From his early pub-rocking days with outfits like Kippington Lodge and Brinsley Schwarz, Nick Lowe has been one of the more solid presences in popular music. As a producer, songwriter and performer, "Basher", as he was affectionately named during the glory days of Stiff Records, has been a huge influence on British pop, playing a key role in the careers of everyone from The Pretenders to Elvis Costello. He also enjoyed chart success in his own right with songs like I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass and Cruel to Be Kind.
Lowe, for a period a member of the Cash clan, having married Johnny's daughter Carlene, has now settled into a career of song-writing, production, selective performances and the total respect of his peers, including his former in-laws. His recent album, Dig My Mood, is a dark affair with songs that one might imagine his pal Costello having a go at. It's a blues-tinged, smooth and introspective record with not much trace of either "Basher" or the veteran pub-rocker who once sang I Knew The Bride When She Used To Rock 'n' Roll. And that's exactly what Nick Lowe wants to hear.
"It's quite easy to rock but it's much harder to roll. As I get older, the roll is the most interesting bit of rock 'n' roll and it's the hardest bit to do. The older you get, you just get interested in other things and you tend to get more eclectic. But I don't think what I've done on the last album is particularly different from anything else because it's still basically skiffle. "Lonnie Donegan was my hero and he was the nearest you could hear to any home-grown rock 'n' roll talent. He did all those Lead-belly songs and he had that wild voice that used to get on grown ups' nerves. So apart from a brief brush in the late 1960s with progressive rock (I had a little look at it for about a month and realised that it was rubbish really), I've been doing the same thing all the time."
Lowe was a member of Brinsley Schwarz from 1969 to 1975. Long considered a much underrated band, they recorded six albums for United Artists and had a sophisticated and eclectic approach to music not properly reflected by their pub-rock tag. It was with the Brinsleys that Lowe began to write successfully. Songs such as (What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding? were written during that period, and it was this song in particular which helped establish Lowe's song-writing credentials. First covered and made rather famous by Elvis Costello, it was later to re-surface in a Curtis Stigers version on the soundtrack of the movie The Bodyguard - the sort of financial bonanza which no professional songwriter can particularly regret.
"When I started out, being in a pop band was just a branch of show-business. In fact, I remember that when we went to see our first London agent, we'd wait in a waiting room with dog acts and conjurors. We were just another turn. Then when The Beatles came out it really started dividing and if you didn't write your own songs you were just a kind of end-of-the-pier thing.
"If you wrote songs you moved into something slightly more cerebral. We realised that we didn't want to be a pin-up act and that we wanted to be taken a bit more seriously. And so you had to write songs. My first efforts were very derivative - you rewrite your heroes' songs as everybody does, and then you develop your own style which is really an amalgamation of everything you ever liked. There's nothing new under the sun - the only difference is the way you actually explain your point of view."
In 1976, the Brinsleys no more, Lowe became house producer at Stiff Records, a new label formed by Jake Riviera and former Brinsleys producer Dave Robinson. They could all see the possibilities in the developing London punk scene, and it was here that Lowe earned his title "Basher". He was to produce, write for and nurture the very bands which were beginning to take over the London pub venues. Lowe's approach was to be back-to-basics, old-school and very successful. Soon The Damned, Dr Feelgood, The Pretenders and Elvis Costello were dominating the most discerning turntables.
"When Stiff Records was going, I was a little bit older than most of the punk groups, and I became a producer because I was slightly more experienced and could help some of these groups make credible records. Punk was not a musical thing necessarily; it was more of an attitude thing - but I liked the attitude. I got to work with some really good people - some really terrible ones as well - and it all seemed totally natural, like our time had come. Practically everything that I did, or I was producing, or that my friends did, was a hit. We took it almost for granted. When these new encyclopaedias of rock come out I go into Waterstones and sidle up to the music section, look both ways and rather surreptitiously look myself up.
I'm generally astonished by the number of things that actually were hits back then. We actually thought something was a flop if it didn't get into the Top 20."
Lowe picked up his own recording career in 1978, having left Stiff along with Costello and signed to Radar. Jesus of Cool (or Pure Pop for Now People as it was called in America) contained a hit, I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass. Labour of Lust (1979) supplied him with a very big hit in Cruel to be Kind - also a hit in the US. It was during this (second) golden period that Lowe finally became a pop star.
"When I had started out, I really just wanted to be famous - even when I started doing it full time. It had nothing to do with art at all! Then I had that little brush with being on the TV and in all the papers when I had a few hit records and, while I really enjoyed it, I realised pretty soon that it's a very, very hard treadmill to stay on - and not much fun.
"When it comes to it, that's the worst part of it. That really is the worst part of it. Also the general public think that it's absolutely terrible for you as the wheel moves around and the hits stop. But that's the essence of being a pop artist: tastes change and you're just there for a little while. But since all of that, I have taken steps and have been lucky enough to reinvent myself. Now I have a career which doesn't require my presence."
Lowe has a balanced and generous view on song-writing. He can write his own and yet he regularly records and performs the songs of others. A recent concert favourite is Ron Sexsmith's Secret Heart, and his last album includes songs by Henry McCullough and Ivory Joe Hunter. At the heart of it all are Lowe's open approach to music in general and total commitment to the songs themselves.
"I'm unusual in that I came from that beat group era and I'm still actually writing songs and making some progress. As for other people doing my songs, I don't have any hang-ups about that. I'm a professional songwriter, and I don't really have a political stance so I don't get all precious about people doing my tunes. But I do have mixed feelings sometimes because, while on the one hand you are very pleased and flattered that someone wants to do your songs, very often they just copy the record instead of doing the song and that can be embarrassing.
"But I love it when artists do my songs and re-interpret them in their own way. It's a funny thing - when I do another person's song, it's always a song that I sympathise with so strongly that I can learn it almost straight away and I almost think that I wrote it myself. When I play a song live, like Ron's song, I forget that I didn't write it. Likewise if I've done my work right on my song, I sort of think I'm singing a cover.
In the 1980s Lowe worked with the group Rockpile while continuing as a solo performer. In the 1990s he formed a quite spectacular, though not particularly successful, group along with Ry Cooder, Jim Keltner and John Hiatt and continued to write for himself and others, perhaps most famously a song called The Beast in Me, recorded by the ex-father-in-law Johnny Cash. Now at the end of the 1990s he has come up with probably his finest work yet on Dig My Mood, released on that most reliable of labels, Demon Records, a very happy home for the artist formerly known as "Basher".
"Record companies in the main aren't really interested in the kind of records that I make. But I go to a lot of trouble to make my records sound the way they do and I'm perfectly aware that it's not daytime radio programming kind of music and that's too bad. I don't want to sound arrogant but it's tough to make records and you might as well do them the way that you think they sound good. To be quite honest, I'm not really interested in big record companies. I don't want for myself what a major label would want for me. I prefer just to take it easy."