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"FacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterestFacebookPinterest\n\nBy his own count, Nick Lowe had three hits in his career as a pop star, and none since Jimmy Carter was president. Not exactly Lennon-and-McCartney-level production, but more than enough, if he was that kind of guy, to subsist on. Thankfully, Nick Lowe is not that kind of guy. \"I realized in the early eighties,\" he says, \"that if I didn't do something, there and then, I was going to be condemned to present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life.\" This kind of self-awareness is rare among humans, and even rarer among rock musicians. It's what has allowed him to evolve so gracefully, into this cool, moody hybrid, Johnny Cash meets Paul Smith meets Graham Greene. On stage, alone with his guitar, he's self-possessed, elegant even, at peace with who he is now. And who he is now, at 62, is not at all who he was in 1979. The new version: older, grayer, better.\n\n\n\nGQ: How do you not become the guy who plays the same ten songs at every show at this stage in your life?\n\n Nick Lowe: If only there was a grand theory that I put into action and it all just came off as easy as it sounds. [laughs] I realized sometime in the early '80s that if I didn't do something\u2014like planning for the future in a way, a kind of pension or something\u2014that if I didn't do something there and then, I was going to be condemned to forever present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life. Because that's normally what happens to people in the pop business. They get a little break, and last for one, two, or three years. Well, I got a little bit better than that: I got, I think, four years out of it. But at the end of it, I could tell that the public's taste was changing. I knew what would happen because I'd been a record producer, you see: I'd hung out with the suits on the twenty-first floor. I knew how the suits used to talk about the artists, with barely concealed contempt. So I knew what was waiting for me round the corner. Because I wasn't one of those very unusual people like Neil Diamond or Elton John, whose careers just seem to span the decades. I knew I wasn't one of them.\n\n\n\nYour browser does not support iframes.\n\n |||\n\nGQ: Yeah, but I think there are bands\u2014I don't want to name names, but you could take one that rhymes with \"Rolling Stones,\" for example\u2014and I feel like, for almost thirty years now, every album sounds like they're trying to make Sticky Fingers all over again. Whereas your last few albums are so different from your early stuff. It seems like you shifted into this other gear successfully.\n\n Nick Lowe: That's, uh, kind of you to say. And I know what you mean about the Stones. For a band to stay together that long, even if\u2014especially if\u2014they're just trying to constantly rediscover their groove from thirty years ago\u2026it's absolutely unbelievable that they managed to stay together. And good luck to them, I say. Personally, I can think of things I'd much rather do than go see the Rolling Stones nowadays. Thirty years ago, it would have been different. I don't want to start slagging people here\u2026\n\nGQ: Okay, then, back to you. When you're up on stage now, in your '60s, and you're doing a song from early in your career, like \"(What's So Funny Bout) Peace Love, and Understanding,\" how do you relate to that material now?\n\n Nick Lowe: I can't relate to quite a lot of it. You know, songs about doing a bad, bad thing with a bunch of groupies or staying up all night sniffing Charlie in a hotel room: not only are those things not readily available to me anymore, I'm not really so interested in them. But once, things were different. And there are plenty of good songs about that stuff. Some of the songs, though, that I was onto back in those days were really quite good, you know, and with a little bit of a tweak here and there, I can sing them very readily. But some of them are just a bit too callow, and a bit too, you know, bug-eyed amphetamine monster for me to really pull them out of the bag now. But \"Peace, Love, and Understanding,\" of course, is\u2014ah, well, I don't want to sound too pathetic about it, but it almost doesn't belong to me anymore, it's been covered so many times. Luckily, my publisher does know that it belongs to me. [laughs] But you know what I mean. It's sort of\u2026everybody's done it.\n\nGQ: I'm not a music journalist, but the question I've always wanted to ask is, once you become well known for a song, and 30 years later you're up on stage playing \"Cruel to Be Kind,\" how does it feel? Is it brutal?\n\n Nick Lowe: When I had my couple of hits, I sort of felt like I was ticking a box more than, \"Great, I'm off now on a chart-topping career.\" I felt that in order to do what I wanted to do, I had to do certain things, and one of them was to have a hit in my own right. At least one. I managed two or three, if you take in Europe. But in the United States, where it really matters, I had one hit and people still remember it, and it's a pretty good little song, you know? And we do it now rather like it was when I first thought it up, which was a copy of \"The Love I Lost\" by Harold Melvin the Blue Notes. And I love doing it. I really love it. It cheers people up. How I do it now sounds quite different. In fact, it was on the radio the other day and I was quite amazed how differently I do it now. If they're good songs, they really will stand the test of time. There's one song of mine called \"I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass,\" which was a fairly big hit in Europe, and people ask me for that sometimes, and I just don't do it. It's a really good record, but there's not actually any song there. It was a half-baked idea I had when I went to the studio, and the bass player and drummer sort of put a little sauce in it. But if I played it with just an acoustic guitar, the audience would probably give me a little clap in recognition, but by verse two, they'd be looking at their fingernails, waiting for the next one. There really isn't anything to it. If it's a good song, and the lyric isn't too ridiculous, I'm very happy to do it.\n\nGQ: What can you tell me about the new album?\n\n Nick Lowe: There's really never any sort of master plan. I find if I've got a couple of tunes that I think are possibilities, I phone everyone up and get them into the studio and we'll have a go at recording them. If they go well, what usually happens is it begins a process\u2014quite a slow process. I'll start thinking of a couple more that seem like they could fit in with that. But I'm an extremely slow worker, very unprolific. It can take me weeks to do a three-minute song, or at least to make it sound, in my mind, like I haven't written it. That's when I'm satisfied.\n\nGQ: What do you mean by that?\n\n Nick Lowe: Well, I work away at it and work away at it, until I kind of think I'm singing a cover. Until I think it's a cover song, which I like and know well and can take liberties with, and that's when I come out of my trance. The same goes for when I find an actual cover song that I like. I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it. So you wind up, in a way, at the same place.\n\nFacebookPinterestundefined\n\nGQ: I've never heard the process described that way before.\n\n Nick Lowe: Ahh, well, I suspect there's a similarity between writing prose and writing songs. I would imagine, if you're an author, you stay up one night working on a chapter, and you're thinking, Oh boy, that's really good stuff. Then, the next morning you get up and you're sort of disappointed. You can see all the tricks that you learned along the way. Probably your public really likes these tricks, but unfortunately, you don't' like them anymore and so you start working to eliminate them and surprise yourself. So that when you're reading it, your eyes just flit across the page, delighting in every line, because it doesn't seem like you had anything to do with it. And that's what I try to do. But you have to be careful because if you take out too much of yourself, your people will protest.\n\nGQ: One of my favorite songs is \"Lately I've Let Things Slide.\" I'm not sure what that says about my mindset, but lyrically, that song is perfect. It sounds like you know exactly what you're doing.\n\n Nick Lowe: You know, I'm still kind of a hapless character in my everyday life. But when it comes to the writing, my influences are very old influences. I love American music of absolutely all stripes, including show tunes, advertising jingles, theme tunes from quiz shows, all kinds of American music. But I love what happens to it when it comes over here, as well. It gets kind of randomly mid up, you know, and a little European sensibility gets in there. I'm very anxious to keep that. I don't want to do just some Brit version of Nashville, you know, or Memphis. But one of the things that I'm really interested in\u2014in country and western music, which I love, and gospel, which I also love\u2014is this very conversational tone and getting the lyric so, absolutely, there's no waffle there. You try to make every word count, so there's no doubt what you're talking about. When you're young, you waffle away. Well, I'm done with that. I think it's much more interesting to say just what you mean. It's exciting, really.\n\nGQ: Do you have plans to produce again?\n\n Nick Lowe: No, I only do my own records. I put it away, really, when everything changed in the '80s, when the way of making records changed and became more, well, more of it was done on computers. And although there have been plenty of great records made that way, I was just too lazy to learn any more. It got suddenly a lot more serious in the '80s and I just didn't like the sound of it. I didn't like the sound that machinery produced. It's a lot better now, but I just sort of went off it. And once you go off it, you lose your space on the ladder. It just runs away from you.\n\nGQ: Why is that? After a certain time away, it seems like it's almost impossible to get back in the game as a producer.\n\n Nick Lowe: I think it's a question of \"Move over, grandad.\"\n\nGQ: There are people\u2014like Rick Rubin with your old father-in-law Johnny Cash\u2014who are still producing things on a small scale, without the machines. Isn't that the kind of thing you could pull off?\n\n Nick Lowe: Well, maybe. Maybe. I'm very fussy about how my records sound, but I'm very aware that because of the way they sound, I will never be a big-selling, mainstream artist because the public has gotten conditioned to hearing pop music in a certain way. And I don't do it that way. As soon as one of my records goes on, it makes a vast portion of the public nervous. They get spooked by it. To some people who have ears to hear, it's a delightful, refreshing change. But to most of the public, it's a load of homemade-sounding nonsense. I'm afraid that that's the way it's going to be.\n\nGQ: I've always been interested in what it was about London in the '70s that produced so much great music. What was going on there?\n\n Nick Lowe: London was a real dump in the 70s, when it belonged to me and my friends, because, like most cities, you kind of hand them off. You're in charge for a bit and then you don't go out anymore. You say, \"Oh god, it's going to be too crowded,\" or \"Blimey, not that place again.\" So you hand it off to the next blokes, but when it was ours, it was a real dump. In the main, a real dump. Nothing like it is now, with its cafes and its sort of wannabe New York stuff. We had to make our own fun, you know. It was very hard to come by.\n\nGQ: What's your favorite band of that era?\n\n Nick Lowe: I really liked a band called Roogalator. It was an American guitar player, a bassist, and a drummer. The drummer plays with me now. Danny Adler was the guitar player, and he was really something. He was much better than any of us were. We'd always get him to show us how to do stuff. Or there was Kilburn the High Roads, which was Ian Dury's group before the Blockheads. I loved them.\n\nGQ: What was it like working with Graham Parker and Elvis Costello on all those great early albums?\n\n Nick Lowe: Well, with Graham, it was an odd situation because his group was made up of so many people from the group I had just left. It was sort of strange: One minute I was tripping down the road, you know, I'm free! And the next moment, I'm in the studio with these guys again. But Graham was, and is, fantastic.\n\nGQ: He's always been one of my favorites, so maybe I'm biased, but I've always wondered why he didn't get more famous.\n\n Nick Lowe: I think part of the reason why is because the manager, Dave Robinson, saddled him with this band that had just broken up and came with all their in-jokes and were fully formed in a way. Don't forget: They used to mention Graham Parker in the same breath as Bruce Springsteen. And Elvis. The three of them.\n\nGQ: So why Elvis Costello and not Graham Parker?\n\n Nick Lowe: I think Elvis had a nastier band. He was a nastier individual. As far as the public was concerned. He's a lovely guy, you know. But his act was much greasier. Whereas I'm afraid that, in my view, my guys\u2014love 'em as I do\u2014made Graham too kind of Van Morrison, which at that time, that wasn't it. He should have had a nasty little guitar player with him, one guy, and somebody playing a keyboard, so he came across bigger.\n\nGQ: I want to come back here at the end to what we began with: How have you managed to stay vital? How do you continue to break new ground, or find a new voice?\n\n Nick Lowe: I've always felt kind of like an outsider, even when I was very successful back in the old days. Even then. I kind of enjoyed it, really. Later in life, suddenly, if you're an outsider, it's something to be celebrated, I think, rather than getting on people's nerves. Now I don't seem to get on people's nerves as much. The other thing is, I'm really lucky that I've had a little gang of people who I've been involved with for a long time. I've got the same manager, the same drummer, and a few other people who are great cheerleaders, I suppose, is one way of expressing it. That's all I can say, really. I've been really lucky to have a gang of people who have always been there to encourage me to get on with it. Styles come and go, but I try not to take any notice of that.\n\nGQ: Do you find that you care less about what people think of you as you get older?\n\n Nick Lowe: No, I do care what people think. But if they don't like it, and they haven't got a good reason why they don't, then I don't care.\n\nGQ: Do you feel like you'll ever stop? I once read an interview with Lou Reed where he talked about this thing\u2014that's what he called it, this thing\u2014and he said, \"It's not like it stops.\" The thing was making music. Do you feel the same way?\n\n Nick Lowe: I do, rather. Yes. I did think, at one time, well, I'll just get myself a little flat and a decent car. I'll do something else. But it's ridiculous, really, because I can't actually do anything else. And there is this phenomenon of people in their sixties and even seventies still doing pretty good work. When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, \"God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?\" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap. And now, that seems completely ridiculous. As long as I can still do it, and enjoy it, and not embarrass my people, you know, of course I'm going to press on with it.\n\nFacebookPinterestFacebookPinterest"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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