Lowe and Brinsley Schwarz thus enjoyed plenty of name recognition among pub-rock adherents through the mid-’70s, but an unknown suburban gas station attendant named Graham Parker wasn’t among them. “I knew nothing about pub-rock, absolutely nothing,” he insists. “All I’d known was that Brinsley Schwarz was a name I’d seen in the papers doing lousy gigs. I thought they were a German heavy-metal band.”
Rejecting the progressive rock in vogue among his friends in favor of the 1960s music he’d loved in his teens, Parker took out an ad in Melody Maker, one of those weekly music papers that advertised Brinsley Schwarz gigs, saying “Singer-songwriter needs musicians into Stones, Dylan, Van Morrison.” As he explains within the liner notes to Hip-O’s Graham Parker — The Ultimate Collection, “It was basically Dylan looking for The Band.”
Though the 1974 ad failed to attract the band Parker needed, he found some musicians who helped him demo songs he’d been writing and introduced him to Dave Robinson, who had managed Brinsley Schwarz. Robinson loved the songs, shared the demos with his Radio London DJ buddy Charlie Gillette, and helped Parker assemble a band of older, more experienced pub-rock veterans. They were dubbed the Rumour, with the “twin tower” guitarists Schwarz and Martin Belmont from Ducks Deluxe, along with Brinsley’s keyboard bandmate Bob Andrews, flanking the diminutive Parker.
“Then my manager said, ‘We’ve got to get Nick Lowe to produce you,’ and I didn’t know who Nick Lowe was,” remembers Parker. Though both his band of pub-rock all stars and his producer had stronger credentials in music circles than Parker, the release of Howlin’ Wind caused a minor sensation, with the grit, urgency, roots and soulful passion of the music so at odds with the prevailing trends of the times.
“I wasn’t on anybody’s radar, and all of a sudden I was in the press, with Sounds asking, ‘Could this be the next Bob Dylan?'” he recalls. “And I thought, well, they’ve got that figured out. I was big headed. You have to be. I was 25 years old, for Christ’s sake, doomed to be a gas station attendant, and I got mad. I knew I couldn’t waste my life like that. I knew I had talent.”
If 1976 was Parker’s year, with Heat Treatment reinforcing his powerhouse synthesis, 1977 saw everything change once the Sex Pistols dropped the bomb. Parker had delivered a blistering critique of rock’s problems, but he and his band would no longer be seen as the solution. They were too old, their arrangements were too inventive and deeply rooted, they were too musical for the revolution punk would wreak on popular music. It didn’t help matters that Parker’s ’77 release, Stick To Me, lacked the punch and focus of the first two.
“The Sex Pistols were way more phenomenal, absolutely,” says Parker. “Suddenly the press was all over these people, and they weren’t all over me. Hearing the Sex Pistols and the Damned for the first time, I didn’t get it. They looked like sleaze bags. Then I saw Johnny Rotten doing ‘Pretty Vacant’ or something on ‘Top Of The Pops’, and it was like, wow, this is really something. I realized that guys my age and the Rumours’ age and the complexity of our music was not going to appeal to 16-17-year-olds. The Sex Pistols were.”
As punk begat its poppier “new wave” offshoot, Parker seemed to provide the template for an emerging songwriter whose renown would quickly eclipse his. Like Parker, Elvis Costello was a scrawny, angry, bespectacled guy who came out of nowhere, fronted a hot band with deep roots, and recruited Nick Lowe to produce his debut. Compounding the connection, Costello recorded for Stiff Records, the iconoclastic indie label co-founded by Parker’s manager, whose signing of Parker to the major-label Phonogram helped launch the fledgling operation. When My Aim Is True made Elvis a chart-topper, Parker began to seem like an afterthought. Some converts with short attention spans told Parker he sounded a lot like Costello, where chronology suggests vice versa.
“I still think My Aim Is True is the best thing he’s ever done, a monster classic,” says Parker. “He was a true pub-rocker, if anybody was. A fan of Brinsley Schwarz and obviously a real Nick Lowe fan. My manager had always been talking about starting a record label and signing all of these acts that I considered losers. Next thing I know, Declan McManus is Elvis Costello and Ian Dury has this incredible band together, the Blockheads. Wow, what happened to those losers?
“In 1976, none of those people had their act together. They were playing much more apologetically. Whereas I was just so pumped up and full of myself. I’d hit the stage and I was incredibly intense and the Rumour seemed to understand — let’s go, from one song to the next, very little talking, no tuning up, if it’s not in tune, fuck it — they were just following my lead. None of those so-called pub-rockers had been doing that, but by 1977 they all emerged with much stronger acts.”
Though Parker was no more a new waver than he was a punk rocker, competition from the likes of Costello spurred him to his greatest creative glory. With 1979’s Squeezing Out Sparks, Parker’s strongest collection of songs and the streamlined, supercharged backing of the Rumour accelerated his momentum, pushing his career from stalled into overdrive.
As those privileged to witness the tour in support of the album can attest, few live performances have ever been so galvanizing, so overpoweringly intense. “The punk thing had happened and all these exciting acts were taking over, and I was already being written off, which the press tends to do,” he recounts. “Squeezing Out Sparks didn’t have as much roots or swing, and there was no horn section on it. The songs were just great. I know how good ‘Discovering Japan’ is — the lyrics, the chord sequence, there’s nothing like that, there’s nobody that good these days.
