Nick Lowe: In and Out of Fashion, Never Out of Style

Few figures in rock history have been more consequential to me than Nick Lowe, whose work—both solo and with other like-minded power-pop and new wave kingpins—has soundtracked numerous dimensions of my life. I remember where I was while hearing the rollicking, groovy “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass” for the first time, and the same goes for “Cruel to Be Kind.” A multi-instrumentalist and pub rock Shakespeare, Lowe is maybe best known for writing and producing Elvis Costello’s hit song “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” but it’s that first Graham Parker and the Rumour album, Howlin’ Wind, that grabbed me quick and opened my taste up to blue-eyed soul (“White Honey” remains in regular rotation). His work on the Pretenders’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” too, sticks with me.

Lowe is effortlessly cool, with his silver, slicked-back hair, thick, black-rimmed glasses and million-dollar smile. When I rang him up, he was in Chicago preparing for the next batch of shows he’s going to play with his band, Los Straitjackets, here in the States. I have no reason to be hyperbolic; Lowe is a splendid phone hang, nurturing our conversation with long, insightful responses and a genuine joy for letting the dialogue go anywhere and everywhere. Gratitude lingered in the air, as he let me look into his world for 45 minutes.

In mid-September, Lowe and Los Straitjackets released a new record, Indoor Safari—12 songs that have lived a few lives already and run the gamut like a pop-rock buzzsaw. It’s not just his first album of new material in more than a decade, but it’s Lowe at his strongest, a capture of “Britain’s greatest living songwriter” making no-frills rock music with the same mindset he did Jesus of Cool and Labour of Lust more than 40 years ago. The songs, like “Went to a Party” and “Crying Inside,” beckon Lowe’s roots, webs of star-power he didn’t linger in for too long before ditching the charting affections on Nick the Knife, The Rose of England and Party of One. As Lowe himself might say, it’s the kind of music that goes in and out of fashion but never out of style. Knowing that he’s been around the block a time or two, you hang onto those words.

And, with a crew like the Straitjackets standing next to him, Nick Lowe sounds as confident and comfortable as ever. The tunes are rejuvenated and, as my own worries about the future of rock ‘n’ roll grow more nihilistic with each passing day, Indoor Safari arrives as the kind of album that, perhaps miraculously, functions like an eternal, unwavering force of guitars and hooks. It’s an epic catchiness I once believed was more powerful than anything, restored to its sweetest profundity. Making a top-drawer song is as pleasurable to Lowe now at 75 as it was when he was 25, 30 years old. It really is such a gift to get close to it.

I spoke with Lowe recently, charting his post-“Cruel to Be Kind” successes all the way through Indoor Safari, chatting about the Straitjackets, punk music, Christmas music and rock ‘n’ roll longevity along the way. The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Paste Magazine: Indoor Safari has been out for more than a month now. How are you feeling about it?

Nick Lowe: Well, I’m extremely pleased by how it’s been received. The strangest thing, for me, really, is how the record came about. We’ve released some of these tracks before, on a series of EPs. When it was suggested by the record company for us to collect them all together and put them on an album, my reaction was, “Whoa! Hold on a second.” When we recorded these tunes, we had to record them on the fly, when we were actually on the road. That presents two problems, really. One is that you don’t know what sort of recording studio you’re going to get. You just pick a town that you’re going to be appearing in and book a studio in that town and hope for the best. So, very often, we got studios which really didn’t suit us. They were modern, economy recording studios. In other words, a room with some computers and another room with a kit of drums and a synthesizer. And, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to make this sound like an old guy rant about “the good ol’ days” or anything like that. I know there are some fantastic records made on computers. But it’s different for a group like ours. Even though we’ve got some up-to-date ideas about how to present ourselves and what we do, there’s no doubt that it’s riding on a retro chassis that requires a room big enough for four or five guys to get into—to play live, and only really expensive studios have got that now.

That’s what we were all raised on, that’s how you made records: You get in a room and all play together, or pretty much, anyway. We had problems with that, but we were all big boys. We can get around that, and we did our best. But, more than that, the songs I’d written—I suppose we could have done a bunch of covers and just knocked them out, because we didn’t have any ambitions for these records we were making other than the merch table. It became evident that there was a demand for us to have a recording of ourselves on sale at the shows. So, we could have, I suppose, knocked out a bunch of covers. But I‘ve been writing songs with this arrangement in mind—me and the Straitjackets—and the trouble with these simple songs, which are ideal for me and the Straitjackets, is that you can record them and out comes the song, but they only really get a personality and a life after you’ve played them in front of a live audience five or six times. And, of course, recording them in the way we were, on the road—I live in London, they live in the United States—that process hadn’t taken place.

So, the recordings: They were okay, but they were a bit flat and didn’t have much personality and vibe to them. When it was suggested we put these records out on an LP, I said, “Well, we’ve got to revisit. We’ve got to either re-record some of these songs or revisit the original recordings and make them sound like something. They definitely need new vocals and other bits and pieces, just to make them sound like they do now.” We needed to have someone oversee this process, and we asked the great Alex Hall. We went into his studio, recorded two or three new songs, and he took all our old recordings and oversaw the smartening up of those. He made it sound like the record was all recorded in the same week, instead of over three years. I think that’s why it’s been so well-received, because I knew the songs were good and one of the reasons I wanted to re-do these songs was that I’m not prolific enough to just come up with 12 cool new songs. I knew some of these songs we’d recorded were good songs, but they just hadn’t been done right.

And the strangest thing of all about this is how I have told people this story and said, “Hold on, everyone. A lot of this material has been released before,” and no one seems to care! I thought people would be quite snotty about this, “Ah, c’mon! This has all been available before.” I’ve told them until I’m blue in the face. [Laughs] No one seems to mind, so I’m extremely pleased by how it’s been received. Judging by the amount of copies we’ve sold on this tour, we’ve had to restock two, three times.

It’s also been fascinating to hear people calling Indoor Safari a comeback record, since you’ve been on the road non-stop for these last 12 years—except during COVID-19. Does it feel like a comeback record? You’ve never been absent from music-making in some regard, whether it’s onstage or in the studio.

I suppose it does a bit, but only in respect of I thought I was done with making records. I really had just written it off. I was thinking that there wasn’t an opportunity for me to make records anymore. I really thought, “Well, that’s it. It’s done, because you can’t make any money from records anymore, unless you’re Beyoncé or Taylor Swift.” Spotify has taken care of all that, but it’s really just a calling card. You make a record, it shows that you’re in the business and you’re still operating. It’s like a business card that you give someone; “Hi, I’m Frank from ACME Plumbing.” That’s what the record is, mainly, nowadays. And I thought, “Well, I’m done with that now.” The way musicians make a living now is live and thank goodness, because I know how to do that! [Laughs] I’ve been doing it for a long time, and I’ve got a huge catalog to draw on. Then, I was lucky enough to hook up with Los Straitjackets, so I thought, “Well, here we go. This is going to be fun.” We get together twice a year, and it’s not very grueling—two or three weeks out on the road, we play some nice clubs, all hand-picked. I thought, “This is a very nice way for someone at the end of their career to make a living.”

I don’t need to make records, because they’re so expensive. The kind of records I know how to make, paradoxically, are incredibly expensive. [Laughs] There’s a reason why you can’t find studios with a big enough room to house five people: They’ve all been knocked down and turned into Starbucks or electric car stations, or something like that. You can make a record with the same sonic quality as Abbey Road or Gold Star or Trident in your bedroom now with just a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. And that is great! That’s absolutely fantastic. But, the kind of stuff I know how to do doesn’t sound any good if you make it like that. It’s only the very expensive studios, really, that have that facility—well, you run into a few on the cheaper end of the market that are still operating in that way, with a big room and a separate recording room, but not many.

So I thought, “Well, this is ridiculous, me still making these records.” What’s that expression—madness is doing the same thing over again, hoping for a different result? I thought, “This is ridiculous. Why put yourself through it? It’s so expensive, and for very little return. I’ve really rung the curtain down on my recording career, so that’s what was weird about this—because I really thought I was done with it. But, by a backdoor, another one has been prized out. And I think it’s a good record. I give it a 7 out of 10—that’s a high score for me, by the way, on my own records. But if it hadn’t been for our geographical problems—the fact I had to come to Chicago to mix it and go back to London and then call Alex up and mix it over the phone with him—I think it would have been an 8 out of 10. That’s a pretty good score for me, 7 out of 10.

I’d been thinking, too, about how you waited a while before putting out your first solo record in ‘78. You were in Brinsley Schwarz and Rockpile, on top of working as a producer at Stiff Records. It wasn’t an overnight deal, and neither was Indoor Safari. How formative or even non-negotiable is patience in the game of rock ‘n’ roll?

That’s a great question. I’ve never thought of that, because I’ve certainly never been in a hurry—apart from when I first started out. I was a kid and I thought I knew where it was at. My hopes and dreams were very simple, real cliché: I wanted to be famous. I wanted to be on TV and meet girls. Those were my two main ideals, and that happened for a while. It worked like a charm. But it’s very soon you realize, “Wait a minute, there’s a bit more to it than this.” I can’t say I got it straight away, but I suppose I figured out—where the body was buried, for someone like me—that how I could make a living and get some longevity was to learn how to write songs. Most musicians don’t make much money, actually, and don’t really have a very long career. They’re made to feel like their heads are high up on the totem pole, but they’re not. It’s all the people behind the scenes—they’re the ones who make the dough. The best a musician can do is enjoy playing—that’s the reward, you get to play live and you get people patting you on the back and telling you how great you are.

For a lot of people, that is enough. But it wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to do that, but I also wanted to make a decent living. I had to be very careful that I avoided fame, as well. That was the thing; I realized that that was destructive as well. You’ve got to walk a very fine line. You want to stay so that people remember you and don’t think you’re just a one-hit wonder person, but be able to duck your head down for a while and stay out of the way until life the carnival has moved on. Then, you pop up again and people remember you when you’ve got something to tell them about—a new record, or something you want to publicize. You used the word “patience.” I don’t know what word I would use. Maybe “longevity.” I thought, “Well, if I get what I’m doing right, it’ll be timeless. You’ll never go out of fashion.” You might go in and out of style, but you won’t go out of fashion. No, that’s the wrong way around. You’ll go in and out of fashion, but you won’t go out of style.

And that, I suppose, is a kind of patience. You’ve got to be content that you’re never going to be a huge, swashing-great success. It’s all limited, unless you’re one of those people like Bob Dylan or Elton John—people who seem to manage to roll through the decades, just churning out fantastic work. I knew my talent was more meager than that, but I could make it go a long way.

Well “Cruel to Be Kind” became a hit and then your sound grew up. You quit being “pop star” Nick Lowe. I’m always interested in how success, even if it’s just some minor love on the charts, can dictate the direction that an artist takes. Did you feel pressure to capitalize on a sound that caught a lot of ears and write more hits that were just as familiar?

I almost think that “Cruel to Be Kind” was my one bonafide pop hit. Whenever I go, people know that one. I had hits in other territories, which are still quite well-known songs, but “Cruel to Be Kind” was—even though it was just outside the Top 10—seemed to be enough for people to remember it. In a way, I felt like, although I enjoyed my time as a pop star—I could always get a table in a restaurant and people were pleased to see me and all that—I knew that I didn’t want to stay at that level. It was too spotlighty for me. I’ve always felt like an outsider, really, and I knew that I didn’t have what it took to do that, either, to be that kind of pop artist. I wanted to be something slightly more—where I was controlling things more. When I felt my career as a pop star was on the wane, of course the record companies all said, “C’mon, Nick, where’s the next one?” There was pressure—you had to come up with another album.

In Brinsley Schwarz, we were doing three or four [records] a year and being on the road all the time. But, of course, later on, even doing one a year was extremely hard work and soul-destroying, because I didn’t have enough good material to come up with that. I tried, but it wasn’t good enough. So, I knew I had to change my tune. So, that’s what I did. Everything was starting to come apart in my private life. I was taking too many drugs and drinking too heavily, everything. I knew I had to really take stock, and I took myself out of everything for a while. I got divorced, and I had a good think about what I was going to do. I thought of my pop success as almost like a box that I’d had to tick. Experience on the road: Tick. Can you work a room? Tick. Have you had a hit record? Tick. It was just one of those boxes that I had to tick to figure out what I was going to do next.

At my advanced age, as I was then—I was in my 30s, that was old back then, for being in the pop business—I couldn’t figure out why that was the case, why, in pop music, you were over the hill at 30. There are a few people who are older than me, like Dylan and Paul Simon, but they are very, very rare. Why can’t you be older in the pop business like you can in jazz? You can’t be too old to be a jazz musician or a blue musician or, back in those days, a country and western musician. No one cared. But not in pop music. I thought, “This is ridiculous. I’m going to prepare for this, for getting older.” In my mind, I’d hardly started. Yes, I’d had a hit record and I’d done all this stuff, all these years on the road. I produced hits for other people, wrote songs for other people. I’d done pretty well, and I thought, “But you haven’t really established yourself. You’re still just a fringe guy. What can you do?”

So, that’s when I thought, “Well, I’m going to prepare myself, so that I can use the fact that I’m getting older as an advantage instead of it being something to be embarrassed by and hidden.” I looked around at some of my contemporaries still behaving like they were when they were 20 for an ever-shrinking audience. No new people thought they were any cop, they just thought they were a bit of a joke. I didn’t want that. I wanted to attract younger people without talking down to them. I wanted to invent a way of presenting myself, in a way of writing and recording myself, that wouldn’t be for a huge audience. I knew it wasn’t going to be for everybody, but I thought, “If I get it right, young people will dig it like I dug older artists.” I didn’t think they were over the hill, I loved artists who were older than me. And I thought, “Well, if I get this right, that’s the sort of thing that could happen to me.”

I knew it wasn’t going to be for everybody, or that it was going to be a breakthrough. But, I thought, “It’s a way I can make a living now, even though the clock had turned and my time as a pop star was over. I won’t have to jump up and down like a teenager in front of a bunch of oldies. It’ll be a way more interesting thing to do.” And it sort of has worked out like that. The audience I’m lucky enough to have, especially in the United States, where I do most of my work, there’s a lot of people who, God bless them, have followed me since I started—since I first signed to Columbia back in the ‘70s. God bless them, but there’s a whole lot of other people going down the ages. I’d say the youngest people I encounter at my shows are in their mid-20s. There are a few teenagers but, generally, they’ve come with their slightly older friends or parents. When you get a mix like that and they’re all having a good time, that’s fantastic.

Thinking about how there are people who’ve been following you since your Columbia days—you’ve been on tour for five decades and you’ve written and produced more songs than most, so I imagine you’ve seen quite a bit of this world by now. Thousands of shows and more than a dozen records later, do you find that this line of work keeps surprising you?

Yes, it does. How it does is very difficult to explain, I think, because it’s so personal and really big. Working with Los Straitjackets, who are so great, I really can’t say enough about them. They’re such great musicians, and they have a very similar attitude to it all that I do, working with them musically. To see how we can satisfy ourselves without losing the audience—we’ve got this great audience, and we’re always trying to stretch it a bit, to see how we can introduce new songs and new styles to them and see what they’ll take and accept—is really interesting. To see how sophisticated you can make the music without people suddenly going, “Oh, give me a break! Four of you have got Mexican masks on. Who do you think you are? Mozart?” All of us love dumb rock ‘n’ roll music, but we like other, much more sophisticated stuff. It’s a wide range we’ve got to call on and are able to call on. We all like jazz, Broadway stuff, film music. It’s not a narrow little scene that we’re working here. We’re drawing on all this other stuff to try and make something which, really, nobody else has got the opportunity to do—because we’re very, very hard to pigeonhole. That keeps us interested. We don’t take ourselves very seriously, but we take what we do extremely seriously.

It’s always great hearing you play with the Straitjackets, because they’re some of the best musicians, I think, you’ve worked with in your career. And I think it shows especially on a record like Indoor Safari. When you get to share a stage with them, or share a studio space with them, and they’re so malleable and invested in the work that you’re doing and the music you want to make, where does that let you go as a songwriter? What kind of confidence do you possess knowing that you’ve got a band as good as them with you the whole way?

It really is a gift. When we first got together, it was to do Christmas shows. I had a Christmas record [Quality Street] out—which had been very well-received, especially over here in the U.S., and much to everyone’s surprise. Shortly after it was released, two of the main people involved with it—Bobby Irwin, who played drums with me live and on my records for decades, and Neil Brockbank, who used to co-produce my records with me and tour-manage me—were really good friends, the three of us were really, really tight. Those two guys died one after the other, and it really took the wind out of my sails. I never boosted the Christmas record.

But, a great thing about a Christmas record is that every Christmas is brand new again. So, after a couple of years, it was gently suggested to me to do some shows, maybe with Los Straitjackets. We share a management company, so it’s not too far of a stretch to think that something like that might have come along at some point. But, it took this Christmas record for it to actually happen. We went and did some Christmas shows. We didn’t know if we’d enjoy it or like each other or if it would work. We didn’t even know if it worked, but it did sort of work. It worked enough for us to do it for two, three years. It did it for us enough for us to have a couple of shows where the roof came off the place—way, way, way above the material we were playing. We played in a way that was something else. The trouble with Christmas shows is that you reach “peak Christmas” very, very quickly. It doesn’t take very long to get as far as you can with it.

You’ve got about a two-month window there.

Yes. [Laughs] We said, “Well, I think we’ve had enough of that now,” and then we started to do out of season work, and that’s really when it started getting into gear. When we first got together, the group had, God bless them, learnt—I sent them a list of tunes we could do, and they’d learnt up the records as best they could. But, as soon as we started playing together, I said, “Oh, forget about the records. Absolutely forget about the records. What we’ll treat this as now is just learn the songs and imagine you’re going to do an instrumental of them. Do them your way, and I’ll sing over the top. That started to meld into them not quite doing the songs their way and me not quite writing songs the easy I would have thought they would go. There was a little meeting of the minds, where we bent towards each other musically and, suddenly, it doesn’t seem like they’re backing me up at all. It really does seem like, when we get together, it’s a total collaboration. I’ve written songs specifically for this project in mind, and I’ve written the songs in a way that I know makes it way easier for them to interpret the songs in their way. It’s much more a collaboration. I certainly don’t think I’m being backed up by them, altogether you know that the audience is expecting that arrangement. I stand in the middle, I don’t wear a mask.

You might be standing in the middle, but you’re still standing alongside them. On Indoor Safari, most of these songs barely cross the three-and-a-half-minute threshold. They’re quick and they’re sharp, as all good pop-rock songs ought to be. “So It Goes” is two-and-a-half minutes long and it’s a masterpiece. Going back years and years, what influenced you in the 1970s to make a song that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and what keeps you fascinated by that approach 50 years on?

I come from that 45 RPM single generation, where I listened to records obsessively and they were all two-and-a-half, three-and-a-half minutes long. Three-and-a-half minutes for a slow one, two-and-a-half minutes for a fast one. I’ve totally absorbed that time scale for a tune, because it had to be like that. That’s how much vinyl was available for the music to fit on, you know? That’s why that was there, but I also became with the craft of pop songwriting from that time. Now, I don’t really feel like an artist in the sense that I have an artistic vision and I like to write songs about myself, explaining my point of view. Don’t get me wrong, the people that do that are some of my favorite people, but I don’t do that. I don’t feel like that. I feel much more like a craftsman. I’m much more interested in the craft of songwriting. I’ll make artistic decisions in the songs I write and the records I make, but essentially it’s the craft of it that I’m interested in. That sort of early pop song restriction just suits me when I’m trying to get all the information in in a very short sense of time, so the ear never gets fed up with it. There’s no repetition. You strip all the fat away from it so it’s only interesting and that’s that. It’s all in the ear of the beholder—one person’s “only interesting” is another’s “God, this stuff’s a bit clean, innit?” Nobody likes everything.

Pop and punk rock were running on similar time signatures in songs but then, at the same time in Europe, prog-rock was going pretty well. Those songs would sprawl into 20 minutes if you let them. Were all those things able to co-exist or was there a noticeable contrast?

I think there definitely was a contrast at the time. When it started, really, in London with the pub-rock scene—that’s when bands started playing in pubs and were playing a mixture of their own tunes and covers—it was free to get in and people started getting back to punchy, short songs. That’s what people wanted to hear. And then, when the punk thing came along, it was much more visual and had an intent about it that, in a way, was shocking—because pop music had started to become so sophisticated and artistic and up its own ass a bit that the return to the short, sharp, shock stuff was a breakthrough. But, apart from a brief look at it, long works weren’t very interesting to me.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.