Nick Lowe: I Love My Label
[purchase]
According to the liner notes for his rarities and covers compilation The Wilderness Years, pivotal pub rock and new wave icon and sideman-to-the-stars Nick Lowe recorded this wonderful tongue-in-cheek, utterly too-perfect pop song about label love in the mid seventies, somewhere between leaving Brinsley Schwarz and recording his first solo album Jesus of Cool (originally released in the US by Columbia Records under the title Pure Pop For Now People), in order to get out of his major label contract with United Artists.
The song was released as one of the very first singles from the newly-formed Stiff Records, where Lowe was in-house producer; both Lowe and the fledgling indie label he worked for would go on to become powerful forces behind the early punk and new wave sound of Elvis Costello, Dave Edmunds, and others in the late seventies and early eighties. Thought the single is long gone for all but the most fervent of collectors, the song is newly available on the reissued version of Jesus Is Cool, where it probably makes current re-issuing label Yep Roc Records proud, in a hipstery, ironical sort of way. And you thought the indie movement was something new, didn't you?
