Our good friend Derek Scott has sent me an extract from David Hepworth’s latest book, Hope I Get Old Before I Die (why rock stars never retire). I would hope that both Derek and I align ourselves with Rock Stars and William Yeats
Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;
A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind,
An old man’s eagle mind.
Derek kindly extracts chapter 9 of Hepworth’s book to take my mind off events in America.
Nick Lowe
Unique among pop musicians in finding his true voice in middle age, the Brentford-based craftsman made a series of quietly brilliant albums about the loneliness of the long-serving rock star.
The term ‘one-hit wonder’ is frequently used as a jibe.
This ought not to be the case, particularly when the people using it, like the overwhelming majority of professional musicians, have never had the experience of a hit of any kind.
Even those who have had the rare privilege of having a few hits realise that because the lion’s share of their income derives from one song they are all one-hit wonders.
These special songs tend to go on paying the bills long after they drop out of every chart in the world. The greater part of the money these artists receive every year from the collection agencies that calculate the cash that comes from being played on the radio, in elevators, at the hairdresser’s and, since the dawn of digital dissemination, down numberless invisible filaments all over the known universe has been generated by just one piece of work that they did long ago.
….
Song publishing is a long, long game, as many young songwriters have had to wait for their old age to discover.
As rock entered its fifth decade a tiny handful of these songs came to have their day in the sun, often years after they were first written, recorded, released, deleted and given up for dead.
.
What’s so funny bout peace love and understanding
It matters not how long that massive hit takes to arrive so long as it does. It can be a matter of decades.
Nick Lowe had written ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’ in 1974 for his pub rock band Brinsley Schwarz, a group that was a byword for whatever is the polar opposite of commercial success.
At the time approximately five people heard it. Brinsley Schwarz split up not long afterwards and Lowe went on to become the house producer at Stiff Records, which was starting as an independent at the time of punk.
They put him to work producing The Damned, who used to call him ‘grandad’ in honour of the fact that he was twenty-six. This was one of those times in the history of popular music when people’s age was wielded as an accusation.
When Elvis Costello took to including the song in his live show at the end of the seventies it was widely assumed he was being sarcastic. Even after he had finished with it the song remained a charming obscurity, known and loved among the cognoscenti but not much further than that.
However, as Bob Seger sang, rock and roll never forgets.
In 1992, almost twenty years since it had been first recorded, it was rescued from the anonymity to which it seemed to have been consigned by the exquisitely manicured and wholly unlikely hand of Arista boss Clive Davis.
Davis was in the midst of making Whitney Houston a movie star with The Bodyguard and was overseeing the accompanying soundtrack album.
Once the main duties of promotion had been discharged he still had room on the second side for a bunch of up-and-comers from his own label.
One of them was American musician Curtis Stigers, who offered his cover version of Nick Lowe’s song. Had he known that The Bodyguard was going to turn out to be the biggest-selling soundtrack album of all time he might have chosen one of his own compositions instead.
As it turned out, the inclusion of his version of Lowe’s song ended up earning for Lowe the biggest royalty cheque of his professional career, all as a consequence of a set of actions entirely beyond his control and the magical power of a market for physical product that in the early nineties seemed to be growing exponentially.
At the time CDs were being sold almost as fast as they could be produced and at higher prices than recorded music had ever previously commanded.
During 1993 The Bodyguard soundtrack sold a million actual physical copies – in one week alone.
How much that cheque was for we will never know. Rock stars are traditionally indiscreet about every aspect of their careers apart from the fiduciary. It was whispered in the music business that this stroke of good fortune had made Nick Lowe a wealthy man. That’s a description which has no absolute definition, particularly in the context of musicians, who have the most irregular flow of income imaginable.
When this was raised in subsequent years he pointed out that a great deal of it had gone on subsidising his own band for an American tour, since by this time, when Bodyguard-type sales were unknown and record companies were no longer handing out money for tour support – money which in any case was entirely recoupable from royalties – it was increasingly the case that if artists wanted to go out with the band of their choice they had to pay out of their own pocket and take the risk of not getting it back at the box office.
Lowe was in his mid-forties but had yet to do anything that seemed like ‘settling down’.
He had previously been married to Carlene Carter, the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, with whom he shared a somewhat abnormal domestic set-up in which both parties were in truth married to their individual careers.
By 1994 he had come out of a long relationship with the TV presenter Tracey MacLeod, at which point he released an album called The Impossible Bird.
This turned out to be the first of a series of critically applauded records in which he ruefully explored the life of a middle-aged man, another one of those figures who, as Bruce Springsteen pointed out, had had their adolescence prolonged and adulthood endlessly postponed by rock and roll.
Mike Yarwood used to be a popular British television entertainer. Most of his TV shows were devoted to impressions of politicians and film stars. Each would finish with him singing a favourite tune which he would introduce by smiling sheepishly and saying, ‘And this is me.’
Whenever I encounter any of the records Nick Lowe put out in the second half of his career after the punctuation mark provided by his Whitney Houston windfall, I can’t help thinking of Yarwood’s words: here was the former man of a thousand voices finally settling on one; here was a man who had previously prided himself on an ability to flit from mood to mood without sounding overly committed to any one seeming to be suddenly forced to survey the empty fridge of a man who had arrived in middle age without the compensations of family and was therefore moved to sing a different kind of blues.
There were glimmers in these songs of truths most songwriters prefer to conceal. They revealed that his career possibly hadn’t gone quite as well as it might: how these days he reached into the laundry for the cleanest dirty shirt and on bad ones he would wake up fully clothed with the front door open wide; how as he picked through the detritus of his superannuated bachelor life, surveying the untouched takeaways and the garage flowers, he faced the realisation that there was nowhere to run from what lack of love had done.
Seasoned Lowe watchers liked to refer to these albums as his Brentford Trilogy in honour of the unglamorous London suburb where they were conceived. Everything about them seemed like an exercise of self-deprecation in the English style.
In order to work the songs out he would spill them into the empty air while pacing around the function room of a local pub. When the time came to record them he would repair to a tiny studio in Camden Town.
Because this had formerly been a dairy, he and his engineer Neil Brockbank christened it Gold Top Studios in honour of the famous Gold Star Studios where Phil Spector had made his masterpieces.
He didn’t do anything to discourage people from associating the songs he was singing with the life he had led. Whether they were true to Nick Lowe’s real life we could not possibly know, nor would we have any right to know. What was most important was that they sounded true.
They are also the greatest mid-life crisis records in rock and roll. What made them different from the middle-aged records that everybody else would go on to write was that they accepted the great learning of middle age, the learning which seems to evade so many of his contemporaries, and that is that by this point you really have nobody to blame but yourself.
To one of the best of these albums Lowe gave the most piercingly honest name a fifty-eight-year-old rock star could ever give any album. He called it At My Age.
