By: David de Young
Nick Lowe stepped onto stage a little before 11 p.m. Friday night at the Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis, his nearly pure white hair giving him the look of a stately, more dashing version of Walter Mondale, who is just 21 years his senior. (Lowe is 55.) But there’s something still so boyish about Lowe that it’s hard to believe that he was already 31 when he had his first hit in 1980 with Cruel to be Kind, and he started playing the pub circuit in England as a teenager in the mid 1960’s.
Nick Lowe - Publicity photo
Lowe opened his solo acoustic set with a beautiful new song There Will Never Be Any Peace (Until God Sits Down At The Conference Table) that immediately grabbed the attention of the room. Gerry Anderson of the High Heels (whose band opens for the Scissor Sisters at the Fine Line next Thursday) was so impressed he remarked to me as the song ended that that song alone was worth the price of admission right there.
It wasn’t until before his 3rd song that the singer introduced himself, “I’m Nick Lowe, by the way,” he said, announcing that he was going to play a couple songs from his new EP. He proceeded into What’s Shaking on the Hill, the first song on his new 17-song live album on Yep Roc records titled Untouched Takeaway.
Next came I’ve Let Things Slide, a bit of a country song followed by Has She Got a Friend, which is a mid-tempo rockabilly number from The Convincer that came off as country on solo guitar.
“There’s a hollow in the bed where your body used to be,” was the first line of the heartbreaker (my notes don’t mince words and say “really fucking sad”) Lover Don’t Go from The Impossible Birds. But what is it with the Fine Line fans? It was during this song that loud people talking at the bar required me move 10 feet deeper into the crowd to get out of earshot. Why anyone would come to an acoustic show to get boisterously drunk and make stupid remarks during heart-wrenching quiet songs just boggles the mind.
Next, things came back around with a song I couldn’t place with the chorus “Bingo, that girl’s got the winning hand,” or something to that effect.
Before introducing the next song, Lowe, who was Johnny Cash’s son in law during his marriage to Carlene Carter (to whom he was married to from 1979 to 1985) told of how Cash once gave him some advice about how you should never talk about your “last” album, only your “latest.” Saying we (the Fine Line audience) looked like “uptown folks,” next up was what he called “a classier offering” than his previous song referencing bingo. The song was Indian Queens, a song he wrote after seeing a sign on the motorway while driving home from Cornwall. The humming on this song reminded me of “Kung Fu Fighting.”
Next came a respectable version of Cruel to Be Kind which he followed with a dramatic bow, the kind you normally only make if you have a big hat with a plume in it on. This was followed up by a cover of the John Hiatt song She Don’t Love Nobody.
The Man That I’ve Become, from 1998’s Dig My Mood was a song that Lowe said was kind of happy, kind of sad at the same time.
A few songs later, Geraint Watkins joined Lowe on keyboards for the rest of the set. Together they bumped the volume up a tad with a rendition of Half a Boy and Half a Man. (I truly appreciated the clever lyric that rhymes with the title, “It’s the 21st century’s latest scam!”) After a Watkins song, Only a Rose, sung jointly by Lowe and Watkins, the beautiful lounge song You Inspire Me, was again interrupted by a woman by the bar making jaded complaints about her life. (I should start asking these people their names and out them in my reviews, but Lord knows they don’t read stuff like this since they’re probably at these shows only to hear “the hit.”)
I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll) followed, with rock and roll piano by Watkins, the song seeming more relevant again now than it did a few years ago, and another song I should probably adopt as the story of my life. The set closed with a beautiful slow version of What’s So Funny about Peace Love and Understanding, (ironically the song that made Lowe a millionaire after Curtis Stigers covered it on the soundtrack to The Bodyguard in 1992. Live, and perhaps to emphasize that the question is more relevant than ever before, Lowe almost bitterly sneered the chorus, and tenderly added the phrases, “Understanding Brother, Understanding Sister” added at the end. If I didn’t have goose bumps from the first song of the set, I surely had them now. “Thanks everybody, good night to ya,” said Lowe as he left the stage.
For the two song encore he performed In the Heart of the City (flipside of his 1976 single So it Goes) and The Beast in Me from the Impossible Birds (which has appeared on a Sopranos soundtrack.)
Location Info:
Fine Line Music Café
Artist Info: Nick Lowe
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