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chaplin
Thursday, April 26, 2007
A former tour de force is forced to tour
Here's Andy Cotterill taking Nick Lowe's picture earlier today for Word. We met in a room at the back of a pub in West London that Nick has used in the past to try out new material. He stopped using it a while back when the landlord changed and the staff starting looking at him with pity. "I think they thought I was a bloke who used to be on the TV who just took the place to recall former glories." His new album's called "At My Age". It's wonderful.
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The insinuation from your headline is that he has fallen on hard times. Yet I seem to recall that he received around a cool £1m just for Curtis Stigers singing his song on The Bodyguard soundtrack. I'm sure he has no need to tour at all.
ReplyDeleteI only headlined it that way because I think that's one of his songs - or is it the Kursaal Flyers? Anyway, I'm sure he would have no problem with the gag.
ReplyDeleteI don't recognize the phrase from any Nick Lowe song. However, I do hope that, whether forced or not, he'll be touring to support the new CD, and in the States as well as the UK. It's been 6 years since his last album and that's a LONG time to go without any new Nick Lowe! I can't wait for At My Age to be released in June...
ReplyDeleteThink I know that place and remember the local fuss when it changed hands to become a pine-scrubbed chardonnay temple, and actually banned the old locals.
ReplyDeleteA chap who used to have a record shop on Chiswick High Rd told me a great story about Nick, who may still live in that locality. They shared a milkman, who happened to be a huge country music fan. He knocked on Nick's door one day, to get the bill paid and was dumbstruck when it was opened by Johnny Cash in a dressing gown, who sorted him out with the necessary. He'd obviously had the in-laws staying.
Nothing to do with the real subject of this chain at all, but I once bumped into Nick Lowe in a pub. I used to work as a civil servant on Whitehall years ago and one summer night a bunch of us went to play softball in Green Park after work. All very nice. Anyway, parched to the nth degree afterwards we sweatily crossed Park Lane and found a pub just over the road from the Ritz Hotel, The Clarence. A small place and completely unremarkable. Two very tall blokes were stood on either side of the front-door sized entrance talking and drinking. As as we shuffled between them to get to the bar I realised that the one on my left was Nick Lowe joking quite happily with a very smiley Huey Lewis (minus his News). I recall I muttered reflexive "F*ck! That's Nick Lowe talking to Huey Lewis!" to no response from anyone. That's it really. I remember it was a rather unique end to an ordinary day, that's all.
ReplyDeleteNot particularly punctual, but I'm reading through the back posts...
ReplyDeleteAndy, was the Huey/Lowey sighting in '77? I ask as before hiring the Attractions, Elvis Costello used Clover – basically The News, sans Huey – as backing band on his Lowe-produced debut album. So that would fit – although of course the two could have crossed paths at any number of times...