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As he reaches his mid-thirties, Nick Lowe is doing it by halves: half a man and half a cowboy.
Which means he probably used to wear a sheriff’s badge and fire caps at next door’s cat, same as everyone else, and definitely means he’s about to ride from the sunset onto the radio with his new album ‘Nick Lowe And His Cowboy Outfit’. Just the kind of conniving wordplay we ought to expect from a chap whose last LP ‘The Abominable Showman’ included songs like ‘Time Wounds All Heels’ and ‘(For Every Woman Who Ever Made A Fool Of A Man There’s A Woman Made A) Man Of A Fool’.
“It just seemed like a good name, I couldn’t understand why no one had ever used it before, it was one of those simple ones that’s been overlooked. The Cowboy Outfit is just a new name, it’s the same old band. What happened was, when we toured before it was called Nick Lowe And His Noise To Go… but when Paul Carrack’s album came out,” (produced by Nick The Knife) “Paul Carrack And The Noise To Go just didn’t make any sense at all. So we dumped that.
“I was going to call the album ‘Cowboy Outfit’ because the kind of music on it is country rock, so it suited that. But it’s the same band, Paul Carrack,” (keyboards and brilliant voices), “Martin Belmont on guitar and Bobby Irwin on drums.”
The single blazing a trail across the West, ‘Half A Boy And Half A Man’’, is already Nick’s most successful 45 since ‘Cruel To Be Kind’ an alarming five years ago, and he’s got his fingers crossed for it. “It’s notoriously hard to get a rock’n’roll record into the charts,” he says, “but it’d be nice to have a bit of a tickle at the charts because it’s an easy one to play live!”
Lowe’s currently overseeing another Paul Carrack album, the successor to ‘82’s ‘Suburban Voodoo’, and in a roundabout way that explains why Nick has one song on his LP produced by that old Scullywag Elvis Costello.
“Paul has this great r’n’b croon, and he sounds best when he’s doing songs that aren’t of any consequence lyrically. I can write for him quite convincingly, but I’m not as good at sounding convincing at performing those songs myself. So I wrote this song for him called ‘LAFS (Love At First Sight)’, and we recorded it in a sort of Al Green, Memphis groove, the sort of stuff he was doing in the early seventies.
“It worked pretty successfully, we hadn’t mixed it or anything. Anyway Elvis heard it and he thought it was a great song, to my amazement – I thought it was a good record with Paul’s singing, but I didn’t think it was a particularly good song. He said ‘You ought to record it’ and I said ‘No, not for me’. He said ‘What if I produce it, d’you fancy me having a go at producing it, and I’ll put the kitchen sink on it’.”
So Nick, the producer of Costello’s first five albums, found himself on the other side of the glass. “He runs a tight ship, I had to be there on time and there was no question of any drink or anything in the studio. I decided to put myself in a real old-fashioned artist-producer arrangement where you just do exactly what the producer says, and on that level I think it’s pretty successful. It’s not my favourite track but it’s quite good fun.”
Does Nick find Elvis a moody guy to work with? “No more than most, and a lot less than some. I think he himself, because it made better press, hammed it up a bit, that moody image, because he looked so dodgy when he came out, it was quite a cool thing to come across with this real macho image, it didn’t go with his visuals at all. He throws wobblers like a lot of other people, but I can think of some other people who’ve got far more of a Mister Nice Guy image who are absolute buggers in private.”
The Cowboy Outfit are playing some dates here – there’s the little business of a spot on Bob Dylan’s bill at Wembley in early July – then they’re off to the welcome territory of the States. “We’re doing a couple of gigs on our own, then we’re opening for Elvis on a tour, which will be good fun, I haven’t done that since Rockpile opened for him with Mink DeVille in ‘77/’78. But we’re going to Texas on our own, because it appears that Elvis doesn’t do a lot of business tin Texas and we do quite well there.”
Then there’s the Carrack album to complete, plus a single with the Creation, a “psychedelic pop” band who charted here in 1966 with ‘Making Time’ and ‘Painter Man’, the latter “particularly nauseatingly” covered, as Nick says, by Boney M.
“People who ask me to record them are going for a sort of unsophisticated sound, which I sort of specialise in,” he chuckles. “Making records is a very tedious process, I love listening to them when they’re finished but actually recording them is really boring.”
That probably just shattered all your dreams of becoming a producer … never mind, you can always dream of being a cowboy.
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