Nick Lowe
Englert Theatre — Friday, October 14 at 8 p.m.
Nick Lowe has toured the globe, but when he brings his solo show to the Englert on Oct. 14 (8 p.m.; tickets $37.50), it will be his first time in Iowa City. I spoke with him last month, on the phone from his home in London, about his career, his fans and his upcoming tour. “It’s good fun to turn up someplace where quite a large number of people in the audience don’t really know who I am,” he said. “And then I play a tune and they go ‘Oh blimey, I know this one. It’s that guy!’ That really gives me a kick.”
Yeah, “that guy.” The guy who, according to his website bio, is “songwriter of at least three songs you know by heart.” The guy who, as a producer for Stiff Records in the 1970s and ’80s, worked with the likes of Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and the Pretenders to craft the New Wave sound. The guy who played in the rockabilly-flavored pop group Rockpile with Dave Edmunds. The guy who was in a band called — no kidding — Little Village.
With Rockpile, he spent the better part of three years, from 1977 to 1980, touring America. “Part of the reason I’m lucky to have this really nice audience in the U.S. is because of all the gigging we did back then. Also, I play to quite a lot of younger people and I’m amazed when they come up to me after the show and start talking about Rockpile. It’s almost as if it’s been handed down like some tribal secret.”
Not handed down so much, perhaps, as always there, like some kind of rock DNA. I mentioned Nick Lowe to a 30-something friend, and was surprised she not only knew who he was, but had already bought her tickets for the show. She was psyched. I was bewildered. She wasn’t even born when Lowe was bashing out hits in the ’70s and ’80s — that speaks to the breadth of his influence. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve heard his songs. You’ve heard “Cruel to Be Kind,” his biggest U.S. hit, from 1979. You’ve heard Elvis Costello sing his “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding.” And if you watch TV more than you listen to music, you’ve still heard “The Beast in Me” on The Sopranos, or “The Cold Grey Light of Dawn” on True Blood. Yeah, that guy.
There’s a 2011 New York Times article (by Larry Rohter) that suggests Lowe’s songs are more well-known than he is. He laughed when I mentioned it, but agreed that it’s probably better than the opposite, because it’s the work — the songs — that are important.
“It’s something I’ve rather worked at. The trouble is, especially over here, you get shoved in a box. Once you’ve had a go, that’s it, people just want to keep you in that box. And then you’re out on one of those grim ‘remember the good old days of punk rock’ parties, which I can barely remember myself! But I’m not interested in all that stuff. It’s not like I want to ‘get down with the kids’ or anything like that, but I certainly want to feel like what I do is relevant.”
He agreed, too, that some songs take on a life of their own — that fans connect with certain songs and have a proprietary, “This is our song!” response to them. With “Peace, Love, and Understanding,” for example, “I almost feel as though I haven’t had anything to do with it. It almost feels quite remote. And when I play it and see people react, I feel they’re not actually reacting to me; they’re reacting to the song.”
So will he mix some old songs into his set? “Oh yes. There are some tunes that I absolutely must do and I must say I really love doing them, too. Because one of the great things about playing solo is that these songs can sort of change. You know, with a band, they sort of stay locked in the arrangement and that’s it. But if you play them on your own they change without you really knowing.”
These organic changes keep the songs fresh. “On the rare occasion I hear one of my records played on the radio, I’ll be astonished at how different it is now. I’ve changed lines,” Lowe said, laughing. “And huge chunks seem to have disappeared, and new bits get put in and I think, ‘How the hell did that happen?’ So I’m rather pleased about that — it all keeps on the move.”
Also keeping things on the move is the pace of a set that includes mostly three-minute songs. “It’s a fun show. I take what I do seriously, but I don’t take myself too seriously, so it’s not too trying an evening,” he says wryly. His self-deprecation is utterly charming.
Asked about future recording plans, Lowe said he’s in a “funny mood” about making records at the moment. The kinds of records he likes to make, with other musicians in a studio, are incredibly expensive. “And that’s why nobody does it that way anymore,” he said. The prevailing notion, I countered, is that anybody with a laptop can make a record, to which he replied, “Yeah, they can knock one out. And it’ll be pretty good. But ‘pretty good’ is the new shit. And in fact, when I hear something that’s really sort of messed up and badly mixed, I think, ‘Whoa, this is like a refreshing drink of water in the Sahara!’”
He’s “not really pushed” to make new records, but said songwriting is like a muscle that has to be worked. “I still write songs. You can’t really turn the tap off. And, if I think it’s the kind of song that people can hear once and think ‘Oh, this is a pretty good one,’ then I’ll put it in the show.”
If we’re lucky, we’ll hear one.
Cheryl Graham knew the bride when she used to rock ‘n’ roll. This article was originally published in Little Village issue 207.
