A macabre painting of a topless woman reminiscent of Egon Schiele hangs directly opposite a painting of a cute toy dog with a bell around its neck. It’s decorated in a tasteful reformed-bachelor style: packed bookshelves (a biography of Karl Marx, a pictorial history of boxing, Willie Dixon’s I Am the Blues, a Hans Fallada novel called The Drinkers), a copy of Johnny Cash’s debut album (signed “To Nick”), chic zinc-top dining table. Lowe keeps the first place as a sort of workspace. The money allows his family to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. In a wild bit of luck, a cover of “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” by Curtis Stigers, appeared on the 1992 soundtrack to The Bodyguard, which, thanks to Whitney Houston, sold roughly 40 million copies and handed Lowe a windfall of songwriting royalties just as his career started moving in a less-commercial direction. (It was built in 1805.) These days, Lowe resides a few blocks away, in another row house, with his second wife, Peta Waddington, and their teenage son, Roy. His house, he says, isn’t very old, but he means by English standards. Lowe lives in Brentford, a sleepy town once best known for its nylon factory. In keeping with the forecast made by his unkempt younger self, Lowe, now closer to 70 than 60, looks terrific: tall, slim, dapper, sporting a brown corduroy jacket over a white dress shirt and dark cuffed Levis, with outsize black-frame Buddy Holly glasses, and his hair, now completely white, swooped into a dignified take on a pompadour. Twenty-eight years later, Lowe opens the door of the same West London row house to greet a new visitor. Twenty years from now, he vowed, “I’ll be happening. I’m just starting to get good now.” His smile had faded, and he jabbed the air with his cigarette for emphasis, maybe to help convince himself.
He was making a prediction: “I’m going to know how to write a song when I’m 60. Uncharacteristic swagger must be building to a punchline.Įxcept it wasn’t. And in interviews, he tended to scrupulously avoid speaking about his work in ways that might come off as pretentious, leaning heavily on a British taste for cool irony that also informed his approach to lyric-writing. It sounded like the start of another comic riff. But also I think my voice is going to sound great.” Point of fact, I think I’m going to look fantastic when I’m 60. “But the thing is, you see, now I really think I’m just starting to get good. . . . Then he smiled, his eyes turning mischievous. “No indeed.” He took a drag on a cigarette, suddenly pensive, and looked off to the side, as if considering whether or not to reveal a secret plan. “I certainly never thought I’d still be doing at 40,” he acknowledged. Strumming a guitar, Lowe told funny, self-deprecating stories about his intimidating father-in-law and an early attempt at writing a novelty song about the Bay City Rollers. His feathered mop of hair had already started going gray. In the BBC video, Lowe looked older than 40, puffy, slightly haggard, wearing a drab tweed jacket that might’ve been nicked from a boarding-school headmaster nearing retirement. He’d quit drinking for a few years, but soon started up again, and his decade-long marriage to Carlene Carter, the singer-songwriter and child of Nashville royalty (daughter of June Carter Cash, stepdaughter of Johnny Cash), was nearing its official break. RS Recommends: 5 Devices You Need to Set Up Your Smart Homeħ0 Greatest Music Documentaries of All Timeīy the time of Party of One, though, it had been five years since any of Lowe’s songs had charted. A Lowe-penned song, “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” would become one of Costello’s most indelible tunes, and Lowe’s own solo career took off as well, right alongside the rise of punk and New Wave, his signature hits remaining stone classics of the era: “Cruel to Be Kind,” “So It Goes,” “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass.” punk single, the Damned’s “New Rose,” and began a fruitful collaboration with Elvis Costello, producing Costello’s first five albums, a legendary run. There, Lowe produced what’s widely considered the first U.K. (or within, for that matter), and then as a house producer at a scrappy independent label called Stiff Records.
Lowe had a new album to promote, Party of One, but he’d been in the music business for two decades, first in the band Brinsley Schwarz, which wore its Americana influences on its sleeve but never made much of an impression outside the U.K. In January 1990, a couple of months shy of his 41st birthday, Nick Lowe welcomed a BBC film crew into his suburban London row house for an interview.