If Brinsley Schwarz have a front man then it's Nick Lowe. A spiky crest of hair, nose of the type referred to in polite circles as "strong," Nick Lowe plays bass and does much of the lead vocalising, left leg pumping up and down like a man blowing up a flat tyre with a foot pump.
Nick's also their potential hit man. He does most of the band's writing. Of the many songs he's written so far I guess you'd call at least half-a-dozen very good. Two or three are simply excellent. One day he'll write a big hit, but there's no real hurry.
His songs may well be the greatest beneficiaries of Dave Edmunds' production work on the current album.
The band's development started with Nick and Brinsley at school in about '63-'64, the time of the Beatles and the Stones. "Then when we left school there was a gap while we were in semi-pro groups."
Later Brinsley called Nick one day, said his bass player was leaving and did he want the gig. "This was down in Tunbridge Wells, about '67-'68. I left home and we've been together ever since then."
When Nick joined the band, Kippington Lodge, they'd just made "Shy Boy," one of the singles they did for Mark Wirtz, who did the "Teenage Opera" thing.
Ahead
"He was amazin'. Just way ahead of this time no two ways about it. If he came along nowadays he'd be a Phil Spector sort of character, that's the way I see him."
When he first started Nick played banjo. ("I was really into skiffle. In fact I played at one time with Sean Tyla (Ducks de Luxe). I never knew the names of the guys I was with. For some reason in those days you never used to know the names of the guys you were in groups with. I played with Sean in a group called The Four Just Men."
When he started playing guitars in a Kingston Trio type group. "The Shadows, even though I liked them, were a bit before my time but when the Beatles came along I got interested in groups. The only reason I played bass was that it was the only instrument I could join Brinsleys group on."
Nick's early bands, experiences in music included backing singers. J.J. Jackson was one. Billie Davie was another.
Bass playing and singing aside Nick's most important contribution to the band is as songwriter. The first song he recalls writing was a skiffle number.
"I'd heard all the songs about 'The Rock Island Line' and 'The Grand Coolie Dam' and all that and so when the Great Train Robbery was done I wrote a hokey skiffle number about that. Most embarrassing."
Nick says he has little trouble writing a song. "I can't help but write. It's not clever. I just hear things come into my head and I try to go through with them, play 'em.
"What is hard is getting it arranged and constructed in your mind so you can say to somebody 'Look if you play that and I play this I think it's gonna sound like that.' That's the hard part.
"I'm really trying to write a Good Song that'll appeal to anyone. I'd like to get a song that won the Eurovision Song Contest cos I'd make it so drek, so crass, so crap that it'd be great. It would be fantastic.
"I could really get off on doing that, even though I knew it was crap. Cos, you know, you're competing against people there that really know their business. That's hard to do."
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