Nick of time

with a long overdue album in the shops, nick lowe explains his lengthy absence, touches on late fatherhood, bigs up his new songs, and attempts to draw a veil over the ‘rubbish’ in his back catalogue! terry staunton listens intently.

Triple Oscar-winner Jack Nicholson may not be the most obvious inspiration for a songwriter, but Nick Lowe has always been humble enough and happy to draw on any outside influence that comes his way. Watching the Hollywood legend on TV one night, in the 1997 comedy As Good As It Gets, Lowe was struck by the power and simplicity of one line the rascally thesp delivered to a visibly stunned Helen Hunt: “You make me want to be a better man.”

“It just popped out of nowhere, a real heartstopper,” he recalls. “I immediately thought to myself, ‘Ooh, I could use that. I know exactly what I can do with that...’”

This is typical behaviour for a man whose 1990 single title All Men Are Liars (And That’s The Truth) was lifted from an irate audience member in an episode of Oprah Winfrey’s soul-baring TV show. Jack’s unwitting contribution is the basis of A Better Man, the first track on At My Age, Lowe’s first album of new material for almost six years.

The new record sees the erstwhile pub rocker and new wave pioneer mining the same rich seam of sophisticated, mature country and soul with which he all but reinvented himself on 1995’s The Impossible Bird, and continued to perfect on two further albums, Dig My Mood (1998) and …

by Terry Staunton
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