Local music promoter Nick Haines has come up trumps in a five-year campaign to get a St Kilda laneway named after Melbourne musician, and former Nick Cave collaborator, Rowland S Howard.
Howard, who played with Cave in The Birthday Party and famously penned the song Shivers, which went on to be famously covered by The Screaming Jets, died of liver cancer in December 2009.
An application for the commemorative Rowland S Howard Lane was approved by the City of Port Phillip in 2013 but, as the ABC reports, it was then disallowed due to State Government regulations governing Victorian place names.
The planning minister has the power to override the regulations, which prevented the formerly nameless lane between Jackson Street and Eildon Road in St Kilda from bearing Howard’s monicker.
And after a hard-fought campaign by Haines, which was backed by Council, State Labor finally gazetted the name change after it won power in the 2014 election.
Haines told the ABC he was “hugely relieved” that his campaign had paid off. “This was very personal for me, as he was a friend,” he said. “And this was quite an effort”.
It’s also likely to be some welcome good news for Howards’ girlfriend, St Kilda resident Genevieve McGuckin, who was recently the victim of an atrocious theft.
Thousands of dollars worth of vinyl and priceless keepsakes that Rowland and McGuckin had collected over the course of their three decades together were stolen from their home, with a police investigation still ongoing.
Watch: Rowland S Howard – Shivers Live
