Some Velvet Morning

Rowland S. Howard was born in Melbourne in 1959. As a teenager he wrote “Shivers,” a song that would define his early career with Boys Next Door. The band relocated from Melbourne to London around 1980 and became The Birthday Party. Howard’s guitar style was dissonant and deliberately difficult. He transformed the instrument from a rhythmic anchor into a visceral tool of emotional tension, using screeching distortion and feedback as texture rather than effect. It worked against conventional rock structure, bending notes into shapes that were more anxiety than melody. The Birthday Party were one of the most confrontational live acts of their era. Lydia Lunch was born in Rochester, New York in 1959. She moved to Manhattan at sixteen and became part of the downtown art and music scene. She founded Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and became one of the defining voices of the New York No Wave movement. She discarded traditional song structures, chord progressions, and vocal conventions entirely, proving that raw emotional intensity and dissonant noise could carry more weight than commercial polish. No New York, the 1978 document of the No Wave scene compiled and produced by Brian Eno, included Teenage Jesus and the Jerks alongside DNA, Mars, and The Contortions. She released her debut solo album, Queen of Siam, in 1980. Two people who had each decided, on opposite sides of an ocean, that music could be made to resist itself.

“Some Velvet Morning” was written by Lee Hazlewood and recorded as a duet with Nancy Sinatra in 1967. A shifting, impressionistic piece with no fixed meaning. Hazlewood took the name Phaedra from Greek mythology and later admitted he was not entirely sure what his own lyrics meant. The Daily Telegraph called it in 2003 “one of the strangest, druggiest, most darkly sexual songs ever written.” Howard and Lunch recorded their version at Riverside Studios in London. Barry Adamson played double bass. Mick Harvey played drums. Genevieve McGuckin played piano. The arrangement strips the song of its warmth. Howard plays texture rather than melody. Lunch does not try to reproduce Sinatra. Two voices circling a song that nobody fully understood to begin with. Howard and Lunch did not try to improve on Hazlewood and Sinatra. They made a different thing entirely.

4AD released the single on July 2, 1982. It was a one-off recording. Howard and Lunch were in London at the same time and went into a studio together. The result was eleven minutes of music across two sides of vinyl, and it has been reissued and listened to ever since. Howard continued to make music after The Birthday Party dissolved in 1983. He formed These Immortal Souls and collaborated with Crime and the City Solution and others. His fractured, feedback-laden approach became a reference point for gothic rock and noise rock musicians in the decades that followed. He died from liver cancer on December 30, 2009, at the age of fifty. Lydia Lunch continued writing, recording, and performing for decades. Her uncompromising, fiercely independent approach laid groundwork for riot grrrl and industrial music. She is still working. Released July 2, 1982. Forty-four years later, it still sounds like a conversation between two people who understood the dark better than most.