An Introduction

While he’s best known as the writer of a song called What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding, a couple of minor hit singles (Cruel to Be Kind and I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass and his production work with, among others, Elvis Costello, Graham Parker that’s very much the tip of the iceberg as far as Nicholas Drain (but call me Nick) Lowe is concerned.

Born 24 March 1949, the son of an RAF officer, Lowe spent part of his childhood stationed in the Middle East before his family settled in back in England, where he ended up at Woodbridge School in Suffolk with a guitar playing teenager name Brinsley Schwarz. The pair played in a number of bands before they left school and formed a poppy outfit called Kippington Lodge, cutting five singles for Parlophone Records and sharpening their on-stage skills playing the same German circuit that brought The Beatles on.

Not that Kippington Lodge were going to match the Fab Four, or anything. But, according to the article from Salon linked below, they were there, working a similar environment under similar conditions. 

Then, in a career move that came to be regarded as close to the ultimate in hype, Kippington Lodge morphed into a country-rock band Brinsley Schwarz that debuted at  a showcase concert at New York’s Fillmore East, opening for Van Morrison and Quicksilver Messenger Service on 3 and 4 April 1970. Manager Dave Robinson intended to fly planeload of British journalists and the winners of a competition in Melody Maker to New York, but the whole episode evolved into a widely-documented comedy of errors. Reviews panned the gig and the Brinsley Schwarz album, so it was back to the drawing board.

A second album, appropriately titled Despite It All, fared slightly better as the Brinsleys reinvented themselves as key players in London’s good-time back-to-basics pub rock scene in the early to mid-seventies.

The end of the Brinsleys in 1975 brought a couple of career-shaping elements into play. Lowe started playing bass with guitarist Dave Edmunds in Rockpile and a solo single So It Goes/Heart of the City, appeared as the first single on a new label called Stiff Records label, funded by a loan of £400 from Lee Brilleaux of Dr. Feelgood fame. 

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© Ian Hughes 2015