Photo via Nick Lowe - Facebook
Nick Lowe
Nick Lowe
When Nick Lowe performs classics like "Cruel to Be Kind" and "I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)," he knows they’re in good hands. That’s largely thanks to his backing band of the past dozen years, Los Straitjackets—marking the longest Lowe has ever played with a consistent backing group.
Nashville’s signature masked instrumental rockers Los Straitjackets are known just as much for their iconic Lucha Libre masks as they are for electrifying, surf-infused garage rock. Together, their genre-spanning style—weaving through pub rock, power pop, and Americana—makes for an unforgettable live collaboration.
“They're very good musicians and the fact that they're an instrumental group when they play on their own, I think is really cool,” said Lowe during a recent Zoom interview prior to their July 16 show at Vivarium. “The way they play, it has a bearing on the way they play my stuff.”
“They started trying to copy my records. Of course, what else would they have done? And it didn't take very long before we realized that that was probably a bad idea. And once they started just playing the songs, don't ignore the records, except if there's a signature riff or something on the original recording they can incorporate.”
“But we just make our own way of doing it up, make our own way of playing the songs and ignore the records a little bit. It's not far away from the original recordings, but just because of the way they play and the sound they make, it sounds different.”
Lowe said they keep on thinking they’re going to stop touring together but are still having too good of time to stop. He attributes it to them adding a couple new songs each time they tour to keep it fresh. Fans can expect a career-spanning performance, pulling from his pioneering pub-rock days with Brinsley Schwarz and Rockpile, all the way through his solo catalog and his 2024 full-length album, Indoor Safari.
“Of course, there's certain songs we just have to play,” he said. “People would be disappointed if we didn't do them, but we try and keep a little flow through of new change.”
Lowe caught up with the Shepherd Express about how Los Straitjackets have revitalized his songs, what keeps him interested in writing new songs, and how a bad Milwaukee gig led him to meet Paul Cebar.
It sounds like the songs have grown the more you’ve played them with the band. How so?
Yeah, they always get better the more you play them. That's the problem with records. Most people, when you record an album, you record the songs before you've played them in. And so sometimes the version that the audience gets down the line is quite different. Usually, it's better than the recorded version, because you haven't really had time to explore the thing and to sometimes take bits out. It's not just adding to them, it's taking bits out as well that you thought would work, but they kind of get in the way. You're always just trying to streamline. Streamline this stuff.
If the song's any good, it'll always reveal more stuff. The more you play it, especially in our case because we don't play that much. So, we do a tour nowadays, we get together two or three times a year and do a tour, do three tours, which last anywhere between three and five weeks. So, if it's a three-week tour, we'll do about 15 or 16 shows, something like that. We don't really play them night after night after night. We just get together, as I say, three times a year, do these shows. So, they don't get stale, but the more you play them on those tours, they'll just reveal a bit more and you'll play them a slightly different way. Another meaning maybe comes through the song. But essentially, they are just pop songs and a good pop song really you can do it many, many different ways.
Indoor Safari was your first album in quite a while. What made you want to scratch that itch again and record again? What drew you to that title?
Well, we recorded a number of EPs, four track EPs, and we recorded them on tour and sometimes in bad studios and in some cases before the songs were like we've just been talking about, were played in at all. And in some cases before the songs were finished, but it wasn't really what I wanted to do. But I could see the sense in having something to put on the merch stand at our gigs, have a little bit of some records of something. So, we put these records out and we did our best, but it was suggested after a few years went by that we should put all these tracks together on an actual album, maybe with one or two new songs. And I thought by this time we could record these much better, these songs. The songs are much better.
We played them a few times. And so again, we didn't really mean to ever make any recordings really when we first got together. We didn't think we were going to do that at all, but we realized there was a demand there and people really wanted to hear some stuff that we recorded together. So, we went and cut the record to which is Indoor Safari and we re-recorded some of the tracks we'd released before on the EPs that had come out. We either re-recorded some of the songs or we just kind of revisited the original recordings and made them a bit better. Maybe replaced a vocal here or put backing vocals on, just improved them. And we had the great guy called Alex Hall at Reliable Recorders in Chicago. That's where we recorded the whole thing and he put his magic touch on it and made it sound like all these tracks had been recorded at the same time instead of over a period of sort of four or five years.
How do you think your songwriting has grown most in recent years?
Well, my songwriting changed quite a lot when I started doing solo shows. Elvis Costello encouraged me to do solo shows, and I was reluctant again to do it. And one of the things he said to me was, "When you get up by yourself in front of an audience and play a song you've written, it's almost like you hear it for the first time and like you're looking at yourself doing it like you're up in the air or something, watching yourself doing it. And you can hear what's good about the song and what is bad about the song, and it will influence your songwriting.” And that's exactly what happened. I started playing songs that people knew and they liked it. They liked them, of course, but I thought, “boy, I can do this better with an acoustic guitar.”
If that's all you've got, you have to really work hard at arranging your song and making it flow and everything so that you keep people's attention. So, when I write songs, well, you say recently, but I've been doing ... Ever since I started doing solo shows and I'm writing a song, I think of that. I keep that in mind that “will this work with just an acoustic guitar? Can I make this come over?” And that way, if you can get a song that does work with just an acoustic guitar, then you can make a record of it with drums and bass and all the rest of it. Everything else will be easy. It's only hard making records when you're just making it up in the studio. I have done that in the studio, gone in there with half an idea and sort of made it up in the studio, but generally it doesn't really work that well.
I've had a bit of success doing it that way, but only once or twice. The best ones are when you go to the studio with three or four absolutely finished songs that you know can work and that's when you get more success, artistic success. I don't mean commercial success necessarily.
Any future plans for new music?
Yeah. I'm nearly finished a record now. I'm going to do some more work on it when I go to the United States [for this tour]. I go to Chicago to the recording studios I was talking about earlier, Reliable Recorders in Chicago with Alex Hall. He's the engineer and co-producer. And I’ve been doing a record every time I go to America, I always go to Chicago for two or three days and record a few more tracks. And I think I've got enough good tunes now, good tracks. I've recorded more than I need and so I'll probably ... It won't come out till next year, but I think it's pretty good, pretty good record.
I imagine when you wrote songs such as “Cruel To Be Kind” that you never imagined that they'd be so popular decades later. What does it mean to see fans new and old still connecting to them?
Yeah, it really is amazing. And there's a lot of younger people who come to our shows as well. I'm very pleased about that. When I say younger people, I mean people in their sort of late 20s and 30s and 40s, much younger than me, not particularly much younger than Los Straitjackets, but certainly younger than me. And I'm very pleased to see them because some of these songs were hits before a lot of these people were born and I don't know quite how they know about them really. But it's a funny thing, if you have a hit song and I haven't had many, but I've certainly been associated with a few over the years, but once you've got one or two, it's amazing how people just seem to know them and recognize them and they live on. A song like “Peace, Love and Understanding”, I don't even feel like I wrote it anymore.
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I've heard so many covers of it, although I can remember the day that I did write it when I was, I suppose, effectively the first person in the world to hear it never ceases to amaze me that it sounds now like it's always been around like a sort of standard or something like that. And as a result, I sometimes forget that I had anything to do with it.
Some of your songs date back to your days with Brinsley Schwarz. How did playing with a band like them give you confidence to go out as a solo artist?
Oh, I wasn't really lacking in confidence when I was a young man. I loved playing with Brinsley Schwarz. We were all young. We worked very hard and in those days, it was a very different scene. There was no internet, of course. So, the only way you could get people to know about you was hit by hitting the road, going out and playing and playing and playing every little club and college and schools and dance halls and things like that. We played anywhere. And in that time, it's like doing an apprenticeship for any kind of job. You learn how to do not just to play together, but also how to write songs. It's a skill that you acquire and you play the songs in front of an audience and you can see how they react to some things and how they're not interested in other things.
I look upon my time with Brinsley Schwarz as like going to some sort of college or some university or something like that. A lot more fun, of course, than a college or a university.
Does it feel similar being back in a band setting with this band?
Yeah. I mean, being in a band, they're all sort of similar. There are things that are the same with every band, no matter what music they play, there are dynamics that come into play with every single band. And obviously the personalities are a bit different, that'll change the dynamic. But that's why with the film Spinal Tap, the sort of spoof documentary, that's why musicians particularly thought it was an extremely funny film because no matter what kind of music the real musicians played, they recognize themselves in Spinal Tap. And although you have ups and downs, you're very privileged to be able to earn your living doing that. But I play on my own as well and it's a different vibe when you get up there and play the songs with just an acoustic guitar. I enjoy doing that too, but it's a lot more fun with a band.
I imagine it's been fascinating to learn a bit about the Lucha culture from this band.
Yeah. We're going back on tour in a week or so's time for about three weeks. Then at the end of the year, we're going to do some shows opening for another act, a pop act really, who are coming back from the ... I suppose they were very successful in their 1980s, a group called Roxette from Scandinavia, from Sweden, I think they're from. And they're doing a big tour in big places, and we are going to be one of the opening acts. So, we're looking forward to that. I mean, I don't think their audience are going to be really aware of much about us, but I like putting myself in those sort of situations, so I'm looking forward to it.
What's one of your favorite Milwaukee memories?
Oh, let me see. Well, I've got a very good friend called Paul Cebar, who lives in Milwaukee. Are you aware of him? He's a great musician.
Yeah, he's great.
Yeah. So, I remember we've been friends for many years now and we met each other under very funny circumstances. The band I had at the time was a pretty good band, but we did a gig in Milwaukee. It was in winter. It was very cold and raining and horrible, and we played at a place I can't remember what it was called, but it was sort of a big club, and we'd driven for hours to get there through the bad weather and everything. And it was a really terrible gig. There was nobody really there. We weren't much good. And we got back to the hotel, very, very dejected and despondent and we thought, "Well, we'll go to the bar and have a couple of drinks and go to bed." And when we got to the bar, the woman who was running the bar was just closing and she said, "Well, I'm just closing up, but I'll give you a drink.
You can have a beer and I'm going.” So, she gave us a drink and one of the guys in the band said to her, "Where are you going tonight?" And she said, "I'm going to see this band who are friends of mine." And she said, "Do you want to come?" And we said, "Yeah, okay." So, we all jumped in her car and went off somewhere across town to another place. Again, I can't remember what it was called. It was slightly smaller, but it was everything that our gig had not been. It was jumping, it was really fun and loads of people and the band was great. They were called the R&B Cadets and Paul Cebar was in the R&B Cadets. And after the show we went round the back and by this time we'd cheered up like mad.
We'd had a few drinks, and we loved their band and we went round to the backstage to say hello to them. And we wound up going back to their house and we sort of stayed up all night really listening to records and we forged a friendship that night, which has lasted I would think for, I'm thinking that was probably in 1982 or 83, something like that. So well, you work it out. It's a long time, 40 something years.
Do you remember the first show you played in Milwaukee?
No, I'm afraid I don't. No, it was probably with the band I was in called Rockpile and I would imagine it was when we were opening for Bad Company, the very first tour we did in 1976, I think. It's the first time we came to America, and we had a job opening for the group Bad Company and we got fired off the tour. It was a long tour, and we got fired after five or six weeks, I think. And I can't remember if we played in Milwaukee or not, but I would imagine that we did, but it would've been in some big arena.
(Lowe’s first Milwaukee show was with his band Rockpile on November 11, 1978, at The Electric Ballroom; the Bad Company tour was 1976-77)
