(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Mon 23 February 2026 7:30, UK
Artists growing to hate their most accomplished work is a cliché that goes back centuries, but the realm of pop music seems particularly susceptible to this degree of self-loathing, when musicians like Nick Lowe find widespread fame and acclaim for a song that, by their own personal standards, is fairly lacklustre.
Trying to reduce Lowe’s extensive, illustrious music career to just one song is a rather tricky task. After all, the Surrey-born songwriter has created a wealth of diverse masterpieces over the decades, along with carrying out production work on some truly iconic albums, spanning the spectrum from Elvis Costello to Johnny Cash. If you asked 100 people to name a Nick Lowe track, though, the likelihood is that ‘Cruel to Be King’ would be the most recurring answer.
A retro-styled power pop offering which was far more commercially-focused than Lowe’s early offerings during his Stiff Records era, ‘Cruel To Be Kind’ ended up being a colossal hit for the songwriter, peaking at number 12 in the UK singles chart and firmly establishing his name within the musical mainstream. For Lowe himself, though, the song was initially something of a guilty pleasure.
After all, Lowe came up during the age of grassroots pub rock, during the early origins of the punk revolution, when such an overtly commercial, pop-centric track would have been scoffed at. “I wrote this song when I was still in the group Brinsley Schwarz,” he once recalled to The Guardian. “As a ’70s pub-rock band, it was kind of taboo for us to admit to liking disco, but we were fans, and I was in love with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ ‘The Love I Lost’.”
“So the original version of ‘Cruel to Be Kind’ was my attempt at a floor-filler for when we played clubs and freshers’ balls,” he continued. “We cut the song in 1974 for an album that didn’t come out until years after we split. But when I signed with Columbia’s Gregg Geller, all my Brinsley demos and unreleased material passed to him.”
The fact that the song was recorded some five years before it was eventually released certainly accounts for the fact that, by 1979, it sounded somewhat outdated, particularly in contrast to Lowe’s output at the time. Seemingly, though, it was all down to Geller.
“Each time he rang me, he’d mention ‘Cruel to Be Kind,’” Lowe shared. “But by 1979, I was this hip new wave producer who’d worked with Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and the Damned, and the song sounded embarrassingly pre-new wave to me.”
In fact, Lowe was so embarrassed by the song that he made every effort to put Geller off the song. “I’d respond unenthusiastically. ‘Oh yeah, you like that, Gregg? Great. But I’ve got a better song here about a woman who was eaten by her dog,’” he explained. Ultimately, though, there was no getting away from the fact that ‘Cruel To Be Kind’ would end up being Nick Lowe’s next single, and there was no getting away from the fact that it would be a major hit, either.
Luckily, by the time it had made Lowe a household name and shot up to the upper-end of the singles charts, it is fair to say that the songwriter’s appreciation of the song he wrote during his pub rock era had improved somewhat.