Nick Lowe is heading to Australia on the back of his fine new album, The Old Magic. Once known as the Jesus of Cool, or Basher to his mates, Lowe’s resume includes working as the Stiff label’s in-house producer. His most successful client was Elvis Costello. As a member of Rockpile he co-authored one of the great albums, Seconds Of Pleasure. Then, of course, there’s a solo career that yielded the perennial single ’Cruel To Be Kind’ and a slew of albums that have seen him marked as one of the great British songwriters. With The Old Magic Lowe once again delivers a work that runs from both tender ballads to a form of rockin’ that almost pre-dates the Beatles. We were lucky enough to get the great man on the phone for a chat. Sean Sennett asked the questions about The Old Magic.
TOM: ’Restless Feeling’, on the new album, is a great song. I was going to ask you about writing that, if it was a song that came quickly or gestated over a long period of time?
Nick: Well there is a bit of a story attached to that particular song. It was a sort of a song I wrote for somebody else. We started recording it and had so much fun doing it; we decided not to give it to the person in question. But it’s a fun one. That’s the one with Ron Sexsmith singing with us.
TOM: It’s interesting listening to your new record because in a way it kind of feels like it’s almost pre-Beatles, before they changed the landscape.
Nick: Well I suppose so, yes. There’s a couple of song writing styles on there, which are sort of pre-rock and roll, I suppose. Also some of the grooves are quite old fashioned. My feeling is everything has been done. I don’t think there’s anything original anymore in certainly western popular music, or what you might describe as western popular music. But it’s the influences that you take and put together that makes something original, like a recipe for a soup or stew; you take a little bit from here, little bit from there, and you mix it up and come up with something new.
It’s pretty obvious where my influences are from, I love American pop music and also blues and gospel and even show music, all kinds of American music, but I love what happens to it when it comes to Europe, and the Italians get their hands on it for instance, or the French. Their stuff is kind of corny and kind of bad but there’s something rather great about it too. I like putting in all kinds of things to come up with my own style.
TOM: When you mention there are a couple of interesting grooves on the record, is there a particular song that fits that example?
Nick: Well I think in a way they’ve all got some good grooves. Even the slow tunes have got groove in what I call a groove. But I like the little groove there is on ’Somebody Cares for Me’ for instance. It’s got a funny little rumba thing going for it and everyone is playing something – a different sort of rhythm on it, but it comes together in an interesting way. That would be an example, or there’s a song on there that I didn’t write, it was written by a friend of mine, called ’You Don’t Know Me At All’ which is like a Johnny Cash thing, but we put these horns on it. It changes the
character of the thing. That’s interesting to me, that sort of thing.
TOM: For the benefit of some of our readers who might not be aware, would you mind talking about the idea of you reinventing yourself and being happy to be a fellow that’s in his sixties doing music?
Nick: Well yes, the way I sort of describe it is after my brief career as a pop star was over, which lasted from about 1976 until ’81 or ’82, I knew it was coming. It’s inevitable. The public gets tired of your shtick and they move on. Unless you’re a very unusual sort of person, like Elton John or Neil Diamond, whose career seems to span the decades, I knew I wasn’t one of those people. And so when I knew that my time was up, I had very mixed feelings because on the one hand there were quite considerable perks to being in the public eye like that, and being famous. But also
there’s rather more downside to it. I was very tired of myself really. I was sick of the sound of my own voice, and I had no ideas or anything like that. I was drinking heavily, all that cliche stuff. I was quite glad in a way; it was time for me to have a rest. When I took stock I thought to myself I’ve done pretty well up to now. If it’s all over, I’ve done pretty well. I’ve made a bit of money and I’ve done some quite good stuff, had a couple of hits. Why is it that I think that I haven’t really done anything really good yet? I started thinking about this. Then started considering how I might reinvent myself or represent myself so that I could take advantage of the fact that I was inevitably going to get older in a business which at that time had absolutely no use for anyone even in their thirties let alone into their forties. There was no such thing as forty-year old pop singers. That was ridiculous. Now of course you can’t move for them – seventy, eighty blooming years old. Crickey, and they’re doing good work too, people like Paul Simon and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, they’re all doing the best work of their lives, but they’re way up there. That was absolutely unheard of back in the early ’80s. I started thinking about how I might use the fact that I was going to age as an advantage and I knew that I had to think of a new way of recording myself, how I wanted to record myself and present myself. In order
to do that I had to take a bit of time out of the limelight. So I started working on this and slowly I can see it’s not exactly paying off because it’s not for everybody, but I thought if I get it right and get it hip enough I thought young people would like it, and I wouldn’t then have to be condemned. I saw it as being condemned to just playing to the people who liked me when I had my time in the sun, like so many of my contemporaries have to do. They serve just to allow their audience to relive their youth. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to have a new thing going, which would actually improve with age. As I could say, I would use the fact I was aging to make it – give it some depth, and I still wanted it to be funny, and entertaining. I didn’t want to make everyone feel bad. That’s the last thing I wanted to do. But it’s interesting now to see it sort of starting to work.
Nick Lowe’s That Old Magic is out now through Yep Rock.
