Harry Howard and the Near Death Experience
Show me someone who doesn’t believe in destiny and I’ll show you someone who has never been to the Northcote Social Club.
Any punter who has chosen a night at a live music venue over a night in front of the telly knows what I’m talking about: the payoff.
I’m talking about dragging your arse in from the suburbs and letting someone stamp a star on the back of your hand and buying a gassy beer and standing together-alone with your fellow musical trainspotters.
And then it happens.
The heavens open and God (as imagined by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) reaches down and pulls the plugs from your ears and you experience a perfect gig. (Or should I make that, Gigs of Destiny? Too much?)
The gig I have in mind was at the Northcote Social Club.
It was 2011. I was at the Social Club because Ron Peno and the Superstitions were launching an album. One of my musical regrets of the 1980s was that I hadn’t seen Died Pretty live—and, besides, my brother Tim is one of the Superstitions—so I wasn’t about to miss the gig.
There were two other bands on the line up—the Ocean Party and Harry Howard and the Near Death Experience. Together, those three bands delivered a perfect gig.
Seriously. They were that good.
I will write about the albums that each of those bands connected me to that night. But, for now, I want to talk about the second band on the line up: Harry Howard and the NDE.
How to describe such a band? What could possibly do them justice?
Nothing.
Words are not enough.
What I can say is that as soon as the fab four—Howard on vocals and guitar, Edwina Preston on keys and vocals, Clare Moore on drums and Dave Graney on bass—started playing I found myself drifting from the back of the room towards the front.
Now, in case you’re wondering, I’m a wallflower at gigs. I generally don’t talk much, especially to the musos (this rule was self-imposed after, as an 18-year-old, I attempted to express my appreciation of Died Pretty to former member Frank Brunetti and wildly overshot the mark).
That night I sipped my beer and tried to maintain a semblance of cool.
I may not have succeeded.
It was stunning music.
They were so ferocious. They were so smart. They were so funny.
The four of them together in that space sounded incredible: like the world’s hippest supergroup.
The highlight was when Howard and Preston (she’s a novelist, by the way) sang a duet.
I was floored. That duet, ‘We Can’t Decide,’ made Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads seem tame; not because it was more gruesome, but because it was much more believable.
Dear Reader, I bought the album.
The Near Death Experience have put out two more albums since their self-titled debut.
Each album is stellar (my favourite is the second, Pretty). And I listen to them frequently. And I return often to ‘We Can’t Decide’ (Pretty’s Howard/Preston duet is even better, by the way) because it reminds me of that night at the Northcote Town Hall.
As for that gig, I’m still in recovery.
Here’s the video for ‘We Can’t Decide.’