And there I was for some thirty years thinking it was all Rockpile!
The contents are pretty well flagged by the cover art and the cynical opening track, Music for Money, two minutes of Lowe taking a wry dig at record industry and the way in which commercial considerations keep pop music dumbed down. You can see that dumbing down reflected in the robotic riff, and it’s difficult to avoid a conclusion that reactions to the hype and failed promises around Brinsley Schwarz’s American debut are lurking in the background. It’s a theme he returns to in Shake and Pop and its cousin brother They Called It Rock.
Like many of his peers on the New Wave side of the Punk Rebellion, the likes of Dave Edmunds, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and company, we’re talking blokes who’ve been put through the mill by commercially-minded A&R men who now find that their material that was being dissed and dismissed just a few months before is now, unexpectedly, the Next Big Thing. You won’t be surprised, under those circumstances to find a hearty two finger salute directed towards the major labels.
And you can see the same cynicism in the cover art, half a dozen images of Lowe (actually, in one case, Dave Edmunds) posing with the appropriate guitar as designer stubble folkie, grinning flower child, tartan-clad glam rocker, new wave hipster, heavy metal greaser (that one’s Edmunds, a wry little comment in itself) and twin guitar prog-rock dinosaur.
There’s the implication that we’re looking at a pop chameleon who’s capable of delivering anything, a suggestion that’s reinforced by the cutting-edge tinkling disco pop of I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass, the Beach Boys harmonies from Lowe and Edmunds on Little Hitler and Shake and Pop ‘s dig at major label reactions to a one-hit-wonder's follow-up (Arista say they love it, but the kids can't dance to it), later cloned in more obviously Chuck Berry mode for They Called It Rock. The variety continues through lush ballad territory that verges on syrupy pop corn parody on Tonight, infectious driving power pop (So It Goes, the first single that appeared on the Stiff label and would, in a just world, have gone to #!), a dash of poppish reggae (No Reason) and the downright odd (a cover of Jim Ford’s 36 Inches High).
But it’s the last couple of tracks that really display Lowe at his best. Kenneth Anger's catalogue of Tinseltown scandals (Hollywood Babylon) provides the source material for Marie Provost, the story of a silent movie actress whose corpse became food for her dachshund (She was a winner/Who became a doggie’s dinner) where the jaunty tune is completely at odds with the subject matter, and the narrator’s admission that she never meant that much to me. The track became an instant favourite when I first heard it thirty-five years ago, and it’s remained that way ever since.