Crime & The City Solution

The ever-evolving Crime & the City Solution arose after the breakup of the influential Birthday Party. Melbourne, Australia native and evocative singer/songwriter Simon Bonney founded and fronted the group alongside his partner, violinist/vocalist Bronwyn Adams; they brought in former Birthday Party members Mick Harvey and Rowland S. Howard plus the latter’s bassist brother Harry Howard. From 1985 through 1991 the lineup issued seven multi-track EPs, appeared in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, and delivered five full-length albums—Room of Lights (1986), The Bride Ship (1989), and Paradise Discoteque (1990) among them—before splitting in 1992. Bonney and Adams later assembled a fresh configuration that cut the Detroit-recorded American Twilight in 2013; a decade afterward another edition tracked The Killer in Berlin under producer Martin J. Fiedler.

The quartet’s 1985 self-produced debut EP, The Dangling Man, quickly defined the band’s moody, atmospheric, blues-rooted sound. Drummer Epic Soundtracks, late of Swell Maps, joined after that release, allowing Harvey to move between multiple instruments on the atmospheric follow-up Just South of Heaven. Room of Lights arrived in 1986 and included the standout track “Six Bells Chime,” whose impact on filmmaker Wim Wenders prompted an invitation for the group to perform the song onscreen in his 1988 masterpiece Wings of Desire.

By the film’s release, however, the version of Crime & the City Solution seen onscreen had already dissolved; after Room of Lights the Howard brothers and Soundtracks departed to launch These Immortal Souls, prompting Bonney, Harvey, and violinist Bronwyn Adams—Bonney’s wife and songwriting partner—to move to Berlin and recruit local players, among them Einstürzende Neubauten guitarist Alexander Hacke, for the ornate, intoxicating Shine (1988). The next album, 1989’s The Bride Ship, pushed further into baroque territory.

Crime & the City Solution returned to the studio one last time in 1990 for Paradise Discotheque, centered on Bonney’s ambitious four-part suite “The Last Dictator,” a cycle sparked by the fall of Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu. After supplying “The Adversary” to the soundtrack of Wenders’ Until the End of the World, the band disbanded. Harvey went on to record and tour with former Birthday Party colleague Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds, while Bonney issued his solo debut Forever in 1992 and followed it with Everyman in 1995.

In 2011 Bonney, Adams, and Hacke revived the project to record and tour, enlisting David Eugene Edwards (16 Horsepower, Woven Hand), Jim White (Dirty Three), Troy Gregory (Dirtbombs, Swans, Spiritualized), and Matt Smith (Outrageous Cherry, Andre Williams). Mute Records issued the compilation A History of Crime: Berlin 1987-1991: An Introduction to Crime & the City Solution in fall 2012 ahead of the March 2013 release of American Twilight.

After periods of worldwide touring the international lineup went quiet. During the 2020 pandemic Bonney applied to a PhD program extending his earlier aid work across the Indo-Pacific, where he had visited regions facing extreme violence; the application process ultimately yielded songs that processed the psychological toll of that work.

Bonney and Adams then formed a second Berlin edition of Crime & the City Solution. Joining them were keyboardist/bassist Frederic Lyenn, guitarist Donald Baldie, guitarist/synthesist Georgio Valentino, drummer and percussionist Chris Hughes, and pianist/guitarist Joshua Murphy. Produced by Martin J. Fiedler at Klangbild Studios, the resulting album The Killer marked the first occasion Crime & the City Solution had collaborated with an outside producer.