Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard

Synopsis; A documentary about the life of Rowland S. Howard, a seminal figure in Australian independent music.

You may not have heard of Rowland S. Howard but he was the writer of the classic punk-pop song "Shivers", best known as sung by Nick Cave of The Birthday Party, the band for which Howard was the guitarist. From these jejune beginnings, Cave, as we know, went on to cult success and balladeering with Kylie Minogue whilst Howard stayed committed to an intensely personal path.

Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein’s documentary is a thorough-going account of Howard’s relatively short and pained life (he died, aged 50, of cancer in 2009). It succeeds as both an insight into the Melbourne punk scene of the late 70s, already chronicled by the directors in their 2009 doco, We're Livin' On Dog Food (Lowenstein also featured a version of "Shivers" in Dogs In Space,1986), and as a portrait of the evidently talented if difficult, Howard whose music is virtually unknown beyond his peers.

Both for survivors of the time and anyone interested in it, Autoluminescent benefits from a remarkable (pre-mobile phone) amount of good quality archival footage of Howard’s early days with his first band, The Charlatans, then The Birthday Party, including the overseas trip that led to the band’s demise in Berlin in the early 80s. Milburn and Lowenstein interweave this material with interviews with Howard, both from his early career and shortly before his death, as well as with friends, lovers and family. They tend to overdo the tired device of interpellating gushing soundbites from celebrity guests like Henry Rollins and Thurston Moore. Nick Cave has some justification for inclusion but these tend to give the film a distracting mockumentary vibe and particularly at 100 minutes should have been omitted.

That fault aside, if the point of documentaries like this is to honour the person and bring their life’s work to a wider audience then Autoluminescent does its job handsomely. I am sure that there will many people seeking out Roland Howard's music as a result.  Heck, he wrote "Shivers" when he was 16, which has got to be as good as a 13 year old Frankie Lyman writing "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"

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