The lucky moment in 1992 that gave Nick Lowe a million-pound payday: “What can I say?”
Few were banking on Nick Lowe to suddenly be showered with songwriting cash so late in the game, no less than the man himself.
He straddled a curious hodgepodge of musical terrain when first going solo in the mid-1970s. Some pub rock swagger, power pop shine, and seamless coast into the new wave all scored Lowe’s distinct songcraft, just as at ease penning a UK and US top 20 with ‘Cruel to Be Kind’ as he was producing The Damned’s album debut and standing as a studio dependable for the Stiff Records label.
Yet, one of his numbers would take nearly 20 years to reap any commercial rewards. Waking up one morning in the early 1970s, Lowe had the long and cumbersome ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’ title stuck in his mouth and decided he liked it enough to begin sketching an accompanying country folk leaning tune for his Brinsley Schwarz band. Released as a single for 1974’s The New Favourites of… Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe’s pop hopeful failed to make a dent in the charts with the band dissolving not long after.
Lowe would play bass in Rockpile before being pulled into Stiff’s orbit, where he first crossed paths with one Elvis Costello. Similarly, soaking up some of that new wave spikiness and armed with a veneration for the classic songbook, the recent Stiff signee saw the first batch of LPs cut with Lowe in the producer’s chair, including 1979’s Armed Forces, his and the Attractions’ biggest album yet, with canonical hits like ‘Accidents Will Happen’ and ‘Oliver’s Army’.
It’s during these sessions that Lowe’s buried single was dusted off for another stab. Having been one of the few fans paying attention back in 1974, Costello recorded his own version of ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding’, first issued curiously as the B-side to Lowe’s ‘American Squirm’ in 1978 and then tacked onto US issues of American Forces at Columbia’s behest after the former’s success in the States.
Brinsley Schwarz’s lost gem had finally made it, Costello’s rendition standing as the defining take and popularised from then on. Lowe already had reasons to be cheerful with his old number’s second lease of life until its surprise feature on the third biggest-selling album of all time.
Thrust to mega unit shifts by the mammoth success of ‘I Will Always Love You’, the official soundtrack to the Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner romantic drama The Bodyguard in 1992, sold ungodly amounts of records at nearly 30 million certified copies today, and 10m in its first year. Luckily for Lowe, jazz crooner Curtis Stigers had signed up to cut his own poppy take on ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding’ on the soundtrack, resulting in the number’s third significant chart boost and the first of many fat cheques landing through his letter box.
“A million dollars. I won’t be coy. A million fucking bucks,” he told Mojo in 1994. “What can I say? It was just the most enormous stroke of luck.”
According to the songwriter himself, the huge financial success of The Bodyguard paid for tours, a decent tour bus, and several plush hotels. As for anyone willing to sit through the film’s cheesy melodrama, around ten seconds of Stigers’ ‘(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding’ can be heard roughly 33 minutes in, as Houston’s character receives a death threat. It was a small Hollywood footnote that ultimately saw Lowe laughing all the way to the bank after the song’s initial failure in 1974.
