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Uncut , Feb. 05

Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before - Rock ' n
Roll War Stories From The Editor's Desk

Nick Lowe

LEEDS: MAY 1982

REGRETS?” NICK LOWE MUSES thoughtfully, chopping out
another line of coke in his Leeds hotel room, four or
five hours after the first night of a UK tour with
American roots titans Ihe Blasters.”I suppose I’ve
had a few’ he laughs.

To be honest, we both have. Following the previous
evenings show at Leeds University, we had returned to
the hotel and laid minful siege to the bar. After
a couple of hours of uproarious quaffing, I
reluctantly remind Nick that one of the reasons I’m
here is to interview him for what used to be Melody
Maker. So we go up to his room, where Nick decides we
need something to perk us up somewhat for the
conversational contest to follow. At which point, he
produces a couple of large wraps of coke. After a few
hearty toots, Nick is in full anecdotal flow and I’m
fighting a losing battle to get a word in edgeways.

It’s around three in the morning when you join us, and
Nick has already been through several amusing changes
of mood. At one point, for reasons I can’t even
begin in retrospect to imagine, we start talking about
The Dead Kennedys, the very mention of whose name
puts Nick into a bit of a strop.

“People screaming ‘fuck’ into a mic and singing about
eating baby limbs—The Dead Kennedys, that kind of
thing — it’s like having a lot of damned children
misbehaving all over the house, he moans. “You feel
like telling them to go and play in the garden.”

Presently, Nicks entering a phase of modest
self—recrimination, hence his musings on regret at the
top of this page.

“Obvionsly, we’ve all got a few skeletons rattling
around in the old cuphoard,” he reflects, enjoying
another hit of the coke. “But there’s nothing that
l've said or clone that really makes me wince. Even
those Bay City Rollers records - when I did them, I
was sincere. At least, I needed the money sincerely.
Generally, though, I think I’ve escaped damned
lightly. ‘There are so many people getting freaked out
and trying to keep up with what they said when they
started out.

I’m thinking in great big letters of The Clash. I
feel very sorry for them actually, because they seem
so confused. They’re continually having to maintain an
image and it must he damned hard. They don’t write
songs, they write headlincs. They’re probably
dyingto to write something positively hloody
mindlcess’

There follows a fairly maudlin interlude, during which
Nick recalls his fractured friendship with the great
Dave Edmunds. His mood brightens,however, when
he starts talking about Elvis Costello, whose best
work remains the records Nick produced for him.

“When I was in Brinsley Schvarz, he used to come and
see us all the time’ Nick recalls with a fondness
no doubt sentimentally fuelled by drugs and a lot of
beer. “He was always there, looking very intense. Even
when he was with other people, he always seemed to he
standing apart from them. The first time I actually
spoke to him was in a pub in Liverpool. He was at the
bar, and I thought, ‘Well.., there he is again. I’d
better buy him a drink.’ Because I was famous then,
you see. I was in the Brinsleys, man. We were pub rock
legends, earning £175 a night. We were big time. And I
went over and he just glared at me. Damned unsettling.
You know the way he is. Anyway, after that, whenever I
saw him, we'd have a drink. I just thought he was a
very intense fan. Then he moved to London and we lost
touch. And then we started Stiff and one day I saw him
at the local tube station.

“He’d just been around to the office to buy a copy of
‘So It Goes'. And we started chatting and he said he’d
been trying to get a deal, and then he told me the
story he now trots out all the time.

“At the time, he thought he was like something out of
one of those old—fashioned films where a guy walks
into a music publisher’s office and says, ‘Boy, have I
got a song for you!’ And he plays it on the piano and
the publisher leaps up and says, ‘It so happens that
Miss Fay Fontaine is next door! And they wheel in old
Fay and she sings it gorgeously and it’s a fucking
great big hit and our boys away. And Elvis obviously
thought this was the way to do it.

“So he’d been going around to these record companies
and they’d ask him for a tape and he’d tell them he
was going to sing the songs, and then he’d pull out an
acoustic guitar. Of course, they were appalled.
There’s something very intimidating about sitting with
Elvis - he sings at full blast, and he’s got an
incredibly loud voice and he emotes like mad.

So he’d be there emoting away like there’s no tomorrow
and the guy’s phone would ring and it would be his
wife or something and Elvis would be in the middle of
some song and the guy would begoing, 'Eight? Yes.
That’ll he fine, darling. Lamb casserole? Wonderful!’
And poor old Elvis would be there wondering what to
do. Should he carry on singing? Should he stop?
Should he carry on singing, but try to be a bit
quieter?

“Anyway, it turned out he’d left a tape at Stiff and
when I got to the office Jake [Riviera, later
Costello’s legendarily fiery manager] was raving about
‘Mystery Dance',because he thought Edmunds could cover
it. Then we listened to the tape again, and Jake said,
‘No. Fuck it.This guy can make a record of his own.
He’s got tons of stuff here.'

“I wasn’t convinced, I must admit. The song that
finally changed my mind was ‘Alison'. I was stunned
when I heard that. I'm absolutely mad for a weep and
when I’m in the humour, I’m hopeless. And when I
heard EC doing ‘Alison’ for the first time, I wept
like a baby.”

Nick seems like he's slowing down a hit when there’s a
knock on the door. It’s Meldy maker Photographer,
Tom Sheehan, with a crate of beer.

“Thought you chaps might have worked up a hit of a
thirst,” the legendary lensman says with extraordinary
foresight.

“The fucking cavalry’s arrived’ announces Nick,
conspicuously revived by the sight of all that ale.
The next thing you know, Nick’s chopping out more
coke and looking forward to what’s left of the night.

“I have a terrible feeling this was meant to last me
the whole tour,” he says of the coke. “Oh, well. No
point in moaning when it’s gone..! Tuck in, chaps,” he
suggests.

So we do , not blinking for a while after that.

Allan Jones