Nick Lowe — Labour of Lust

As with so many artists, I came late to Nick Lowe. he was right there in my prime record-buying, music-listening years, and yet I paid him very little attention in his early solo years, and while the Rockpile album was inescapable on our campus when it came out in 1980, I found the enthusiasm for Rockpile annoying somehow and never gave them a go. Not dissimilar to his compatriot Elvis Costello, whose first several albums Nick produced.

So, as usual, about 10 years later, I got quite into Nick Lowe. It started with a best of CD, “Basher,” which came out in 1980 and which I’m pretty sure I picked up at Records ‘n’ Such in Stuyvesant Plaza fairly early on in my Albany residency. That disc was a real revelation, because here was a guy who had been at the heart of the new wave revolution, who also wrote classic songs that wouldn’t have been out of place being done by ’50s artists. He had a real old school sensibility that I quite appreciated. Then I got his 1990 CD “Party of One,” which made a huge impression on me at the time, and I sought out some of his earlier stuff.

By that time, I was almost entirely past my vinyl-collecting phase, and records were mostly gone from the stores. I didn’t often visit Albany’s record stores, but I do recall making a rare trip to Last Vestige, which was then a pretty new shop, and I’m pretty sure it was there that I picked up the three Nick Lowe albums I have, for a whopping $2.99 each.

1979’s “Labour of Lust,” his second solo album, and it’s really just great, straightforward pop songs beginning to end. Even though I was toward the end of playing vinyl, this got some play. Still a very good album. I would come to love Nick Lowe’s later work much more, starting with “Party of One,” but I’ll go back to these earlier discs from time to time.