John HIatt, Nick Lowe & Paul Carrack - Wonderful Copenhagen (2024)

Collaborations between John Hiatt and Nick Lowe began long before Lowe contributed to Hiatt’s Bring The Family album in 1987, and participated - alongside Ry Cooder and Jim Keltner - in the short-lived super-group Little Village. Indeed, Lowe produced, played bass and provided backing vocals for the second side of Hiatt’s 1983 album Riding With The King. Lowe’s then touring and studio band The Cowboy Outfit were bought in to back Hiatt, and it just so happened that the legendary (even by then) Paul Carrack was a member of the mighty Outfit and thus played his inimitable keyboards on the album too. But that’s not all; when it was time for John Hiatt to take his new record on the road, he didn’t hog the limelight; instead, he invited Lowe and Carrack along, gave them equal billing to himself, and all three got a hand in formulating the set lists; each of the trio featured songs of their own - or ones with which they were notably connected. The tour focussed on Europe and Scandinavia - Hiatt had yet to make much impact in his native US - and perhaps the finest of the shows they played took place in Copenhagen on 21st December 1983. A truly democratic affair with Carrack’s ‘Soul Cruising’ kicking things off, and thereafter each participant would take the star turn on a number of their own. Carrack later got to croon perhaps the vocal performance he is most famous for, Squeeze’s ‘Tempted’ (a band he was keyboard player and occasional vocalist with between 1980 and ’81). ‘How Long’, a number one hit in 1975 by Carrack’s former band Ace, is also featured. Nick Lowe’s selection includes cuts from a variety of his solo albums, and includes such classics as ‘Heart Of The City’, ‘Cracking Up’, ‘Half A Boy & Half A Man’ and ‘Cruel To Be Kind’. Master of ceremonies John Hiatt sticks to numbers from Riding With The King, but no one was complaining; it remains among Hiatt’s strongest early records featuring some of his very strongest compositions - without a weak track in its grooves. It would, however, have been near impossible to get these three musos in a room together without a fine selection of cover versions also given an airing, and here we find magical versions of Dusty Springfield’s ‘Little By Little’, Wilson Pickett’s ‘634-5789’, and, originally recorded by The Invincibles in 1966 and covered by the aforementioned Ry Cooder in 1979, ‘I Can’t Win’.