White Boy EP

More dirge love from Victoria, Australia, this time featuring vocalist Adalita’s grunge rock group. The track’s perfectly OK in an of its kind sort of way but only really takes off when guest player Howard’s guitar kicks in towards the end.

From Mutiny

The Birthday Party were in a state of irreversible collapse when they recorded their last two EPs The Bad Seed and Mutiny (the latter posthumously released in 1983). Co-written by Nick Cave and Howard, this is one song I wished Howard had sung. The shipwreck lyrics would have been that much more bone-rattlingly forlorn and Dickensian if summoned from the baritone depths of Howard’s voice. Regardless, a tremendous Birthday Party epitaph.

From Teenage Snuff Film

Howard’s long time coming solo debut album includes a perfectly listenable if frankly perverse cover version of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding”. As a a whole, Teenage Snuff Film feels like Howard was straining to overcome his own blocks and inhibitions to eventually arrive at the (for the most part) triumphant album. Track titles like “Breakdown (And Then...)”, “I Burnt Your Clothes” and “Sleep Alone” might well be telling us something but only partly indicate the album’s moods, given the mordant/melancholy emotional slippages of Rowland’s words and vocals. Recall that “Autoluminescent” is also the title of Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein’s 2011 Rowland S Howard documentary mentioned above.

From Pop Crimes

Ten years passed before Howard got round to recording its successor, an altogether stronger and more rounded album, made after he was diagnosed with liver cancer while awaiting a potential donor for a transplant that might have prolonged his life. It never happened. He died on 31 December 2009, two months after Pop Crimes was released. The album contains another, much more apposite cover version, this time of Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’”, alongside Howard originals every bit as awkwardly elegant and absurdist dandy as his best Birthday Party and These Immortal Souls songs. Which is to say, they sound like they were written in an exact parallel world to the one he inhabited, except it’s on a different timeline, one perhaps 150 years behind. The title song’s allusions to Stalin’s secret daughter almost align both worlds but the album’s all the better for Rowland’s own timelines being so out of joint.

From Pop Crimes

Nothing more to say except this melancholy duet between Howard and HTRK’s Jonnine Standish is heartbreakingly lovely, narcotic lollipops and all.

A Tribute To Rowland S Howard featuring Mick Harvey, Lydia Lunch, Bobby Gillespie, Jonnine Standish and JP Shilo takes place at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 12 February.

Rowland S Howard’s Teenage Snuff Film and Pop Crimes will be reissued by Mute on 27 March.