Crime & The City Solution
Formed from the ashes of the Birthday Party, Crime & The City Solution have become a repository for a number of musicians and artists working under that verbose banner. Their inital mainstay was Rowland S. Howard (vocals/guitar), who, together with brother Harry Howard (bass), brought fellow Birthday Party journeyman Mick Harvey (drums) to the fold. Early line-ups fluctuated rapidly, and included stays for the likes of Epic Soundtracks (drums, ex- Swell Maps). The first pivotal change, however, came when Simon Bonney (b. Tasmania, Australasia; vocals/guitar) arrived. Bonney, whose own band shared a near parallel career to Boys Next Door (a precursor to the Birthday Party), had known the other members from their days together in Melbourne, Australia. The brothers Howard would later split with Bonney to form These Immortal Souls, effectively leaving the band's destination in his hands. In the meantime, Mick Harvey drummed with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, while new recruit Alexander Hacke (guitar) continued to play with Einsturzende Neubaten, for whom Bonney was also an occasional member. Hacke had joined in time for SHINE (1988), whereupon the band had re-located to Berlin from England. This allowed them to work with a variety of new media, notably appearing in Wim Wenders' film Wings Of Desire. Their liaison was so successful the director asked them to compose the soundtrack to his next film To The Ends Of the World. The line-up for later albums added multi-instrumentalist Chrislo Hass, Thomas Stern (bass) and Bronwyn Adams (violin), with whom Bonney was now co-writing. Despite the personnel shifts, the band's output has remained remarkably constant, though the textures have undoubtedly altered: emotive and intense vignettes on the dark side of life, the evocation of mood as much a keynote as is the case with former cohort Nick Cave.