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.
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...