Crime & The City Solution - All must be love

How damaging can it be, even assuming the most solid of careers, to be dogged by the relentless comparison with a more esteemed colleague, living in his shadow and ending up as "those who sound like" him? A condition that in some cases is "deserved" (think, for instance, of openly derivative bands that latch onto a successful phenomenon, ending up little more than a faded imitation), while in other cases it's arbitrarily inflicted by the shallowness of critics and audiences alike. Fully falling into this latter category are the Australian Crime & The City Solution: despite enjoying a genuine cult following among many fans, they were denied wider recognition because of their cumbersome compatriot Nick Cave. The comparison, which might have made sense early in their career given the undeniable kinship with the early Bad Seeds, nonetheless seems rather pointless, since the two groups sprouted from the same Boys Next Door/Birthday Party branch, and several musicians (starting with the ubiquitous Mick Harvey, a man who on his own can define a band's sound) played in both outfits: in fact, at certain points it was almost the same group, following the same Melbourne-London-Berlin itinerary. Moreover, from a certain point onward the similarities thinned out to the point of no longer justifying the comparison.

What is essentially held against Simon Bonney & Co. is that they never truly evolved, remaining anchored to a "genre" dimension (which we might summarily dismiss as gothic blues) just as "the Ink King" moved away from it. This is an accusation that is less silly than redundant, given the fundamental difference between the two situations: Crime are undoubtedly a band tied to a specific imagery, era and style (which hasn't stopped them from embarking on a fascinating journey of maturation), while Cave is an author who has, time and again, shaped worlds according to his own needs.

There's also a different, purely musical foundation: while Cave's primal fuel is a blues torn apart by heavy doses of post-punk, in Crime one can also detect a country influence (borne out by the leader's solo work), as well as psychedelic or even classical-leaning echoes almost entirely absent from his friend/rival's recipe. Finally, their poetics diverge: Cave is a frenzied preacher who converted to milder possessions, Bonney an existentialist bohemian who, drawing from the same American inspiration, favours sunset landscapes over rain-soaked streets at night. In this sense, we might trace a further, subtler distinction between a more European Cave and a decidedly more American Bonney: it's no coincidence that the former settled in London and the latter in Los Angeles, even as both remained eternal expatriates. According to some observers, Cave owes more than one debt to Bonney, who, as we'll see, seems to have influenced both his stage presence and the stylistic hardening that turned the Boys Next Door into the Birthday Party: a question, however, that strikes us as rather beside the point.

What makes Crime unique, if you will, is precisely what many consider their weakness: never having redeemed themselves from the Dionysus/Old Testament double act that rockstar Cave disowned, and having remained adorable losers it's hard not to empathize with. Crossing paths with a string of legends and launching more than respectable careers (starting with the projects of Bonney and Rowland S. Howard), they also proved to be a formidable training ground for talent.

The six chapters of this feature (each corresponding to one of the cities through which their wandering adventure unfolded) are meant as an opportunity to set the record straight once and for all, giving this small but great band the recognition it deserves, and making sure that, for most people, it doesn't remain just "the band that sounds like the Bad Seeds playing in a scene from Wings of Desire".

Chapter 1: Sydney (1977-1978)

In the late 70s Sydney, like many other Western metropolises, was shaken by new, exciting musical ferment, hit as it was by proto- bands (Radio Birdman, the putative fathers of Australian rock), post- bands (Celibate Rifles, the early Midnight Oil) or simply punk ones (Saints, originally from Brisbane but relocated after recording their historic debut). Also jostling for space in the fray were the Particles, a now-forgotten new wave band that was nonetheless well regarded locally at the time. One day, drummer Don McLennan befriended a very young singer named Simon Bonney, born in the city but raised by his family on a remote farm in Tasmania (a rural, somewhat otherworldly setting that would forever light up his imagination), and occasionally invited him to sing a few songs. When the Particles broke up in 1977, the two decided to form a new band together with bassist Phil Kitchener, guitarist Harry Zantey and saxophonist Dave McKinnon, renaming themselves with the bizarre name Crime & The City Solution (inspired, for Bonney, by a dream). The group made waves thanks to a prickly sound driven by McKinnon's sax, but struggled to establish itself amid the scattered atmosphere caused by constant line-up changes. Unfortunately, no audio or video material from this line-up seems to have survived.

Chapter 2: Melbourne (1978-1979)

In October 1978 the band played a private party in Melbourne, staying in the city for a few days. Before leaving, at a venue called the Tiger Lounge, Bonney saw live for the first time the most talked-about band in town: the Boys Next Door. A month later he returned to the area with McDonnen, but lacking the money for the return trip, the two found themselves stranded there and decided to stay: this led to the breakup of the first line-up of Crime & The City Solution. Around this time the singer met Bronwyn Adams, his future wife and frequent collaborator. Meanwhile he struck up an increasingly close friendship with the Boys Next Door and, above all, decided to reform the band with McDonnen and new members recruited locally: thus were enlisted Kim Beissel (apparently on Mick Harvey's suggestion) on sax, Chris Astley on keyboards, Lindsay O'Meara (ex-Voigt/465) on bass and Dan Wallace-Crabbe (later of the Laughing Clowns) on guitar. This second mark of Crime & The City Solution, heavily influenced by the post-punk sounds then in vogue but already carving out a more defined personality of its own (especially in Bonney's distinctive chant-like voice), played about a dozen shows in Australia and recorded a four-song demo that was never released (one track, "Moments", would appear in 1981 on a cassette bundled with the magazine "Fast Forward"), before breaking up a second time and disappearing from view for a few years.

Meanwhile the Boys Next Door moved to London, renamed themselves Birthday Party and completely changed genre, abandoning the naive melodic punk of their early days to embrace a more violent and cacophonous music, which probably owed something to the possessed sound and powerful stage presence of their friends Crime & The City Solution (in particular Bonney's sinuous movements, dubbed by some the "cocktail shaker"): with this formula they would establish themselves as one of the most important bands of the era, launching the career of frontman Nick Cave.

Chapter 3: London (1983-1986)

In 1983 Bonney received a phone call from London: it was Mick Harvey, inviting him to move to the city with his partner. Bonney accepted, and in the first months of the following year recorded two demos on which Harvey played all the instruments: "One Strip Rider" and "Adventure" (the recordings can be found on the anthology "Rarities"). Meanwhile the Birthday Party had broken up, and both Harvey and guitarist Rowland S. Howard (a master of abrasive sounds who had made a name for himself playing with Fad Gadget and Siouxsie & The Banshees) were momentarily free of commitments: the two thus became the backbone of the third incarnation of Crime & The City Solution, soon joined also by Harry, Rowland's brother, on bass.

With this line-up — Harvey splitting his time between drums and keyboards while also active with the newly formed Bad Seeds, and Adams contributing to the lyrics — the band recorded for Mute in early 1985 the EP The Dangling Man, their first official release. The four tracks, produced by Flood and Tony Cohen, offer a taste of Bonney's storytelling gifts as a guttural crooner from beyond the grave, with Howard's searing guitar and Harvey's slimy keyboards egging on his shamanic contortions. It's stark, dark, dramatic music, at once mystical and urban, drawing on influences ranging from Delta blues to No Wave, via the Doors and Morricone: the title track would become a staple of their increasingly frequent live shows (where, however, due to the presence of no fewer than three ex-Birthday Party members, audiences tended to see them as a continuation of Cave's old band rather than a new project).

The line-up stabilized with the arrival of drummer Epic Soundtracks, already a veteran of the pioneering Swell Maps and by then pursuing his own solo career as well as a collaboration with the reformed Red Crayola. This allowed Harvey to focus on guitar and organ while Howard moved to piano, making the sound more dynamic and powerful: the result was Just South Of Heaven, a mini-album recorded a few months later, marked by squarer drum parts and a greater reliance on piano, acoustic guitar and slide. The "desert" side of their apocalyptic blues is emphasized, while Harvey's horror-movie organ underlines increasingly pronounced psychedelic nods. It's a more varied, more polished work, but also less cohesive and evocative than their terrifying debut. Among the tracks, at least the bleak ballad "Stolen & Stealing" deserves a mention, a triumph of Bonney's morbid showmanship. The artwork is by Adams, increasingly involved in the band's activities.

1986 marked the band's definitive breakthrough, as they launched into an intense tour taking in all of Europe, the US and Australia, and in between dates worked on their first proper full-length, recorded largely in Berlin (a city that would take on growing importance in their story) and released at the end of October: Room Of Lights.

The record marks an enormous leap forward, bringing their psychedelic impulses (which bring them close to the early Sisters Of Mercy) to fruition while at the same time definitively nailing down the formula of their decadent post-blues, thanks to a well-honed sound and compositions sharper than ever before. The buzzing opener "Right Man, Wrong Man" (a "Song To The Siren" part II that bands like Mazzy Star must have learned by heart) is the manifesto of this new chapter, while the clattering psychobilly of "Hey Sinkiller" and "Her Room Of Light (For Lisa)" brings the raucous lessons of Cramps and Gun Club to fruition in a new, hallucinated singer-songwriter music of darkness. By now Bonney is a seasoned frontman, flawless in taming the gushes of scorching lava stirred up by his faithful crew.

On "The Brother Song" Adams's violin appears for the first time, which would soon become the true trademark of their alchemy. But the real passport to eternity is the chilling, sepulchral litany "Six Bells Chime", which Wim Wenders liked so much that he hired the band for a now-famous scene in "Wings Of Desire", in which they perform in front of a backdrop painted by Adams, handing the band down to the history of both rock and cinema (while unwittingly continuing to fuel the parallel with Cave, who appears a few scenes later). Unfortunately, by the time the film hit theatres the band had already ceased to exist: at the end of the year, after a show in which they shared the bill with a young Jesus And Mary Chain, Soundtracks and the Howard brothers (who had in the meantime formed a new band, These Immortal Souls) packed their bags, condemning Crime & The City Solution to yet another breakup right at the peak of their popularity. Around the same time, Bonney and his partner joined Harvey in Berlin, by then Cave's new headquarters, and regrouped their troops for the next battle.

Chapter 4: Berlin (1987-1991)

In the early months of '87, the Bonneys found themselves broke, getting by however they could: he improvised as a roadie for a Texan band touring Europe (David Yow's Scratch Acid, who the following year would relocate to Chicago and, with a reshuffled line-up and the name Jesus Lizard, establish themselves as one of the most idolized bands in the indie world); she published Cave's first novel, "And the Ass Saw the Angel" (the singer would later state that her role in writing the book was so significant that she could almost be credited as co-author). Getting back to playing thus became a necessity both creative and material, and Bonney didn't need telling twice: having met them at the bar where he worked, he brought together Alexander Haacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) on guitar, Chrislo Haas (Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft) on synthesizer and Thomas Stern on bass, moved Harvey back to drums, and added the finishing touch by making his partner a permanent member on violin, and once again Crime & The City Solution rose from their own ashes. It's a radically different line-up, more akin to a small chamber ensemble than a rock band, and the resulting music takes on distinctly theatrical, free-form traits, leaving behind once and for all the dark/western scenarios of their earlier records (and, thank God, the comparisons with Cave too).

Live activity resumed in grand style: the band took part in the Kings Of Independence Festival held that year at Hamburg's Knopf Music Hall, which also featured Fall, Swans, Butthole Surfers and the usual Bad Seeds. The evening, partly captured in the documentary "Kings Of Independence", was marred by a huge brawl sparked by hundreds of fans left outside the venue due to organizational problems (the fault of Jeanette Bleeker, the Bad Seeds' manager and the person responsible for the event, who had sold more tickets than the venue's capacity allowed), but it was enough to give Bonney the motivation he needed for the most important step of his career.

Inspired as much by Berlin's atmosphere as by his now decade-long artistic and existential journey, more determined than ever to give shape to his own ghosts, the singer shut himself away in the studio with his bandmates and in under three months recorded Crime & The City Solution's definitive album: Shine, released the following year, is one of the great minor masterpieces of the Eighties, a one-off work thanks to the seething inspiration that drives it and the spasmodic tension it conveys, an unbroken flow of notes played as if in a trance, with the intensity of punk and the solemnity of sacred music. It's a staggering hymn to darkness, to perdition, to heroin, populated by spectral figures and wrapped in a blanket of fog (or smog) that blurs its edges in a vaguely monstrous way. Bonney, a young man at the very peak of his inner quest, does less singing than rasping like a dying man in ecstasy, blinded by visions that could be set in a seedy back alley as easily as in a remote monastery, duetting with Adams's ghostly violin (she wrote half the lyrics) with breathtaking pathos.

The seven compositions seem to have neither beginning nor end as they hypnotically repeat motifs that dissolve just as you think you've grasped them, fraying away with crescendos promised but never delivered, as if trying to capture the confusion and helplessness of a mind ravaged by drugs. On "All Must Be Love", one of the most unusual incipits a record has ever had, every single instrument moves along its own autistic track, the structure so loose it's hard to even make out, and yet it manages to feel as relentless as a military march. "Fray So Slow" shows what Suicide unplugged might sound like if thrown into an asylum, with a violin à la High Tide as searing as a blade in open flesh and a piano coda that rivals the ambiguity of John Cale's "Music For A New Society".

"Angel", suspended over an unreal void, is a prayer declaimed with a torn-open chest, so sincere it moves you to tears, only slightly cracked by its menacing ending. The ride into nothingness of "On Every Train (Grain Will Bear Grain)" is a rare concession to the epic, a lesson in musical economy paired with a lyrical sweep that evokes boundless horizons waiting to be conquered; "Hunter" is its perfect counterpart, a nihilistic rock'n'roll somewhere between Bo Diddley and Dostoevsky, pounding like a murderous instinct that cannot be suppressed. Opened by a sinister Gregorian wail of reversed voices, "Steal To The Sea" is Bonney's ultimate manifesto, who, like a Jim Morrison dazed by the sirens or an Ian Curtis in ascetic seclusion, toys with our nerves for ten endless minutes of oceanic undertow as black as pitch, before fading out into the dripping organ notes of a "Home Is Far From Here" that sounds like it was recorded within prison walls, an adult revisiting of their early horror-movie suggestions that bids them a final farewell. Not even Nico had gone this far in imagining a gothic music without borders. A possible point of comparison might be the drunken pagan rites of Virgin Prunes converted to a deranged form of Christianity, or an urbanized Comus, intent on despising the metropolis they're forced to live in: but any comparison tends to be discouraged by a work so personal and so elusive.

A junkie poem forever suspended between anguish and redemption, all too human yet steeped to the bone in supernatural residue, entirely within and entirely outside its own time, Shine remains one of the most tragic psychodramas (in the Greek sense of the term) in the entire history of rock.

The album was promoted with an extensive world tour that culminated in a night in Amsterdam alongside Suicide. In the autumn Haacke had to step away to play with Einstürzende and was temporarily replaced by Kid Congo Powers (Gun Club, Bad Seeds). Between dates they began recording the follow-up to Shine, released in July '89 under the title The Bride Ship. While unable to replicate the grim storm-tossed seas of its predecessor, the record marks a further surge in ambition which, aided by Gareth Jones's skillful production, takes shape as an even more elaborate sound, thick with exotic-esoteric references and dominated by Adams's dancing violin, while the symbolism of the lyrics grows ever more inscrutable.

The enchanting "The Shadow Of No Man", whose celestial, raga-like drones bridge the early and late Velvet Underground, is worth the price of admission on its own. The tracklist also includes a softened reworking of "The Dangling Man", which sounds a bit like a long-distance challenge to their own past selves. Side B is almost entirely given over to the restless suite that gives the album its title, a sign of almost progressive aspirations, both in its narrative and in its musical arrangement (which at times crosses paths with the world-folk of Third Ear Band). Meanwhile Bonney and Adams had relocated to Vienna, while live activity slowed due to Harvey's commitments with the Bad Seeds and Haacke's with Neubauten.

Sensing that this exhilarating chapter too was nearing its end, in November they regrouped once more in the studio to record what would remain the testament of the "classic" Crime, as well as one of their most profound legacies: Paradise Discotheque, released in the autumn of '90, is yet another flawless decadent fresco, by now bordering on art-rock. It's their most eclectic record, ranging from the galloping country-rock of "I Have The Gun" (which foreshadows the moods of Bonney's solo work) to the Arabian-tinged daydreams of "The Sun Before The Darkness", via the hard-boiled swing of "The Sly Persuaders" and the watery nightmare of "The Dolphins and The Sharks", while the traditional "Motherless Child", served up in an unusual gypsy sauce, shows off Bonney's ability to slip into clothes not his own.

Once again, half the vinyl is taken up by a long and complex suite, "The Last Dictator", which in four acts narrates the rise and fall of Nicolae Ceausescu with almost Shakespearean tones and a palette that ranges from auteur pop-rock (the first act), through Fripp–Enoesque sophistication (the second), to ethno-wave (the third) and dark tides (the fourth). The synesthetic enchantment of Crime & The City Solution has few equals, and they prove more than up to the task even when they abandon intimate hermeticism to engage with History and the Present (albeit suitably transfigured).

The adventure, however, is drawing to a close: after two short tours roaming the globe (which for the first time also take in our country, with three dates in December '90), in the winter of '91 the various members go their separate ways, bringing the band's journey to an end. Bonney settles with his wife in Los Angeles, where he launches a solo career that doesn't disappoint expectations. The last document of the finest line-up of Crime & The City Solution is The Adversary (1993), an odd record that brings together excerpts from two recent concerts (Paris '90 and New York '91) plus the previously unreleased studio track that gives the collection its title. The live performances are of excellent quality, to the point that many songs rival the originals and in some cases even surpass them, proving how the stage is the ideal setting for music as physiologically free as theirs. But it's above all the title track, a majestic eagle's-eye flight over the destinies of humankind, that serves as the ideal swan song for this small epic (as well as the central theme for Wenders' "Until the End of the World"). Being a survey of the best of their repertoire, it's an ideal way to approach the elusive art of these genuine dark gypsies.

Chrislo Haas died in Berlin on 22 October 2004 at the age of 47, from cardiac arrest caused by prolonged alcohol abuse.

Interlude: Simon Bonney

With the band's story over, the restless Bonney decides to settle in Los Angeles and change skin once again: he packs away his metropolitan-shaman get-up, clamps a battered old hat on his head, and transforms into a surprising twilight cowboy, scarred inside and out, finally free to indulge his passion for the postmodern country of songwriters like Gram Parsons, Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark.

Having gathered a handful of local musicians (including JD Foster and Carla Bozulich), once again brought in Gareth Jones to man the production desk, and kept his wife's indispensable violin in the lineup, he sets to work on his solo debut, which, while it may throw longtime fans off, can only reconfirm the unmatched talent of both the songwriter and the performer: Forever, released in 1992, is the snapshot of an artist in a state of grace, perfectly at ease in a roots dimension that lets him ride alongside the alt-country bandwagon of Uncle Tupelo and Jayhawks without losing face. Elevated by Simon's deep, intense voice (which at times recalls a profane Leonard Cohen), songs like "Ravenswood" (offered in both full-band and stripped-down versions, in the best Young-ian tradition), "Forever" and "Now That She's Gone" sound for all the world like they came from the pen of a Southern thoroughbred. An album of manly nostalgia and bare landscapes, where the word "love" is repeated to the point of exhaustion, compact in its traditionalist full immersion yet well balanced between electricity ("Like Caesar Needs A Brutus") and roots ("The Sun Don't Shine"), Forever is one of the most welcome surprises of the Nineties.

Pleased with the new identity he's managed to carve out for himself, Bonney gets a taste for it, and three years later matches his predecessor's results with a riskier but equally exceptional work: recorded in Austin with the cream of the local scene and a special guest in Chuck Prophet, Everyman is a concept album as ambitious as it is understated, centered on the Homeric trials of an "everyman" looking for work in an America populated by losers and the disinherited, with tones closer to the merciless realism of "Midnight Cowboy" than to Guthrie-esque hymn-like populism. There's very little that's epic or idealized about the United States as sung by Bonney, an émigré who can't help empathizing with his characters and knows exactly which side he's on. Musically he moves away from country (though it still dominates tracks like "Ruby") toward a mellow, machismo-free heartland rock, somewhere between John Hiatt and John Fogerty; on the single "Don't Walk Away From Love" he touches Petty-esque chords, on "Where Trouble Is Easier To Find" he even evokes Springsteen, while an almost gospel-tinged "Western Light" gives him the chance to pay a visit to another of his totems: Gene Clark.

For their part, the western fatalism of "A White Suit In Memphis" and the psychedelic temptations of the atmospheric "All God's Children" bring the old band to mind. "Travelin' On" (whose line ⟦Q1⟧ sounds like a credible self-portrait) would end up on the soundtrack of Wenders' "Faraway, So Close!", yet further proof of the cinematic quality of Bonney's music, who, just to leave nothing out, also strings together two classy covers: Danny O'Keefe's "Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues" and "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain", a standard already part of the repertoire of Willie Nelson, another essential reference point for a restless minstrel who, with this album worthy of the best of the Seventies, reaches his consecration.

In 1995 Bonney tours extensively around the country and his career seems on the verge of taking off, but at the same time he's increasingly drawn to film. True to his adventurous spirit, he decides to dive headfirst into the world of Hollywood, working as a driver, a grip, and occasionally an actor, as well as taking directing classes at the American Film Institute's Center For Advanced Film & TV Studies in Los Angeles. Between 1996 and 1998 he records a third album with some Detroit musicians, where he has relocated: however, the album, expected in 2000 under the title "Eyes Of Blue", will never be released, except for the tracks "Lonely Star" and "Water Edge" (used in the score for "Waterworld").

In 2001 the Bonneys return to Australia. Simon enrolls in a film school in Sydney, then moves to Canberra, where he works for the government while earning a law doctorate. In 2003 he posts three more songs from the mysteriously shelved lost album on his Myspace ("Annabelle-Lee", "Eyes Of Blue" and "Can't Believe Anymore"), before once again vanishing without a trace.

The anthology Past, Present, Future, released in May 2019, compiles the best of the two solo albums plus six tracks from the "Eyes Of Blue" sessions, including a cover of Scott Walker's "Duchess".

A hero for the few who crossed paths with historically crucial moments while staying true only to himself, Simon Bonney deserves to be remembered as one of the most charismatic and fascinating figures in contemporary music.

Chapter 5: Detroit (2010-2013)

In 2010, a terse post signed by Bonney suddenly appears on the Crime & The City Solution Facebook page: he's about to return to the scene with new accompanists, intending to tour both his own songs and those of the old band. He quickly reconnects with Alexander Haacke, informs Mute of his plan, and officially announces the fifth reformation of Crime & The City Solution, this time based in Detroit. The new line-up includes, besides Adams and Haacke, David Eugene Edwards (16 Horsepower, Woven Hand) on guitar, Jim White (Dirty Three) on drums, Troy Gregory (Dirtbombs, Swans, Spiritualized) on bass and cello, Matt Smith (Outrageous Cherry, Andre Williams) on keyboards, and visual artist Danielle de Picciotto, Haacke's wife, on autoharp and backing vocals — all musicians he had been collaborating with while working on the aborted third album. Harvey, contacted, turns down the invitation. The idea is not just to play live, but to return to the studio as well.

Between April and May 2012 the band works on the new album, and in the meantime launches a crowdfunding campaign on PledgeMusic to finance the upcoming tour, offering some rather curious rewards (among others: the Hopf Saturn guitar Haacke used to record Shine, a surrealist 35mm film titled "Sadness", a drum lesson via Skype, and even a dinner with the band!). In the meantime, to rekindle interest around its old/new clients, in September Mute releases the (superfluous) anthology An Introduction To... Crime & The City Solution – A History Of Crime (Berlin 1987-1991), dedicated to the Berlin years.

Between the autumn of 2012 and the early months of the following year, Bonney & co. set off on a mini-tour that includes dates in the United States, Berlin, London and Australia, also taking part in the edition of ATP curated by The Drones. On 18 February, during a gig in Melbourne, they're joined onstage by old colleague Mick Harvey, who steps in on guitar for a rendition of "Rose Blue" (taken from the prehistoric Just South Of Heaven). The following month, a full 23 years after their last collection of new material, Mute finally releases the long-awaited American Twilight. Curiously, it's a record that seems to reconnect more with the Morricone-esque atmospheres of their early albums than with the art-rock of their mature period, but turning their intentions upside down: booming production in place of the bare-bones approach adopted until then, blistering performances where once they could barely stand up straight, songs cut with an axe standing in for their usual loose, undefined sketches.

The "American twilight" announced by the title is clearly perceptible, but there's no trace of Detroit's abandoned smokestacks — rather an idealized, Hispanic California (starting with the Mexican lady on the cover), with lingering hints of Calexico (the languid trumpets of "My Love Takes Me There", the sleepy gait of "Domina"). The frontman's raging passion for country music surfaces forcefully on "Beyond Good And Evil" and "Streets Of West Memphis", while elsewhere you catch whiffs of late-period Mark Lanegan ("Goddess") or even apocalyptic Bowie (the title track). No song is bad, but there's no real knockout blow, with only "The Colonel (Doesn't Call Anymore)" dusting off the thrills of their finest work.

On the whole, craft seems to be pulling the cart more than inspiration, but hearing Bonney's voice again is still quite an emotion, and having a new Crime & The City Solution album in hand can only be a pleasure.

American Twilight garners good reviews and would seem to be the springboard for a new lease of life, but the curse that appears to have dogged the band forever is about to kick back in. On 25 May they're due to appear on the Primavera Sound bill, announced with great fanfare, but at the last minute they decide to cancel their appearance, to the fans' great disappointment. Two months later they announce they're back in the studio with material for a new album, of which nothing more has ever been heard. No explanation was ever given for either of these two baffling about-turns.

For a long time there's no further news of Simon Bonney, a man perpetually on the run from himself, who once again has gone back into hiding in that dark limbo which for more than thirty years has fed his legend.

Chapter 6: Berlin (2023-?)

A guitar strums out a minor chord, aching and suspended, then a voice as deep as the night plunges into it, with the solemnity of the diver of Paestum. The opening lines seem lifted from an archaic murder ballad: "My love turns rivers to blood". Who else could be behind that ribbon microphone, if not Simon Bonney?

We'd given the wandering Australian up for lost, after yet another flight into the dark. Then, on the threshold of the new decade, a few tentative smoke signals: in 2019 the aforementioned solo anthology Past, Present, Future, the following year a guest vocal spot on "Straight Songs Of Sorrow" by disciple Mark Lanegan.

The real surprise, however, comes in 2023, exactly ten years after the last epiphany: Crime & The City Solution announce their unexpected reunion. Fans don't take it too seriously at first, used as they are to the band's on-again-off-again moods, but this time it's no joke: a European tour in summer and, shortly after, unmistakable photographic evidence confirming that a new album is being recorded. Incredible but true.

The backstory, as usual, is surreal: trapped in his native Australia by pandemic lockdown, Bonney kills time by digging back into his improbable academic career. With a William T. Vollmann-like drive, he sets to work on a doctorate built around his new job as an aid programmer in the Indo-Pacific, which has taken him to live in Thailand. Dramatic when not outright tragic, the stories he gathers soon spill over from the academic page, becoming raw material for a collection of songs. Songs in which the artist's tormented fatalism, though suspended several feet off the ground, descends into a reality darker than fiction, indelibly stained by current world events. The title speaks for itself: The Killer.

Having sung the deeds of a hunter on the sublime Shine, this time it's the figure of the killer casting its shadow over this latest gothic novel-in-song, sublimating in literary form horrors that are entirely political. To record it, the caravan pitches camp in the city that, more than any other, has shaped the history of crime: Berlin. Armed with a brand-new line-up (Donald Baldie, Chris Hughes, Frederic Lyenn, Joshua Murphy and Georgio Valentino, with only the Bonney couple retained) and Martin J. Fiedler's production, the music leafs through a photo album already dense with fingerprints: Morricone-like deserts, spectral organs, the sinuous, haunted violin of Bronwyn Adams, a few Teutonic touches (the relentless arpeggiator of "Brave Hearted Woman", a heartfelt husband-and-wife dedication).

Two dark gems, however, shine above the rest: at the midpoint, the eight minutes of the title track, a convulsive spoken word piece honing chilling visions ("I feel your pain, please don't kill me") and biting wordplay ("I didn't mean to become so mean"); and, to close, the mournful piano lament of "Peace In My Time", a torch song with gospel overtones, complete with a René Girard-style sacrifice ("I am to blame").

And now, the inevitable contentious question: was it worth waiting so long for 37 minutes that, for all their unimpeachable class, don't exactly break new ground already well trodden? To answer, just rewind the review: how many guitars, voices and lyrics of that caliber do you find around these days?

Postscript: Rowland S. Howard/These Immortal Souls

If Cave is the star who shone the world's spotlight on a niche phenomenon, and Bonney the romantic antihero it's easiest to identify with, the title of most musically important figure in Australian post-punk belongs to Rowland Stuart Howard. The unmistakable sound of his guitar branded those years, and his songs touched depths of despair to envy even in the fiercely contested ring of "doomed" rock, not to mention his iconic emaciated physique. Flawless both as a sideman and as a bandleader, Howard was one of the last credible heirs to Lou Reed.

Like many other kids growing up in Melbourne in the late 70s, Rowland started poking around the local punk scene looking for an outlet for his restlessness. The breakthrough came with "Shivers", written at just 16 for his first band Young Charlatans and then handed over to the Boys Next Door — a serious contender for the sickest love ballad of all time (with a devastating line like "I've been contemplating suicide/ But it really doesn't suit my style/ So I think I'll just act bored instead/ And contain the blood I would've shed" that sums up his poisoned poetics perfectly). It's precisely him, with his razor-blade guitar work and no less sharp compositions, who orchestrated the transition from Boys Next Door to Birthday Party, as well as the most acid-drenched phase of Crime & The City Solution. His blazing talent impressed pretty much everyone, and his six strings became some of the most sought-after in the business (among his illustrious clients we'll mention just Lydia Lunch, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Fad Gadget, Henry Rollins and the early Primal Scream, not to mention the ever-present Bad Seeds).

Feeling boxed in by the role of session man and needing room to breathe for his own material, he tried twice to go solo: the first attempt coincided with the breakup of Birthday Party in 1983, when together with Barry Adamson (ex-Magazine/Birthday Party), Jeffrey Wegener (Young Charlatans/Laughing Clowns), Chris Walsh (Moodists) and his girlfriend at the time Genevieve McGuckin he recorded a three-track demo that turned out to be a disaster; the second attempt went better, in 1986, when he recruited two defectors from Crime & The City Solution (his brother Howard on bass and Epic Soundtracks on drums) and, together with McGuckin on keyboards, managed to follow through on his plans: thus were born These Immortal Souls, based first in Berlin and then in London (though ideally projected somewhere amid the magical swamps of New Orleans).

The band debuted the following year with the single "Marry Me (Lie! Lie!)", quickly followed by their first LP, Get Lost (Don't Lie!). The album, influenced by the southern gothic poetics of writers like William Faulkner, is a disturbing Dantean journey into Howard's mind, which, with viscous psychotic ink, paints his own highly personal circle of obsessions, embodied at various turns by female figures either extremely innocent or extremely malevolent, invoked with the fervor of a possessed Iggy Pop.

It's an album that's both feral and apathetic at once (having to answer to two different backgrounds, blues and gothic-rock), moving between blazing knife-fight assaults ("Marry Me", "Blood And Sand She Said"), long infernal marches ("These Immortal Souls", "One In Shadow, One In Sun") and pathetic melodramas ("I Ate The Knife"), where what triumphs is a morbid taste for macabre detail and the deliberate glorification of bad feelings.

The record was a solid success and allowed the four of them to embark on a tour across Europe (where they opened the London dates for Sonic Youth, Gun Club and Primal Scream) and the United States (where, thanks to Thurston Moore's recommendation, they were signed by the legendary SST, Greg Ginn's label). In those same feverish months Howard also collaborated with Lydia Lunch ("Honeymoon In Red", which also featured Cave, Moore and J.G. Thirlwell), Nikki Sudden ("Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc") and Jeremy Gluck ("I Knew Buffalo Bill", alongside Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Sudden and Soundtracks).

In 1988 they tried to get to work on a hypothetical second album, but the project fell apart because of the unpredictable Soundtracks, who, unconvinced by the material, deliberately played his instrument badly, rendering the recordings unusable: this badly strained relations with the frontman, who sank into a period of writer's block, and undermined the label's confidence, which for a few years refused to let them back into the studio. After a brief tour of Australia (during which Rowland acted alongside his friend Hugo Race in John Tatoulis's film "In Too Deep", released in 1990) and another collaboration with Lunch ("Shotgun Wedding", from 1991), These Immortal Souls went back on the attack with I'm Never Gonna Die Again, released in 1992 and again preceded by an EP, "King Of Kalifornia".

Reinvigorated by John Rivers' clean, powerful production, the record turns out even fiercer than its predecessor, with the opening onslaught of "King Of Kalifornia" pouncing on the listener like a starving panther; but it also contains some of the most anguished ballads Howard ever wrote ("So The Story Goes", "All The Money's Gone", worthy of a Lee Hazlewood lost in the desert), while "Hyperspace" and the instrumental "Insomnicide" testify to the formidable chemistry among the four, with the leader's nervous tremors wildly propelled by Soundtracks' African drums. The masterpiece is the closing "Crowned", eight minutes of breathless running in the hope of crashing. Once again it's a painting in strong colors, scented with Love & Death, performed with the dramatic urgency of someone who fears the world is about to end.

At the end of the recording sessions Soundtracks left to pursue a magnificent solo career (he would die in London on November 5, 1997, of causes never fully clarified) and was replaced by Craig Williamson. With this new lineup, bolstered by the addition of second guitarist Spencer P. Jones, These Immortal Souls recorded what would remain their last track together: a cover of Tom Waits's "You Can't Unring A Bell" (originally taken from the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola's "One From The Heart"), included on the tribute to the Pomona ogre titled "Step Right Up" (1995).

In those years Rowland also lent his voice to a couple of Bad Seeds albums, "Let Love In" (1994) and "Murder Ballads" (1996). The Howard brothers and McGuckin then returned to Australia, where they scaled back activity, limiting themselves to the occasional show. Their final concert was held at the Greyhound Hotel in Melbourne on July 23, 1998, where they shared the stage with old friend Lydia Lunch. Few bands have managed to distill the diabolical essence of rock'n'roll with the same unsettling effectiveness.

Free from band commitments for the first time in twenty years of collaborations, Howard decided to focus on his first fully solo record, in which he could give full vent to his toxic negativity: Teenage Snuff Film, released in 1999 and recorded with a bare-bones lineup (just Mick Harvey on drums and organ and Brian Hooper on bass, with occasional contributions from a modest string trio), is the portrait of a true damned soul, an irredeemable misanthrope loaded like a torpedo with unspeakable urges barely kept in check ("I've lost the power I had to distinguish/ Between what to ignite and what to extinguish", he admits on the opening "Dead Radio"). It's yet another parade of vampiric women, at once muses and antagonists (possible metaphors for society, drugs or music, all of which wore him down to varying degrees), to be ruthlessly suppressed for being either too strong or too weak, and in any case incompatible with his own survival.

"Breakdown (And Then...)" and "I Burnt Your Clothes" are chilling murder ballads that break free from both the Victorian imagination and the blues tradition to plunge into an alienated, no-frills contemporaneity that is, if anything, even more shocking. In few other records do words like "gun", "knife", "blood" recur so often, and spoken with the same relish. The other side of this scornful nihilism is "Silver Chain", in which Rowland remembers that he is, first and foremost, an inconsolable loser, in need of warmth like everyone else, if not more, even willing to beg his beloved for help; only to take it all back shortly after with "Undone", an exercise in anti-romantic materialism in the shape of a scorching ride reminiscent of Dream Syndicate.

But the perfect self-portrait of our man can be pieced together by combining the last two songs: "Autoluminescent", a stumbling gospel with a whiff of Christian ascension, and "Sleep Alone", a barrage of lacerations closed out by two and a half minutes of pure guitar foam, with at least one line that will freeze your blood (“This is the journey/ To the edge of the night/ I’ve got no companions/ Only Celine on my side/ I don’t need nothing from no-one/ The needle’s in the red/ Nothing to lose/ Everything’s dead”). Rounding out the picture are two covers as improbable as they are successful (Billy Idol's "White Wedding" and the old Jay & The Americans classic "She Cried", already tackled by his idol Johnny Thunders) which, filtered through his untamed Jaguar, become, in every respect, laments entirely his own. From start to finish he slurs in a manner so shamelessly livid that he seems to be under the influence of two or three different substances, and there's no reason to doubt that he actually was. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that, even if Howard had never produced a single note before this album, his name would still deserve a place in the annals.

Teenage Snuff Film was met with a triumphant critical reception. Howard kept playing and took on other activities (such as when, in 2002, he played the role of a vampire-musician in "Queen Of The Damned", a role that couldn't have been more fitting), but he also began suffering from increasingly worrying health problems: in 2003 he discovered he was terminally ill with a form of liver cirrhosis that had degenerated into cancer, to the point that his liver was said to be "like that of a seventy-four-year-old alcoholic". While waiting for a transplant his condition worsened, but Rowland refused to be discouraged and got to work on what he already knew would be his final album, determined to land one last blow, immortalizing himself at the height of his suffering. In the meantime, the French label Stagger Records released the double album "A Tribute To Roland S. Howard", collecting interpretations of his songs by Nikki Sudden, Mick Harvey, Warren Ellis, Drones and many others.

Pop Crimes was completed in October 2009 with the artist by then at the end of his strength, which couldn't help but seep into the eight tracks: musically, this translates into a softening of sounds and atmospheres, with the stunning "(I Know) A Girl Called Johnny" (an update of certain Velvet-esque themes in the form of a Gainsbourg-à-la duet with Jonnine Standish of HTRK) that teleports him into the vicinity of an otherworldly dream-pop; on the lyrical side, meanwhile, the blunt tones are set aside in favor of a disenchanted fatalism, if not outright dismayed self-pity (on "Shut Me Down" he apologizes for his wrongdoings with such candor that it would be inhuman not to grant him forgiveness).

When they resurface, the electric ghosts of the past become apocalyptic clouds, as on the title track, which revives the glories of his wild years, or on "Wayward Son", where his guitar proves it can still bite. "Ave Maria", which today is almost impossible to listen to without choking back tears, justifies his time on this earth all on its own.

But Rowland's farewell note is tucked inside the two covers he once again chose to include, wildly different from each other yet united by titles that speak for themselves: Talk Talk's "Life's What You Make It" and Townes Van Zandt's "Nothing".

Among the most moving goodbye albums of all time, Pop Crimes is the harrowing testament of a rock martyr, repentant for his crimes but not for his excesses.

Rowland Stuart Howard died on December 30, 2009, two months after his fiftieth birthday, right at the moment when interest in his music had reached an all-time high. Two years later came the documentary "Autoluminescent", directed by Lynn-Maree Milburn and Richard Lowenstein, which through interviews with Wim Wenders, Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch, Thurston Moore, Henry Rollins, Bobby Gillespie and many others attempts to piece together the enigmatic puzzle behind a personality who drew from his own torment some of the most bleeding songs of the last thirty years.

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