Reminiscin'

This journal is most at ease when discussing the dead, but not the recently departed. The news today of the demise of Mr Rowland S. Howard is cause for great sorrow. His contribution to history is immeasurable. I gather he did something musical, but that is of little consequence. (OK: he wrote Shiver, one of the all-time great songs.) A man of integrity, in a world that knows not the meaning of the word. An alternative to the alternative. A man who refused to have anything further to do with Nick Cave when Cave went all mainstream. A man who stayed true. Man.



Mr Howard’s death got me thinking about the 1980s. How we loved that stuff: that crazy alternative music and life, that dressin’ in black and going to see the touring punk and post-punk bands (not that they were called post-punk then folks)(at one such gig at the Grosvenor I recall, distinctly, Mr Howard {touring with his then special friend Lydia Lunch} telling me - me, personally - to fuck off: Lor' I was proud) and living near Hyde Park and taking acid and scaring folk in Hyde Park and such and so on. Well, you may recall my earlier mention of movan, and now you know I moved back to the environs of my youth. The house was built in the 1920s – very old by Skinny City standards: its age being a second enticement for this preticular (very competent) historian. I imagined (in addition to being somewhat scared of the weirdos that hang out in Hyde Park these days) that a house so steeped in history (verily dripping with the stuff) would have stories. And indeed it does. But not from the early days (at least, not as I have yet discovered). No, a friend I had not seen in years recently returned to Skinny City for a visit and when we caught up I discovered he had known the house well, back a coupla decades. He knew some of the former residents and their various peccadilloes: I don’t recall all his stories but there was mention of heroin addiction, prostitution, theft and general fuck-ups.

I was extremely pleased.