London Guardian, June 23, 1979: Difference between revisions

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As house-producer at Stiff, Lowe nurtured the early career of Elvis Costello, as well as producing such British arts as Graham Parker and the Rumour and Dr Feelgood. Having since helped to steer Costello into the mega-dollar league in America over the past 12 months, Lowe has gone on to lay the foundations for a career as a solo artist, songwriter, and member of Rockpile, with whom he winds up a current tour in Edinburgh on Friday.
As house-producer at Stiff, Lowe nurtured the early career of Elvis Costello, as well as producing such British arts as Graham Parker and the Rumour and Dr Feelgood. Having since helped to steer Costello into the mega-dollar league in America over the past 12 months, Lowe has gone on to lay the foundations for a career as a solo artist, songwriter, and member of Rockpile, with whom he winds up a current tour in Edinburgh on Friday.


For Lowe rock is less a question of what you do than the way that you do it.  The original Stiff philosophy of promoting records with a practical joke and a fast punch line – an eccentricity which has since become a record-industry convention – is very much Lowe’s style.  He claims not to regard himself as a musician at all.  He can, he says, play the guitar and make a bit of a racket, but his real forte is “teasing people” – treating the whole business as a wheeze in the grand schoolboy tradition.


It is an attitude best illustrated by the saga of a little-known record called “Bay City Rollers, We Love You,” which Lowe made under the pseudonym of the Tartan Horde in 1975 with the express intention of persuading his record company of the time to sack him.  Described by Lowe as “an honest attempt to make a ghastly record,” with the daughter of the studio caretaker singing lead, the song surprised everyone – not least Lowe himself -  by going to No. 1 in the Japanese charts – the sort of back-handed joke which appeals to Lowe enormously. 


By his own admission, unreliable, undisciplined and reluctant to get out of bed in the mornings, Lowe is fortunate to have found his way into rock – possibly the only field where such shortcomings are actually an asset.  A gangling and untidy 30-year-old, one imagines that he would have been the first to light-up behind the bicycle sheds at the minor public-school in Suffolk to which he was “farmed-off” by his father – a peripatetic RAF officer.
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Revision as of 17:00, 13 January 2020

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London Guardian

UK & Ireland newspapers

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When best to mock the rock


Mick Brown

A practical joke by Nick Lowe ended topping the charts in Japan. Mick Brown reports.

Nick Lowe has a fondness for slogans. Pressed for an instant appraisal of himself Lowe offers that he is "a flea on the back of the elephant of the rock and roll business" — a claim to be an irritant which is tempered with the understanding that the rock business is a cumbersome and thick-skinned animal which is hard to rouse, but that it is at lease worth making the effort.

"Pure pop for now people" is another Lowe catchphrase, coined in 1976 as a flip description of his own musical output, and that of Stiff Records, the label which he had been instrumental in founding. Variously styling itself as the label where the fun never sets (nor the pun, for that matter) and "undertakers to the industry." Stiff breathed new life into the music business, and into the corpse which Nick Lowe's career had become at the time.

As house-producer at Stiff, Lowe nurtured the early career of Elvis Costello, as well as producing such British arts as Graham Parker and the Rumour and Dr Feelgood. Having since helped to steer Costello into the mega-dollar league in America over the past 12 months, Lowe has gone on to lay the foundations for a career as a solo artist, songwriter, and member of Rockpile, with whom he winds up a current tour in Edinburgh on Friday.

For Lowe rock is less a question of what you do than the way that you do it. The original Stiff philosophy of promoting records with a practical joke and a fast punch line – an eccentricity which has since become a record-industry convention – is very much Lowe’s style. He claims not to regard himself as a musician at all. He can, he says, play the guitar and make a bit of a racket, but his real forte is “teasing people” – treating the whole business as a wheeze in the grand schoolboy tradition.

It is an attitude best illustrated by the saga of a little-known record called “Bay City Rollers, We Love You,” which Lowe made under the pseudonym of the Tartan Horde in 1975 with the express intention of persuading his record company of the time to sack him. Described by Lowe as “an honest attempt to make a ghastly record,” with the daughter of the studio caretaker singing lead, the song surprised everyone – not least Lowe himself - by going to No. 1 in the Japanese charts – the sort of back-handed joke which appeals to Lowe enormously.

By his own admission, unreliable, undisciplined and reluctant to get out of bed in the mornings, Lowe is fortunate to have found his way into rock – possibly the only field where such shortcomings are actually an asset. A gangling and untidy 30-year-old, one imagines that he would have been the first to light-up behind the bicycle sheds at the minor public-school in Suffolk to which he was “farmed-off” by his father – a peripatetic RAF officer.


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The Guardian, June 23, 1979


Mick Brown profiles Nick Lowe.

Images

1979-06-23 London Guardian page 10 clipping 01.jpg
Photo by Frank Martin.

1979-06-23 London Guardian page 10.jpg
Page scan.

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