Book Review: Cruel to be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe, by Will Birch (2019)

The US cover of Cruel to be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe, by Will Birch, 2019.

The UK cover of Cruel to be Kind, by Will Birch, 2019.

The eternally cool Nick Lowe.

Author and musician Will Birch.

British rocker Nick Lowe gets his due in the excellent 2019 biography Cruel to be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe, by Will Birch. Birch has known Lowe since the 1970’s, and he makes no bones about the fact that he is a big fan of Lowe’s work. Birch interviewed Lowe numerous times for the biography, and while it’s not an “authorized” biography, it was written with Lowe’s cooperation. (Although it did take Nick a long time to come around to the idea of someone writing a book about him.)

I’m a big Nick Lowe fan, so I’m quite thrilled there’s a biography of him. In December, I was watching a YouTube video of Nick singing “When I Write the Book” with Los Straitjackets at First Avenue in Minneapolis when I thought to myself “It’s too bad Nick will probably never write an autobiography, he’s such a cool guy. I guess that article in Rolling Stone last year will be the piece with the most biographical details in it.” And then, on the YouTube sidebar, I saw there was a conversation with Nick Lowe and Will Birch at the Strand bookstore in New York City. I was shocked that there was a biography of Nick Lowe that had been out for four months before I’d heard about it. 

Cruel to be Kind is a fantastic book for fans of Nick Lowe. There are lots of great stories from throughout Lowe’s fifty-year career in music. There’s also a lot of detail about his childhood, which was spent in some exotic locales, as his father, an officer in the RAF, was transferred from Jordan to Cyprus to Germany. 

One of my favorite tidbits that I learned from Cruel to be Kind is that in the early 1980’s Lowe wrote several songs for possible inclusion in the 1984 movie Top Secret! Sadly, Lowe’s songs didn’t make it into the film. I’ve been a fan of Top Secret! since I was a little kid, as it was written and directed by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, the guys who made the 1980 classic Airplane!

Birch is also astute at chronicling Lowe’s transformation from New Wave rocker to the veteran musician who has turned out excellent albums like The Impossible Bird, Dig My Mood, The Convincer, and At My Age. These albums have demonstrated that Lowe has become an even better songwriter as he’s gotten older, a rarity in rock music. 

Not surprisingly, Lowe’s old pal Elvis Costello has one of the best quotes in the book: “There’s something about wearing the clothes that suit you at the age you are. Who would you rather be—Steven Tyler or Nick Lowe? Steven’s a good character, but isn’t that an awful lot of work before you go out in the morning?” (p.305) 

If you’re a fan of Nick Lowe’s, you’ll enjoy learning more about his life in Cruel to be Kind.