‘I can’t even bring myself to play it these days although people used to laugh their heads off, it was bloody old nonsense! I’ve never met Rick, but I apologise to the poor bloke unreservedly, although he’s had a big comeback of late. ‘I feel bad about that now,’ confesses Lowe, shaking his white quiff. In Lowe’s 1990 song All Men Are Liars, the crafty lyricist took a gentle swipe at Rick Astley, crooning ‘Well do you remember Rick Astley?/He had a big fat hit, it was ghastly/He said I’m never gonna give you up or let you down/Well I’m here to tell you that Dick’s a clown.’ ‘Time for another one, eh Madge?’ he tuts.
The Surrey-born son of an RAF group captain and a ‘Rosemary Clooney-type singer’ mother, he doesn’t feel in competition with current artists, shrugging when Madonna’s new album is mentioned. ‘You can get a good table at a restaurant for a while but it can utterly ruin you in ways that you cannot prepare for.’ ‘Fame is a mug’s game, really,’ he reflects, sipping a midday pint in the garden of his Brentford local pub. But his songs remain better known than he is, and that’s the way Lowe likes it. Lowe has enjoyed several other high-achieving songs, including the US Top 20 ear-worm Cruel To Be Kind with Rockpile and his 1978 UK solo smash I Love The Sound Of Breaking Glass. It was revered by many of Lowe’s contemporaries: John Lennon admired its message (even quoting the chorus in his final interview), and Bruce Springsteen performed the number in his 2004 shows. As with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, you sense the song is just one X Factor song choice away from being a true modern-day standard. Then jazz singer Curtis Stigers’s cover made The Bodyguard soundtrack in 1992 and, in turn, made Lowe a wealthy man. Nick Lowe was thrilled to discover, in the early Nineties, that one of his compositions would feature in the movie The Bodyguard
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