The guitarist Rowland Howard had been catapulted onto the Australian music scene in 1976, at the tender age of sixteen, at the helm of the Young Charlatans (who were responsible for the cult anthem Shivers). The following year he joined Nick Cave’s Boys Next Door (later renamed the Birthday Party) and followed them to London. After their breakup in 1983, Howard played with Crime And The City Solution, Lydia Lunch, Das Produkt, Barry Adamson, Primal Scream, and Cave himself. He eventually formed These Immortal Souls in order to release the songs he had composed over the course of his career.

The lineup on Get Lost (SST, 1987) included drummer Epic Soundtracks and organist Genevieve McGuckin. Howard assembles a set of languid, melodramatic cocktail-lounge litanies in the style of Tom Waits, describing the existential squalor of the new bohemia. A slightly more casual and detached tone distinguishes it from Crime’s work. The album oscillates between two contrasting moods, one almost comic (Marry Me, a carefree country-blues chant with swing accents, or My Little Child, a kind of melodic garage rock, cadenced and distorted, with barrelhouse piano) and the other decidedly tragic (She Said, Hide, and These Mortal Souls, apocalyptic blues with church organ reminiscent of Ray Manzarek’s Doors, Hawaiian-style Krieger-like guitar, and noir jazz-night cocktails such as I Ate The Knife).

Howard’s self-flagellation then found an ideal partner in the ultimate lamenter, Lydia Lunch. Their Honeymoon In Red (Widowspeak, 1987) is in fact only an anthology of Howard’s songs, almost all performed by Lunch with Howard himself on guitar and various guests, a work of auteur gothic unfolding between macabre and hallucinatory rituals (Come Fall) and abominable voodoo-billy (Fields Of Fire), culminating in the long, tormented choral chant of Three Kings, a composition by McGuckin that mercilessly tortures its instrument in a bacchanal of distortion and percussion.

If Soundtracks is his collaborator in These Immortal Souls, Nikki Sudden (former leader of the Swell Maps) is the one who helps Howard record Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc (Creation). Sob Story remains one of his finest guitar storms.

Howard also took part in numerous other collaborations, which had the beneficial effect of turning the “acid” tone of his guitar into a highly sought-after souvenir for the American rock intelligentsia.

After a few years, These Immortal Souls resumed the thread left hanging after Get Lost. I'm Never Gonna Die Again (Mute, 1992) even intensifies the barbaric quality of their sound, which has not forgotten the lesson of the Stooges (The King Of Kalifornia and Hyperspace) and highlights its romantic, “damned” personality, that of a loner and loser in the autobiographical confession of So The Story Goes (“Everybody knows that I've only got one song / and it's much too slow / and it's much too long”).

Reinterpreted in the context of a crisis of values and the resulting fatalistic apathy, the traditions of blues and gospel arrive at a cadaverous sound, an hyper-realistic soundtrack of an existence without any possibility of redemption. At the same time, the love song returns as the primary expressive vehicle, in a desperate attempt to give meaning to the passage of time.

In 1994 Howard finally left Londra and returned to Melbourne. And became a folksinger. Teenage Snuff Film (Reliant, 1999) is a collection of simple, humble and stark tunes, performed with Mick Harvey on drums and Brian Hooper on bass. But Howard is still his own folksinger, a folksinger who has done drugs with Velvet Underground and Jesus And The Mary Chain, possibly closer to Lee Hazelwood than to Neil Young (Dead Radio, Silver Chain, Sleep Alone).

Roland Howard died in december 2009.