Nick Lowe is standing in the lobby of a Helsinki hotel with the understandably baffled air of someone who’s just been struck on the head by lightning. Wh-what was that? It’s the morning after the kind of night before that makes you sorry there’s such a thing as tomorrow. Nick looks washed-out and wobbly, clearly in the grip of the sort of hangover that leaves you less in desperate need of the proverbial hair of the dog than the canine itself, the whole of it, the entire tail-wagging beast, paws, teeth, ears, the lot. He pats himself down, searching for a fag in the pockets of clothes he looks like he’s slept in. When he finds a bent old Senior Service, a dog-end basically, he’s shaking so badly I have to light it for him. What do you want to do, Nick?
“Find a bar, obviously,” Nick says, “and have a drink.”
It’s not far from the hotel to the nearest bar, but by the time we get there we’re frozen, chilled to the fucking bone, teeth chattering like castanets. Last night’s blizzard has blown itself out and for the moment it’s an unnervingly bright day. It’s also unbelievably cold – 20 degrees below freezing, or something. The five minute walk leaves me feeling like I’m in the latter stages of cryogenic preservation, on my way to becoming a pale ghost, frozen in time, an ice zombie. Nick, meanwhile, has actually turned a bit blue. He’s shivering uncontrollably, but with a heroic effort manages to get a large vodka close enough to his lips to drink it without spilling a drop, a notable feat for someone in his parlous state.
“That’s better,” he says, knocking back the vodka, ordering another. “I thought for a moment when I woke up this morning that the game was finally up. There was a turkey on my back, the biggest fucking turkey you could possibly imagine. I thought, ‘This bird’s got my number. I’ve had it. I’m fucking dead.’ Then it flew away. I thought, ‘Thank Christ. I’m saved.’ Then it flew back. With a twig in its fucking beak. The fucking thing started building a nest. I thought, ‘I’m done for now.’”
Nick, feeling perkier by the minute, orders another round of drinks. “Just to be on the safe side,” he says, polishing off his third large vodka in about 20 minutes.
It’s started to snow again, light flurries at first but getting heavier in a hurry, and by now we’re in a battered old van, on our way to somewhere called Rauma, about 300 miles northwest of Helsinki, on the Gulf of Bothnia, virtually in the Arctic Circle as far as we’re concerned, where it’s even colder and there’s even more snow. What are we doing here? Let’s ask Nick.
“To be honest, AJ,” he says, trying to pour vodka into a plastic cup, a test of his hand and eye coordination that he dismally fails as most of the vodka ends up in his lap, “with the album coming out, I just wanted to get out of England for a couple of weeks.”
He’s talking about Jesus Of Cool, his much-hyped first solo album. Nick’s been releasing albums for years with pub rock veterans Brinsley Schwarz, only a dwindling following of die-hard fans taking much notice. Since palling up with Jake Riviera, however, he’s become Stiff’s unofficial house producer, crafting some great records on startlingly limited budgets, including his own “So It Goes”, The Damned’s “New Rose” and their Damned Damned Damned album, Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World” and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True. He now has a reputation as a pop Svengali, a bit of a magician. There’s suddenly a lot to live up to.
“I’m a bit self-conscious about the whole thing, frankly,” he goes on. “I mean, a solo album? I never really wanted to do one. It always seemed such a wanky idea. I had this image of some singer-songwriter type standing by a babbling brook, staring into the sunset with his poetic eyebrows twitching in the breeze. It didn’t sound much like me, really. Also,” he adds, a little sheepishly, “with a title like Jesus of Cool, I didn’t want to be seen staggering about, from pub to pub, completely pissed, ranting and raving. It would have been damned undignified.”
So Nick, along with Jake Riviera, Rockpile drummer Terry Williams and Rumour guitarist Martin Belmont, has been on an eccentric little tour of Europe, fetching up in Helsinki, were they’ve been recording with local hot-shot guitarist, Albert Järvinen who, as a member of popular Finnish R&B band The Hurriganes, was briefly considered as a replacement for Wilko Johnson in Dr Feelgood. Albert’s got his own band now, the Royals, who have a couple of gigs this weekend in Raumo and then 100 miles even further north, in Siikainen. Nick’s going to be supporting Albert and the Royals at the shows and I’ve flown out with Global Riviera trouble-shooter Glen Colson to join the party. It seemed like a good idea at the time, anyway.
We’re a couple of hours outside Helsinki now, moaning like fishwives. There’s a big hole in the floor of the van, covered by sheets of cardboard that barely keep out the jets of freezing ice, slush, snow, whatever, that blow regularly through the fucking hole and into the van, soaking us. Martin Belmont pours himself a very large brandy. Terry Williams sinks deeper into a chunky knit cardigan. Jake is noisily rude about virtually everyone he’s ever met and a few he hasn’t. Nick guzzles more vodka. It’s snowing again and it’s cold enough to make you weep. We stop briefly on what looks like the shore of an immense lake, frozen over and vast, where we meet up with Albert and the Royals and the photographer who’s riding with them. The Finnish lensman wants to take some pictures here. I presume this is his idea of a joke. So does Martin Belmont, who has to be dragged out of the van into the eerie, sub-zero silence. Nick waddles out onto the lake, a Senior Service dangling from his lips. He lines up alongside Albert, Martin and Terry against a backdrop that seems to stretch to infinity, maybe a bit further. And what’s this, now? It’s a solitary figure, a lone skier, making his way across the lake, just a speck in the far distance.
“Hurry up,” Jake barks. “Someone’s coming.”
“Anyone we know?” Martin Belmont asks.
“Someone just off to the shops, I imagine,” Nick says.
Not much later, the mood in the van on the way to Raumo is desolate. Everyone’s miserable. It’s snowing heavily again and a freezing murk prevails, the light fading quickly – not so much drained as sucked from the sky. The cardboard sheets over the hole in the floor of the van have long since been reduced to sodden pulp and we’re regularly drenched by geysers of wet muck. Ice is forming on the inside of the van. I think I can hear Martin Belmont sobbing quietly, probably thinking of the loved ones he may never see again. It’s scarily cold.
“Just think,” says Glen Colson. “If we’d come in the summer, we’d have missed all this.”
The venue in Raumo when we finally get there turns out to be at some local youth club, which isn’t quite what anyone had been expecting. Albert and the Royals are already in the dressing room, sipping tea and eating the sandwiches they appear to have brought with them in a triumph for forward planning. Nick, who’s been drinking since breakfast, crashes through the dressing room door with a whoop and much hysterical laughter. Albert is visibly shocked.
“You...” he says, aghast. “You... are... drunk?”
“Pissed as a parrot, old boy,” Nick beams, trying to light a cigarette and almost setting fire to his hair.
Needless to say, the show that follows is an absolute shambles.
The next night’s gig in Siikainen is even more bizarre. It’s in a little shack on the side of a lake, which you can’t see much of because there’s another blizzard blowing this way. I’m standing with Jake on this sort of pier just outside the shack, the light fading fast around us, when we make out these strange shapes advancing through the treeline. People are approaching us in the strange twilight, wrapped like Eskimos in layers of fur, lumbering towards us across fields of ice and snow. It’s tonight’s audience, a cheery lot, who form an orderly queue to check in their snowshoes, skis, animal pelts and suchlike at the door. Nick’s reasonably sober tonight and manages to get through the show without serious mishap, and after he plays we get in the van as quick as we can for the 10-hour drive back to Helsinki, which no one’s looking forward to. It’s colder than ever, the night a thing swarming around us as we drive through it, huddled and disconsolate. A freezing wind whistles through every hole, crack and fissure in the van’s ancient superstructure. Misery prevails. We sink into a shivering silence, broken suddenly by Nick.
“Anyone fancy a singsong?” he now cheerily suggests.
We all look at him like he’s lost his fucking mind.
“A singsong,” Jake shouts at him. “A fucking singsong? We’re not on fucking holiday. A fucking singsong? Fucking shut up and suffer in silence like the rest of us.”
Nick’s quiet for a while, then says he needs to take a pee, which starts everyone moaning again. We pull over and Nick stumbles out of the van. I go with him. We’re having a piss against the side of the van and I’m saying something to Nick that he probably can’t hear over the banshee wail of the wind. I turn to say something else, and he’s not there. He’s fallen backwards into a mountainous snowdrift, all but vanished and sinking fast.
“Help... me,” he croaks.
Martin Belmont leaps out of the van to lend a hand. We try to haul Nick out of the snowdrift, with Martin then slipping and falling head-first into the snow himself, taking me with him. Somehow, we get Nick to his feet and crawl back into the van, soaked to the skin, shedding snow, getting everyone else as wet as we are. Jake is furious, not a pretty sight. He’s got a lot invested in Nick, but at this moment looks angry enough to take a hammer to Nick’s head.
“I’m so... so sorry,” Nick whimpers, looking for more vodka and becoming utterly bereft when he realises his last bottle has rolled out of the van during the chaos at the piss-stop.
“Just shut it,” Jake says, seething. “One more word out of you, one more fucking word, and we’ll fucking leave you out here by the side of the fucking road.”
And then we’re lost in the dark maw of the Arctic night, Helsinki 300 miles down the road, with 40 years of dining out on all this ahead of us.