Nick Lowe – His aim is true
At the end of 1977, Lowe left Stiff (along with Elvis Costello) and followed Jake Riviera to his new label, Radar. The move heralded a hectic period for Lowe. He was now, along with guitarists Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner and drummer Terry Williams, a member of Rockpile, which would eventually play on solo recordings by both Lowe and Edmunds, as well as two early-’80s albums by country-rock singer Carlene Carter, who Lowe married in August 1979.
He was also an increasingly sought-after producer in these years, working on some of the finest and most important records of the era, including “Stop Your Sobbing”, the Pretenders’ first single, and Howlin’ Wind, the debut LP from Graham Parker & the Rumour (which included Lowe’s former bandmates, Bob Andrews and Brinsley Schwarz), as well as several more Costello albums.
Lowe’s debut album (Radar’s, too) was released in 1978. Jesus Of Cool — retitled Pure Pop For Now People upon Stateside release — was a kaleidoscope of pop and rock fashion, and it made plain Lowe’s prankster persona even before you’d ripped off the shrink wrap. On the front cover, Lowe posed in a half-dozen stereotypical rock star costumes, and on the back, he wore a re-creation of Frank Gorshin’s first Batman Riddler suit, covered in question marks.
Whereas Costello and Parker were Angry Young Men, pissed off both at England’s economically unpromising future and at what had become of the rock ‘n’ roll they loved, Lowe was devil-may-care. Sure, he loved the sound of breaking glass, to quote one of the album’s singles. But not for rebellion; he just wanted to have fun. Lowe was winking and cool, appreciative of the absurdities of rock ‘n’ roll excess, and game for anything as long as it was hummable and made him laugh.
Of course, there are limitations to such a satirical approach. For one thing, some listeners are likely to hear nothing but the jokes; Rolling Stone, for example, actually termed Pure Pop “a novelty record.” But Lowe’s seriousness about his music is right there in the grooves of the record itself. In addition to earlier Stiff recordings such as “Marie Provost” and “Heart Of The City”, Pure Pop includes “Rollers Show”, an impossibly perfect Bay City Rollers impersonation that sees the ridiculousness of the teen stars’ immense popularity even as it can’t help shrieking along; “Nutted By Reality”, which rakishly pairs the castration of Castro with a undeniable rhythm track swiped from the Jackson Five’s “ABC”; and “They Called It Rock”, a skewering of fickle rock critics that’s too catchy to be anything but critic-proof.
It’s recordings like these, coupled with the soundbites Lowe provided in interviews of the period (From 1978, Lowe on Grace Slick: “She’s like somebody’s mom who’s had a few too many drinks at a cocktail party”), that led writer Ken Tucker to label Nick “the best performing rock critic since Pete Townshend.”
The next year, after touring the United States with Rockpile, Lowe recorded and released Labour Of Lust, every bit as strong as its predecessor, partly because Lowe’s songs are as infectious and funny as ever. Mainly, though, the credit goes to Rockpile, particularly the ringing-a-bell licks of Edmunds and the flawless timekeeping of Terry Williams.
On “Switchboard Susan” (written by Mickey Jupp, who Lowe had produced and Rockpile had backed the year before), Williams plays like a piledriver with a feather touch as Lowe blurts to his operator sweetheart: “When I’m with you girl I get an extension/And I don’t mean Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.”
The unforgettable “Cruel To Be Kind”, a song Lowe had written in the Brinsley days with bandmate Ian Gomm, was the album’s breakout pop hit. Also memorable, and far more unexpected, was the hushed “You Make Me”. Lowe had recorded similarly gripping dramas before, but he’d tended to bury them in out-of-the-way places: “Endless Sleep”, on the Bowi EP, was harrowingly intimate with hopelessness and suicide; the grim “Basing Street”, B-side to the Lust single “Cracking Up”, detailed a bloody crime scene.
But “You Make Me” marked the first time Lowe had stripped his sound down quite so prominently. Backed, just barely, by acoustic guitar, Lowe’s character cops to, and rejects responsibility for, hurting his lover, all in the same whispered breath: “I don’t want to do wrong to you/You make me.” Upon its release, Rolling Stone noted, “Listening to this song is like discovering the class wit, who’s always seemed invulnerable, can actually cry.”
As “Cruel To Be Kind” climbed to #12 on the U.S. and British charts, Lowe’s production work continued to garner attention. It was a heady time. “Round about the end of the ’70s, for a short and glorious time,” Lowe says today, “we were the monkeys in the wheelhouse.” In fact, it’s possible to pinpoint this moment quite precisely, at least in the States: The summer of 1979, when along with “Cruel To Be Kind”, rock ‘n’ roll records such as Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him,” Bram Tchaikovsky’s “Girl Of My Dreams,” and Sniff ‘N’ The Tears’ “Driver’s Seat” all breached the U.S. Top 40, while the Fabulous Poodles’ “Mirror Star” and Dave Edmunds’ “Girls Talk” cracked the Hot 100.
The result, on the radio and in the music industry, was a New Wave. “The heads rolled and all these major moguls in the music business were suddenly seen to be incredibly unhip and lost their jobs,” Lowe recalls. “It didn’t last long, though. They put some guys with skinny ties and spiky haircuts in their place. It was basically the same people.”