Southern Fried
Nick Lowe & Jim Lauderdale
Perth Concert Hall
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
One problem with writing songs that last is that they’re generally not inflation-proof. In I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Nick Lowe has the proud dad putting "a grand" down on "a cosy love nest". In 1971 this was an entirely plausible deposit. To multiply that grand by ten, twenty or whatever, might add contemporary realism but it’s part of the song’s charm. It also serves to underline just how long Lowe has been a master of pop songcraft.
He and his friend and opening act, North Carolina troubadour Jim Lauderdale, are a pair of song factories. At one point, Lauderdale mentioned having written a hundred songs with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. This might not be an exaggeration. His I Love You More was written in an idle moment in Glasgow and might well have joined another Lauderdale item, Seems Like You’re Gonna Take Me Back on soul giant Solomon Burke’s Nashville album.
Lauderdale sings from the heart, like another name he dropped in prefacing The King of Broken Hearts, George Jones, and though it wasn’t a competition he did slightly better than Lowe at cajoling a chorus from the audience, leaving them, appropriately, with the friendly persuasion of Headed for the Hills.
While Lauderdale was happy to chat, Lowe preferred the singing juke-box approach in a brilliantly relaxed, clearly enunciated crooning style. The songs flowed to his gently strummed, perfectly shaped guitar accompaniments, tracing an unbroken line of quality from the standard, Until the Real Thing Comes Along across decades of his own writing and on to Elvis Costello’s Alison.
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