An evening with two of the 70s and 80s greatest underground songwriters (though it’s hard to say Nick Lowe is underground when I hear one of his songs is going to be used in the new Ant Bully movie) seemed like a crime to miss.  But it turned out my expectations got the best of me. When I arrived, Robyn Hitchcock was already on the stage performing his 1988 hit “Balloon Man.” The former leader of the influential 70s punk band the Soft Boys, Hitchcock stood alone with an acoustic guitar, seeming just as natural up there as he did with his full band past, offering explanations of his songs and little jokes about Cockney accents and Elton John. When Nick Lowe took the stage, also only with an acoustic guitar, I must admit my hopes were pretty high. I want to say I was disappointed, but that might be a little extreme. After the recent re-release of Pure Pop for Now People I was hoping that Lowe was going to dig deep into his back catalogue and play some of his classic cuts like “So It Goes,” “Switchboard Susan,” and “Teacher Teacher.”  Instead he played mostly newer material promoting his new album At My Age (accidentally calling it My Aim Is True), though he did play “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding,” “Cruel to Be Kind,” and the more recent “Beast In Me.”  The set was quite long and the most interesting part of it was a drunken man in the front row spitting ice on people and falling on himself.  After Lowe’s set both men took the stage together to do a couple of covers, including Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” in which Hitchcock sang lead. Even the duet didn’t hold up to the drunken man.

— Daniel Clodfelter

When I heard that Robyn Hitchcock was coming back to town as co-headliner with Nick Lowe at the El Rey, the first thing I did was cash in on my fabulous L.A. RECORD connections to score tickets. The second thing I did was miss his entire set. I arrived at 10 pm, which on a Friday night by L.A. standards is pretty damn prompt, to find that not only had Robyn come and gone, but I’d already even missed Nick Lowe’s first couple of tunes. Not being all that familiar with Lowe’s stuff–except of course for his standards “Cruel to Be Kind” and “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding”–I disappointedly resigned myself to sit through his set and try to enjoy myself. After listening to him play a couple of tunes of just him and acoustic guitar, I was sure that was not going to happen. But as the evening wore on, I found myself increasingly entranced by the 50-something Englishman’s simple yet heartfelt melodies and story-like lyrics of life and love. Though sponsored by Indie 103, it felt like more of a KCRW crowd, the audience comprising faux-hipsters in their late twenties who allowed their parents to tag along, all singing to every song, completely enamored with Lowe. The highlight for me was the encore, when both Lowe and Hitchcock took the stage together and performed a number of surprising old covers, including the little-known 1963 tune “Hungry For Love” by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, “Peggy Sue” by Buddy Holly” and the Beatles’ “If I Fell.”

— Lovely Linda