Nick Lowe
Elvis Costello had a brand new bag. He was a musician, but he knew all about the attitude part of it.Collection: Attitude
The world is full of musicians who can play great, and you wouldn't cross the road to see them. It's people who have this indefinable attitude that are the good ones.Collection: Attitude
As long as my body holds out, I'll be grooving when I'm 70, and not some sort of horrible spectacle.
All those years we'd spent learning these chops, and all those gigs in Germany where you'd play all night, and along comes punk. It has nothing to do with that. A lot of people went out of business.
Be a military flier or be in a band; those were the two hippest things I could imagine.
Going to Nashville to meet the in-laws was the first time when I'd been in America and not been seen as some sort of eccentric character with a cute accent.
I like being a big fish in a small pond. I'm not interested in a huge audience because it brings headaches.
I suppose I was waiting until I was old enough to have some sort of experience to sing about. When you're young, it's hard to sing the blues. Nobody believes you.
I work very hard on getting the songs as direct and examined as I can before I go in the studio.
I'm playing to the sort of people who like the same records.
If a hit came along, I wouldn't be unhappy about that. But I'm a bit too old for that now-doing videos and all those types of TV shows. I've kind of done all that, in the '70s.
If anyone comes along, I'm more than happy to welcome them, but I'm not interested in world domination.
In the '70s, you had to come up with an album every year whether you were ready or not.
The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.
These days, rock 'n' roll is much more about rock than about roll. I don't do rock. But I'm interested in that roll part, because that's the funny little bit that makes it hip.
They tell me I produced songs. I just stood in the back, wore a good suit and said, Yeah, that's happening.
When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.
When somebody like Elvis Costello comes along, anybody can make a good record with him.
You've got to really know your song, inside and out.
What's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?Collection: Peace
I've always felt quite like an outsider. I don't really belong in the mainstream, and I quite like that.Collection: Outsiders
Later in life, suddenly, if you're an outsider, it's something to be celebrated, I think, rather than getting on people's nerves.Collection: Thinking
I'm very interested in religion and different religions, and I know quite a lot about it. I love gospel music, and I love going to churches, but the one drawback is that I don't actually believe in God. And it is quite a handicap, you know.Collection: Believe
I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.Collection: People
As soon as one of my records goes on, it makes a vast portion of the public nervous. They get spooked by it. To some people who have ears to hear, it's a delightful, refreshing change. But to most of the public, it's a load of homemade-sounding nonsense.Collection: People
"I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day," which I actually recorded on "Quality Street" because I don't think anyone has ever covered it before. You hear it every single Christmas, and it is a great record. That's by Wizzard. It is a really great record, but I don't think anyone's ever covered it before, so I had to go it doing it differently. It's quite different from how the original goes.Collection: Thinking
You try to make every word count, so there's no doubt what you're talking about. When you're young, you waffle away. Well, I'm done with that. I think it's much more interesting to say just what you mean.Collection: Mean
And then, one day, they program a new tune, and it really catches your ear, you know, because you can be doing the washing up or something, you know, in your apartment and suddenly you go, whoa, what are they playing in there? And you run to the wall, but it's finished - but the song's finished. You only heard enough of it just the pique your interest. And you never know when they're going to play it again, of course, like a normal radio station.Collection: Running
I realized sometime in the early '80s that if I didn't do something - like planning for the future in a way, a kind of pension or something - that if I didn't do something there and then, I was going to be condemned to forever present my three years as a pop star, condensed, as a stage act for the rest of my life. Because that's normally what happens to people in the pop business.Collection: Stars
My latest theory is that it's - well, I describe it as, like, being in an apartment with kind of thin walls. And in the apartment next door, they've got a radio tuned constantly on - tuned to a really cool radio station. It's on all the time. And you can just hear it coming through the wall all the time.Collection: Wall
Even if I was really prolific - which I'm not - I think I'd always put at least a couple of covers on my record. I think it's a sort of healthy thing to do. It shows that you're not totally self-obsessed.Collection: Couple
When I find a cover song that I like, I'll work away at it until I kind of believe that I wrote it.Collection: Song
So you can be about your business, and then on it comes again. And this time you're ready, and you've got a wine glass or something. And you put the glass up to the wall, and you can hear through the wall a little bit more of the song - maybe just the middle bit this time. You know, you managed to get in a little bit of the end. And so it goes on until - because you just got to - you really just want to sing it.Collection: Song
A devastating culmination of the elegant and the funky, a really sensational musician with enormous depth.Collection: Musician
And the other thing for the sort of posher kids was a sort of lethal scooter, you know. One of the things that you just push along with your - really heavy, lethal, you know, trap your fingers in and every bit of metal got rusty very quickly. And the girls I seem to remember they had a thing like a broomstick with a horse's head on the top which they sat astride.Collection: Girl
I love the sound of breaking glass Especially when Im lonely I need the noises of destruction When theres nothing new.Collection: Lonely
I'm an extremely slow worker, very unprolific. It can take me weeks to do a three-minute song, or at least to make it sound, in my mind, like I haven't written it. That's when I'm satisfied.Collection: Song
I'm very fussy about how my records sound, but I'm very aware that because of the way they sound, I will never be a big-selling, mainstream artist because the public has gotten conditioned to hearing pop music in a certain way. And I don't do it that way.Collection: Artist
I used to sort of take the phone off the hook, you know, put my feet up and watch the TV until it was all over.Collection: Phones
When my pop career was over, I was scratching my head, thinking, "God, how am I going to do something after I'm forty?" I was in my mid-thirties, thinking I was on the scrap heap.Collection: Thinking
Cruel to be kind means that I love you.Collection: Relationship
I'm really lucky that I've had a little gang of people who I've been involved with for a long time... I've been really lucky to have a gang of people who have always been there to encourage me to get on with it. Styles come and go, but I try not to take any notice of that.Collection: Long
I've always felt kind of like an outsider, even when I was very successful back in the old days. Even then. I kind of enjoyed it, really.Collection: Successful
So where are the strongAnd who are the trusted?And where is the harmony?Sweet harmony -'cause each time I feel it slippin away, it just makes me wanna cry:What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, and Understanding?Collection: Sweet
The older I get, there doesn't seem to be anything remotely more interesting than talking about love and the lack of it and what happens when it's taken away from someone who's had it.Collection: Taken
London was a real dump in the 70s, when it belonged to me and my friends, because, like most cities, you kind of hand them off. You're in charge for a bit and then you don't go out anymore. You say, "Oh god, it's going to be too crowded."Collection: Real
It was the 1950s, you know, and they had a ray gun, which was basically a flashlight with a sort of trigger on it. And it buzzed and a red light, you know, came on. But anyway we all had one - Davy Crockett hat.Collection: Gun
And there were sort of three toys for boys and three toys for girls. And the boys I can remember was, well, there was a Dan Dare Ray Gun. Dan Dare was a sort of a cartoon character. He was just sort of a - he was like a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, only in space.Collection: Girl
And as Craig Brown - he's an English humorist, not a comedian but he's just a writer and humorist - I'm quite a fan of. I heard him talking in a rather similar way on the radio. He said I'm the sort of person - I can't remember exactly what he said, but it was rather interesting - he said I'm the sort of person that can be reduced to tears in an empty church and feel like I'm the CEO of the Devil's organization in a full one, and I tend to feel like that as well. I love empty churches and going into them looking around, but I'm not a churchgoer at all.Collection: Talking
And religious music and the sort of symbolism of it and everything. But I had this idea. Actually, I sort of dreamt it. I woke up - just before waking up one morning, I sort of dreamt this song or the idea of it and the first little bit of it. And I jumped out of bed and I thought, well, you're still asleep. You're going to forget this in a minute - you know, like you do when you've had a dream.Collection: Dream