Album Review: Rowland S. Howard - Six String That Drew Blood

It’s a name often referenced but likely not listened to as much as that suggests. For Rowland S. (“the S. is shorthand for ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’,” he would drily explain), was the classic cult hero – much as he’d hate to be considered such.

In his sometimes-vicious serrated guitar noise and laconic vocals are elements countless bands of serious young things have tried – and mostly failed – to match.

This double-disc overview of his work is necessary, even if going for the ‘RSH for Idiots’ approach of opening with the misunderstood glory of Shivers, written – at around age 16 – as a sneer at his peers’ melodrama, but made an anthem by the very black-clad he targeted, and still celebrated 35 years on.

It’s then into The Boys Next Door and the nascent Birthday Party as Nick Cave’s main musical foil, bailing when they “forgot where the artifice stopped and we began.” He left classics like The Friend Catcher and an extraordinary duet with punk goddess Lydia Lunch of Lee Hazlewood’s Some Velvet Morning – the hangover replaced by the opiate haze of something stronger. 

Six Strings goes on to run through his bands that perhaps never got their full due – Crime And The City Solution and Those Immortal Souls – and on to his late-life career resurrection with the quite remarkable Pop Crimes album, before his earlier excesses took their final toll. He was a beautiful wraith, and this a document to his singular talent.