Wednesday night just passed saw a host of artists, including old Boys Next Door/Birthday Party bandmates Nick Cave and Mick Harvey, pay tribute to Melbourne’s late great Rowland S. Howard at London’s Royal Festival Hall.  

Pop Crimes: A Tribute to Rowland S Howard, was a tenth-anniversary celebration of both the release of Howard’s final album Pop Crimes, as well as his December 30, 2009, passing.

The show was an outgrowth of one held in Melbourne last month under the same name. Both shows featured Rowland’s brother Harry Howard and partner Genevieve McGuckin, who had together played with Rowland in These Immortal Souls after The Birthday Party's demise.

Lydia Lunch, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie and HTRK’s Jonnine Standish had been advertised as the evening’s “special guests”. Nick Cave’s appearance may not have been inevitable, but could not have come as a huge surprise. His choice of song, however, was astonishing, as was his performance. “Shivers”, which Rowland wrote when he was 16 and which he first performed with his early band The Young Charlatans, was The Boys Next Door’s first single. It has become an enduring Australian classic, but not a song that Cave has seen fit to perform in decades. Indeed, it dates from a period which he and Mick Harvey have all but disowned. Of course, it is an incredible song, and his solo piano version was perfectly measured.

You’ll want to play this one on repeat we reckon, and maybe want to go back to The Boys Next Door’s original single version. Here they both are, as well as a great – perhaps definitive - version from Rowland and his band (prefaced by a chat about the song with Clinton Walker), taped for ABC-TV’s Studio 22 only months before his death.