Nick Lowe: ‘I sang to Johnny Cash and... deadly silence’
In his tranquil back garden in West London, Nick Lowe, often plausibly hailed as “England’s greatest songwriter”, is talking about making an accidental comeback with his first long-player in 11 years. Called Indoor Safari, it finds the silver-coiffed cult hero from the punk era dispensing a masterclass in jauntily sophisticated melodies and often heartbroken lyrics.
Now 75, Lowe is hardly a household name, scoring perhaps his best-remembered New Wave hit with Cruel to be Kind, an oldies radio perennial, but he went on to author songs for countless other artists, including Johnny Cash (The Beast in Me), Rod Stewart (Shelly My Love) and Diana Ross (I Live on a Battlefield). If he has thus always remained somewhat below the radar, that’s just the way he likes it.
“I didn’t have the Cher gene, to go chasing fame,” he declares, charm personified, sipping tea in a deck chair behind his modest terraced house in Brentford. “I found that it wasn’t necessarily the part of the game that I liked. Also, I’m quite lazy. To be one of those huge stars like Elton John whose careers span the decades, it takes an enormous amount of work, and sleepless nights. That’s not for me. I don’t want to be told what to do, and I definitely don’t want to chase the zeitgeist.”
As a British kid growing up in a military family in the 1950’s, Lowe’s first love was skiffle.
“I got the bug with that whole boom-chicka-boom-chicka thing,” he recalls, “which, really, was a lesson in country and blues. From there I heard rockabilly, soul and RnB, and to this day all of that is what I’m interested in.”
Initially, as the bassist and tunesmith in ill-starred country-rock combo Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe might’ve seemed destined to become one of British rock’s early casualties. It’s hard to picture the dapper gent reclining before me today, in his crisply ironed black shirt, plaid slacks and super-sized hornrims, as the early 20-something tearaway who trashed a Manchester hotel room with The Who’s Keith Moon, and later celebrated the event in the top 10 single, I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass.
Other tall tales have him getting throttled by an enraged Ray Davies of The Kinks, and cutting an LSD-ravaged figure on tour with Paul McCartney’s Wings. But Lowe did little to capitalise on his starry shoulder-rubbing and it wasn’t until 1975, when pub rock exploded in London around key artists such as Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury, that he caught a break. “It was like you were waiting around,” he remembers, “then a voice came from the heavens, saying, ‘Cashier Number 5, please!’, and it was your turn.”
As pub rock’s energy led onto punk and new wave, Lowe was in the thick of it. His manager’s Stiff label launched with records from Lowe as a solo artist, and as a producer for The Damned and Elvis Costello, whose first five albums he ultimately oversaw.
Nicknamed ‘Basher’ for his studio ethos (“just bash it out, and we’ll tart it up later”), he formed the band Rockpile with Welsh rock ’n’ roller Dave Edmunds, but they would only officially make one LP, as Edmunds had a solo deal with Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song label, and Zeppelin’s ferocious manager, Peter Grant, prevented them from making any more.
“Everything we did was a Rockpile record, though,” Lowe counters mischievously, “including Cruel to be Kind. Edmunds had hits, too – Crawling From the Wreckage, Girls Talk – and they were Rockpile as well. We’d make my records in the daytime, and Edmunds’s in the evening. I didn’t realise we were working as hard as we were, because it was all really good fun.”
In the days of sharp new-wave fashions, they dressed in shabby jeans, looking perennially drunk or hungover, but somehow got away with it. Amid the non-stop partying, Lowe hastily married Carlene Carter, aka the stepdaughter of country giant Johnny Cash. Of the apocryphal story that he melted Carter’s heart with a solo rendition of I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, he says he doesn’t remember it that way.
“But it may have helped,” he shrugs. “We both liked the idea of each other. Here I was, starting to get a hit record, and she was like a budgerigar amongst all the sparrows in London, so we enjoyed showing off together. We really shouldn’t have got hitched, because we were both equally as bad at being married, but we really liked each other, and still do.”
Amid infidelities on both sides, the couple parted amicably, but not before Cash and his wife June had become a fixture at the couple’s Chiswick home. “For years afterwards, I continued to see John and June, with no trouble at all. John said, ‘Look, I know you two are not together anymore, but that’s nothing to do with me!’ They had hundreds of sons- and daughters-in-law, and exes and otherwise, and some of them had even remarried to each other. By comparison, I was a minor offender.”
Lowe, however, was sheepish about foisting his own compositions on the legendary Man In Black, he admits, “probably due to the possibility of rejection”. In 1981, he mentioned to Cash he’d been kicking around a song idea entitled The Beast In Me, and duly resolved to finish it, drinking wine all night to inhabit Johnny’s persona, “until the next morning, when this shadow looms over me, and John says, ‘Hi Nick, what’re you doin’?’
“When I opened my mouth to sing it to him, instead of the booming baritone from the night before, this feeble, squirty voice came out, ‘Oh, the beeeast in meeee’. Sweating, shaking, I groped my way through. It was awful. Deadly silence!”
At Cash’s behest, he chipped away for years, until The Beast In Me sat in poll position at Track Three on 1994’s Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings album, which reignited Cash’s career.
By that point, Lowe had enjoyed a substantial payday when Curtis Stigers’s version of his mid-’70s broadside, (What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, was included in the Whitney Houston movie blockbuster, The Bodyguard (its soundtrack album shifted 45 million copies worldwide).
Along the way, he’d been reassessing how to channel his songwriting talent. “I realised my career as a pop star, which had been brief, was over,” he says, “and I wanted to reinvent myself, to use getting older as a plus. I never was a tight-leather-trousers guy, but the last thing I wanted was to have to squeeze into them metaphorically speaking, in order to jump up and down in front of my ageing fans. So, I started writing with that in mind, making sure that the songs were watertight, and I didn’t feel stupid singing them.”
Starting with 1994’s The Impossible Bird, which coincided with a romantic break-up with the BBC TV arts presenter Tracey MacLeod, there followed a series of three albums, known as the Brentford Trilogy, where grown-up themes of loss, regret and existential malaise prevailed over consummately poised roots music. Tracks from this mature period like Withered on the Vine, Lately I’ve Let Things Slide and What Lack of Love Has Done are amongst his very best – truly fit for the King of Rock & Roll himself, Elvis Presley, in his Vegas pomp.
After 2001’s The Convincer, though, productivity slowed, as Lowe struggled to see the point in releasing albums in a fragmentary digital universe. It didn’t help that, following 2013’s superb Christmas album, Quality Street, two key players from his band passed away.
The road to its successor, Indoor Safari, began 10 years ago when his manager teamed him up with Los Straitjackets, a twangy surf-instrumental group from Nashville who wear Mexican wrestling masks, for some Yuletide US shows. Aficionados will notice the album is more upbeat. “People wouldn’t come and see me with four guys wearing Mexican wrestling masks for some deep meaningful philosophical treatise,” Lowe reasons.
Their sound may be a million miles away from 2020’s pop, but Lowe won’t castigate today’s stars. “You know, move over, grandad!” he laughs. “My 18-year-old, Roy, plays me stuff. He went through his Drill stage, and I could sort of see it, but I wouldn’t want to do it myself – that chirpy-cricket hi-hat sound really got on my wick.”
Although his gentle pace of activity suggests that Lowe may be considering retirement with his second wife and mother to Roy, Peta, a graphic artist who designs his record covers, he says that a chance encounter with another revered songsmith, Paul Simon, in New York earlier this summer proved motivational.
“I’d never met him before,” he recalls, “but he said, ‘Do you want to hear what I’m doing?’ It was quite unusual sounding, but really fantastic. I thought to myself, ‘How old is this guy? Maybe 82? And he’s still producing work of this quality? Why don’t you get yourself in gear, pal! You shouldn’t rule anything out here.’”
Indoor Safari is released by YepRoc Records on September 13
