Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard’s Berlin Years

By the time The Birthday Party moved from London to Berlin in 1982, the Melbourne group didn’t have much positive to say about the UK capital. “[There] were absolutely retarded bands that were playing there at the time, who were nothing like what we thought they were going to be…,” remembered Nick Cave in the 2011 documentary Autoluminescent. “It was really shoe-gazing bullshit.”

The band had relocated to the UK in 1980 with grand visions of a foreign scene they thought would be stronger than the one they’d left behind (an Australian attitude that has endured throughout history). But in London, The Birthday Party were regarded as upstart outsiders and praise was hard-earned. A 1981 Melody Maker review captured this prevailing tension: “Three minute horror movie soundtracks of jarring insensitivity by a band who’ve overcome my inherent distrust of Australians…” Though they were supported by John Peel, the broader British scene was neither immediately accepting nor as fertile as they’d imagined.

So Nick Cave, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Tracey Pew and Phil Calvert left for Berlin. And the response couldn’t have been more different. “We were received with open arms into this community who reminded us of Melbourne,” Cave says in Autoluminescent. “It was frenetic and anarchic and really creative. It didn’t have the same prejudices in the superior way that the British had about our band…”

Part of Autouminescent, a biographical documentary of guitarist Rowland S. Howard, gathers together West Berlin-based artists and musicians who were awe-struck by “…this bunch of Australians who landed from a different planet,” as German film director Wim Wenders put it. “There was a hush when they showed up somewhere. They were really big. They were the biggest thing in Berlin.” Oliver Schutz of Die Haut claims that “their appearance changed everything… Clothes, how to behave, talk, walk… Everyone had spiky hair all of a sudden and pointy shoes.”

But these few years of acceptance and popularity in Berlin foreshadowed The Birthday Party’s demise. In 1982/3 the band recorded their last two works – Mutiny! EP and The Bad Seed EP – which were typically masochistic and included cover art replete with religious iconography and a swastika. “Hands up who wants to die!” shrieks Cave on the first track of The Bad Seed, “Sonny’s Burning.” And if ever there was a foretelling of The Birthday Party break-up, it was “Mutiny in Heaven.” Not only did the title suggest a fracture, but it was also the first time that Einstürzende Neubauten’s Blixa Bargeld was credited in the liner notes alongside Cave. It would not be the last.

The break-up of the band differs in telling depending on which member you ask. A number of figures involved with The Birthday Party during this time agree that the relationship between Cave and Bargeld wound up freezing Rowland S. Howard out of the group (emotionally and creatively). In a 1983 interview Cave, speaking on the split, makes no mention of Bargeld: “The main reason why The Birthday Party broke up was that the sort of songs that I was writing and the sort of songs that Rowland was writing were just totally at odds with each other – it was mainly a rift which developed between me and Rowland which kind of carried on through the rest of the group… It was certainly enough to make Mick Harvey quit, which is why The Birthday Party broke up officially… Mick has the ability to judge things much more clearly than the rest of us…”

Cave quickly formed The Bad Seeds, a group of fluid membership with Bargeld as one of the few mainstays. Most of The Bad Seeds’ first four albums were recorded at the Hansa Ton Studios in Berlin and each channeled the same morbid, (not-so) pseudo-sexual, quasi-religious themes that Cave had already explored in The Birthday Party. This time, however, his songwriting and arrangement relied more heavily on blues and rockabilly influences. The Firstborn Is Dead referenced the stillborn identical twin of Elvis Presley. The album’s opening track was “Tupelo” – Presley’s hometown in Mississippi – and loosely based on John Lee Hooker’s song of the same name. (So apparent were these roots that “Mercy Seat” from Tender Prey would be covered by Johnny Cash on American III: Solitary Man.)

Throughout, Cave’s creative relationship with Bargeld strengthened. In the 1987 documentary Strangers in a Strangeland, Cave is shot riding in in the back of a car almost at a loss for words when asked about his guitarist. “He can make his guitar sound, like, he doesn’t use pedals or effects or anything like that. Just plugs into any amp, uses any guitar. Half the time he doesn’t own a guitar. Comes to tour with no guitar. ‘Where’s your guitar, Blixa?’ ‘I don’t have it anymore’ and he uses the support band’s guitar but he can make the guitar sound like nothing you’ve heard before. He’s brilliant. He’s my hero.”

For Howard, The Birthday Party’s break-up was a much longer, painful journey. “I was in a complete hiatus for three years,” said Howard in 1985. “I did nothing because I had nothing to do anything for. I’d lost a lot of confidence, I’d written all these songs, but nothing had happened to them. My life had become totally dull, and there seemed to be no real sense in writing songs about being dull.”

Crime & the City Solution would draw Howard from his sabbatical. The outfit was led by London-based Sydneyite Simon Bonney, who moved to Berlin to work with Rowland and his brother Harry Howard, as well as former Birthday Party member Mick Harvey. Because Crime was essentially Bonney’s band, Howard and Harvey’s songwriting was limited. The Kentucky Click/Adventure EP and the Room of Lights and Just South of Heaven LPs were written in Berlin with Howard and Harvey playing backstage roles – inasmuch as Howard’s distinctive guitar sound permitted. (“Six Bells Chime” from Room of Lights is driven by Howard’s melancholic additions.)

Wim Wenders, who shot the cinematic homage to Berlin Wings of Desire in 1987, included two separate concert sequences featuring Crime & the City Solution and Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Their inclusion in the film was essential for Wenders because “musically, that’s where Berlin was at the time.”

But in Crime, Howard wasn’t entirely happy. “I found myself in a group that wasn’t really anything like I expected it to be and wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing musically, and there was no room for anything throwaway. I really tended to feel like a bull in china shop. Like, if I didn’t restrain myself the whole time I’d just smash the little glass frame that held things together. It was a really physically uncomfortable thing…for me to do because I just felt really held back and restrained the entire time.”

When Howard received a phone call from Harvey explaining that the band was in the studio recording a new album without him, it wasn’t a surprise. “I thought fair enough… It was a weight off my shoulders.” Howard began to focus more heavily on his new project, These Immortal Souls, which had taken shape during the recording of Room of Lights in Berlin. Howard went to London to record the debut album with two ex-Crime members, Harry Howard (bass) and Epic Soundtrack (drums), as well as Rowland’s constant companion/girlfriend/partner Genevieve McGuckin (keyboards).

This is where the Berlin years effectively end for Nick Cave and Rowland S. Howard. Both would go on to release critically acclaimed solo and band material in places like São Paulo, Melbourne and New Orleans. But despite the work they produced afterward, it’s hard to think any of it would’ve happened without the self-destructive, near-decade they spent in Berlin.