“I’ve known about his music since The Birthday Party. I loved the sound of his guitar. I loved the way he played. I always thought it was transcendent and expressive. It always expressed things beyond this world. Even though it could be quite jarring and hypnotic, it just had this ability to capture something but also be transcendent,” says the softly-spoken Milburn, whose voice is charged with affection.
Autoluminescent features interviews with music icons such as Mick Harvey, Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Nick Zinner (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Nick Cave and Henry Rollins who discuss their experiences with Howard. However, it also showcases interviews with close personal friends of Howard, who explore a much darker side of his personality. The result is an engaging film that explores the dynamism of Howard’s character.
“I’d always felt he would be someone who would be wonderful in a film, like an actual actor. We wanted to make a documentary about him but not necessarily from a music point of view. He came in and did the interview and it was fantastic,” she says.
“Because it was about Rowland, people really wanted to talk about him. I think everyone just loved his work, and loved him as a person. He really touched a lot of people. Even if they didn’t know him, there was something about Rowland that touched the heart, touched the mind and the imagination of a lot of people. We had that intention of his music, him as a person, his emotional world, his …imagination as a writer and as a person. The women in his life…those were all the things we kind of hoped to get across.”
During the filming of the documentary, Howard passed away due to liver complications in 2009.
“It was very hard because we didn’t have Rowland for long. We would’ve loved to really have started years before so that there was a bit more unfolding of his live, so it wasn’t so retrospective.”
Lowenstein and Milburn were seemingly the perfect duo to explore Howard’s tumultuous life, doing justice to such an incredible individual. Lowenstein explains,
“Boys Next Door played [Milburn’s] high school when she was 17, one of their first gigs. Both of us have been in the orbit of that scene so we all grew up together really with that music and everything. I started seeing Boys Next Door gigs when I was 19 or something, in film school”.
Lowenstein and Milburn are in the process of submitting the film into various film festivals around the world. The reaction so far has been positive, and Nick Cave himself sent them a one-sentence email that read, “You’ve made a very good film”.
“As you can probably imagine dealing with all the parties in Rowland’s life is sometimes like walking a tightrope. Everybody has their own version of what happened, what went wrong, what went right. It was sort of our role to play a bit of adjudicators between all the versions of the event. We sort of managed to come out of with a version that everyone seems really pleased with and emotionally involved with. It brought a lot of people who were involved with Rowland, it was sort of like you only really see one story when you’re in a relationship with someone. It brought all the other stories you may never have heard about into one forum and I think it sort of unlocked something that a lot of people hadn’t really seen even as a friend of Rowland. He did give a different side of himself to different people. So far the reaction has been really positive.”
“It was sort of part of our job was sort of dig in and portray [his] legacy. We certainly just didn’t want, and he didn’t want, it to be just a musician. His legacy will be that he was sort of an extraordinary life…He’s obviously well known for a couple of particular talents – one guitar playing and one as a composer – but what we discovered…was that he was quite a unique and intriguing human being. He was an eclectic eccentric, and there are far too few in the planet especially in the current age. He helped define that era and I just sort of think he’ll go down as an extraordinary life, albeit a tragic and sad life but an extraordinary one.”
