Nick Lowe has been on the road intermittently since the ’60s, when the London-based singer and songwriter, then in his teens, followed in The Beatles’ footsteps on the Hamburg pub circuit. He had never been to New Zealand until he played Auckland and Wellington in 2009 with Ry Cooder. Now he is about to return with his own band, on the heels of his latest release.
Nick Lowe's new album The Old Magic is a masterful record: unpretentious, humorous, and in places unexpectedly moving. It represents the latest refinement of a style that began to take shape in the '80s, around the time Lowe realised his brief career as a pop star was coming to an end. As he explains: "I knew these things had a natural lifespan, and I'd had quite a good run. But at the same time I felt I hadn't really done anything yet."
Realising that self-reinvention would require an approach befitting an ageing artist - "a way of making being old seem cool" - Lowe eased off the pub-rock and turned his attention to crafting songs that combined the qualities of all the styles he liked: country, southern soul, swing, Brill Building pop. An early example of his mature style was The Beast in Me, a song he wrote for Johnny Cash.
Some songwriters become wordier and more portentous as they get older, driven by the feeling that as senior statesmen they ought to be addressing the world's problems. Yet Lowe, always an economical writer, has only become more succinct. If he found himself writing a song about, say, the international monetary crisis, would he stop himself?
"Yes, I probably would," he says, laughing down the phone line from London. "If you sit down and try to write some worthy piece about where everyone's going wrong - earnestness being the enemy of good songwriting, in my view - that's when the wheels come off.
"I'm really a kind of old-fashioned hack, in that I don't really put my diary to music which is one of the things most people do. I mean, I know what I'm talking about. I've had my heart broken; I know what it feels like to be abused and used and to feel like you haven't had justice. But I just make up characters and they tend to be in very everyday situations, kind of shocking in their banality. I'm interested in that, like a familiar object viewed from an unusual angle."
