Lowell was the first person I knew who made a living from his chosen artform. We've been friends for over a decade now. This interview was done at night time in Lowell's study, you walk up the stairs through red velvet drapes into a room chock full of books. There's a table with enamle paintings of writers, William Burroughs, Bukousky and so on. We drank red wine through the interview and a couple of times the proceedings were interupted by Lowell singing his songs. He's a better singer than he realizes, with a deep, rough hewn English/Australian twang of an accent.

Konrad: When did it start? When is the earliest art making or music making that you remember. 

Lowell: Well I grew up in England, so I spent the first ten years of my life in England. My father was a schoolteacher and played a lot of piano so the music I listened to at that period was things like Gilbert and Sullivan and Benny Goodman on the radio, whatever was on the radio. Then rock'n'roll comes in and it's the same story for everyone. I used to watch 65 Special. I'd already done piano lessons from the age of seven. My first language was French. We were a Seventh Day Adventist family. When someone asked me what I wanted to do with my life at the age of seven I remember that on at least one occasion I said an author. Then we came out to Australia as migrants.

 How was that?

 Well I've actually just written a manuscript called 'Migrants' and Penguin has written me a very favourable thing. They want to go ahead with it. That actually documents the whole coming out to Australia and all those sorts of things, being put in a migrant hostel. What it's about is that I noticed that a lot of my friends were Russian, Fijian and so on and we resolved our ethnicity in popular culture at a point of time when the Beatles came out. So even though he was a Russian and other people were Jewish or Black or something else, what happens is when we get together instead of talking about Fijian music or your Russian thing or your first language or anything, let's talk about the Beatles.  Pop culture took hold and the Beatles came in at a very familiar point of time. So, what I'm trying to say there is that you can resolve all your ethnic problems and your weird religious backgrounds in pop.

 So the Beatles were a big turning point?

 Yeah they were and that was a troublesome time too cause I wanted to grow my hair and I was going to the fucking church that I didn't believe in. It was all very tough, you know. I mean, I didn't become a Christian until something like the age of 23 and it lasted till about 29. I did a whole lot of ... even three albums and God knows what That whole period in the church was of unrest and getting into constant trouble. I've got a friend, Allan Broadhurst, I've known him since I was 14. I've known Robert Wolfgramm since we were 16. So all the people I do things with have a long history. We had a band. It was a garage band and we did songs like Animals songs and everyone at church was shocked that we're being delinquent and we're being stereotyped and it was all pretty awful. Alan wrote a poem when I was about sixteen. He said 'I reckon I'm onto this poetry stuff.' I said 'oh well, give us a look.' His poem went "I wear the clothes I like. I wear my hair like I like. I have a shirt I like. I listen to the music I like. If people don't care what I like, fuck em." Something like that. Then he didn't go on. He never wrote another poem, ever. He taught me how to write poetry. So we had a band and all that crap.

 Then in the Seventies it was the early folk period. Dylan just dominated my Sixties more than the Beatles, more than anybody, for a lot of reasons. I went to the Yellow House where I met Martin Sharp in 1970. I had a stand at the Domain in 1970. It was a nihilist stand so I've got all this nihilistic we're all going nowhere stuff. Then Wolfgramm became a Christian. He came to an understanding. I kind of went along with that, in the most positive way, so I shouldn't say went along with it. It was a little bit counter cultural as Christianity was. People would go to Church to argue and I liked it. Then I wrote some plays, musicals, three albums, a book called 'The Edges of Adventism', a book on the Salvation Army, researched the Children of God and all that stuff, a lot of Gospel things. Joel was born in the middle of that not knowing that there were Friday night meetings and all this stuff. So there was a lot of music attached to that and plus I was playing gigs. I played the Elizabethan and all this in the Seventies.

 What I find really hard, I've had to deal with it over the last couple of weeks, is that some people when they talk to me about what I do, that's the period that they dwell on because they like those gospel songs, they're still playing some of them in churches and last year they put on 'Apocalypse Rider' which is a Gospel thing. So there's all these things coming out of the past. You just can't know how tough it is when somebody's sitting there saying 'mate, the best book you ever wrote was the Edges of Adventism.' You're just like 'Oh my God, get this guy out of here.' It's shocking.

 Was it hard getting started, career-wise?

 Yeah. All my life I've always written and during that whole Seventies period I was a schoolteacher and I was writing that book and all the things I've said I'd written and not getting a bean for it. The unhappiest years of my life were being in high school and when I went back as a teacher I just couldn't believe it except the product that you're handling is quite good, you're handling literiture. What started me as a professional was when I went to Bermagui, so I dropped teaching and went to Bermagui with the kids, Amber and Joel and Robbie and we lived in a hut and I was a shocking fisherman but because of the manuscript that I had written while I was a schoolteacher, which has never been published and I don't think it was very good, I got a literature grant. That was 1980. At that point I was a professional writer and there were things in the pipeline; Harper and Row was in the pipeline, then the business writing was shaping up, people wanted me to ghost for them. That's when it started in a professional sense.

 Where to from there?

 I started with the grant, which was a great thing to have and then Penguin Books published Taylor's Troubles, so by 1982 all these great things had happened plus I was in a band and I was involved in, the Southern Flyer, which wasn't paying any money and I met Martin Sharp and worked on the Tiny Tim thing until 1985. In 1985 I just had to get out of Bermagui. The kids had to get into high school so I spent seven years working for publishing houses during which time I painted a lot and did '1967'. Now I'm doing a lot of ghost and co-writing and writing books. I've always got about four books on the go. I'm just finishing that one, 'My Dad Thinks I Rob Banks', I've got this coaching guy, that's ghosting, that won't have my name on it, got Penguin interested in 'Migrants', got a very good rejection from Allen and Unwin, if you've read it you'd go 'wow, that's as good as a rejection can be' and someone in Brisbane wants a book and they're talking of sending me to America or England if they can get a signature on paper. It's all co-authored books. It's their story, it's not my story. It's fine, it's great, I always wanted to earn a living as a writer, that's the aim of it, so there you go.

 When did you start being able to earn your living as a writer?

 1980 and everything I've earned since then has been through writing except when I taught TAFE a little bit.

 Is that a nice feeling to look back on...

 Well it is in the sense that it's what I set out to do but what's a little strange is that I paint pictures and then people say 'that's a good picture' but nobody ever says  I'm a good painter. I get my guitar out and I play them a song, if I pull it off they say 'that's a good song,'  they never say that I'm a good singer, a good player or anything. Then when I write, even when people don't like it they go 'well, you're a good writer. It's a boring book.' So okay, I'm a good writer. The thing is, from my point of view I may get more satisfaction out of singing in a bad band. But, I don't believe that anyone owes me anything. I don't believe that I have a right to be a painter or a right to be anything which explains the path I've led. I've just followed the money line.

 Do you want to talk more about the music?

 Well I started piano when I was seven. I learned until I was fourteen and then I got my first guitar and stopped piano immediately. When it came to playing guitar I never really learned. I just seemed to believe  you just picked it up and used it like a percussion instrument. To a certain extent I think I'm more interested in the words. Most people don't like me playing guitar. No-one in the Wilts did. No-one likes it, it's true, only me. I sneak up on them.

 So I suppose my idea of writing music is writing words really. All my words always rhyme so they appear to be song lyrics somehow. I write rhyming stuff which isn't in vogue at all as a modern poem.

 I've often thought that your kids growing up with you would give them more confidence to try a career in the arts.

 Well I've never recommended it. I've always said 'Geeze, mate. Don't do that. It's hard.' It is hard. You've got to do what you've got to do. 

 Your Tiny Tim book's being published from what I've heard.

 Is it?  They could have told me. I've got a contract on it with Sue, his third wife. She had it for a couple of years. Had an option on it for one year and I just said 'forget it. Do your best.' She always sends me a Christmas card and sometimes we talk on the phone, every six months or something. I think whoever publishes it, if someone's gonna do it, it should really be her. She cares.

 Is it odd having that time lag between finishing a work and getting it published. 

 Yeah it is. That's really odd because your mind is never where everyone else's is. The worst thing I find and it happens all the time, everyone says well what do you do. If I say I'm a writer they're gonna say 'Oh, you should write my story' or they do a trace to see whether they're talking to someone famous and if not they'll dismiss me.

 What makes you write? 

 I think I would have been a good librarian. I've kept a diary since the age of seven, every day. I seem to want to tape things, so I try and get representations of things, and then I seem to want to clean them up and I seem to enjoy doing that so obviously I'm trying to preserve history but I don't seem to have a drive for fame. I haven't really pushed that. I don't want fame, I don't want to be the front man.

 Can I ask you about influences?

 Well obviously I tried to copy Dylan for  a long time. I think I'd like to articulate as well as Nick Cave. I think he's Australia's best writer. Bukouski's a wonderful writer. Robert Louis Stephenson's a wonderful writer. Allen Ginsberg's great moment was Howl. Artistically I think Marcel Du Champ would be my number one. Salvidor Dali, I don't want him on the list but he has to be there. I idolized him at seventeen, that's when I read 'Secret Life.' Warhol. Vincent Van Gogh has to be pre-eminent because of his letters as for his paintings. Brett Whitely and Martin Sharp.

 One of the things about Martin Sharp, I learned so much from him,  but one of the things was the use of the tape recorder. We were taping copious amounts of things. I've enjoyed his art, I don't know whether he influenced me there. Well, he must have influenced me in 25 ways.

 I don't know about influences. There's a difference to me between people who are influences and people I admire. Now I think in terms of influences I can go back to the newsletter days when there was a guy called Phill Ward who started the Small Business Newsletter. Phil Ward said 'The average person on the street can read 20 word sentences.' The first problem is to cut down to 20 word sentences. So I'm thinking of all these ways of getting rid of similies, metaphores, suspect adgectives and going to the bone.

 By the time I worked for Michael Wilkinson  who worked for the Herald Sun before he owned his own company. Michael started teaching me. He said 'when you do an interview push them a bit.' So you ask the question and then you say 'did you go broke or did you do that.' Suddenly the person's got to wake up and go 'yeah well, that happened because I went broke.' 'What's your turnover with your business? How many employees do you have.' Just push them, push them, push them. In terms of infuences I know the right answer is Kerouac or something but I'd say Phil Ward, Michael Wilkinson and people I've worked with.

 What's in the future.

 I think we want to move to Bermagui. I want to work on personal projects. I've enjoyed doing the CD.   I'm not very worried about the marketplace. I am and I'm not. What I'd like would be a book like 'How to Make Millions on the Stock Exchange', something like that to go through the roof.  I get royalties and I sort of do what I like really because when you do something really, you do it for a few close friends. Do a CD like that, twelve people will hear it, you've got one, Jason's got one, Joel's got one. After that you don't hear the applause. Some people like the applause whereas to me sometimes I like to get into the back. I like being in the front and I like being in the back. I'm happy to write someone else's story because I'm sitting in the back, I'm not answerable for it and I've got a book out.

 Do you get much time for personal projects?

 Well, whenever I do any project I do tend to do it from start to finish so if I'm doing a draft for a book I'll go from start to finish. If it's my own personal project then I'll go from start to finish. I don't do anything else. I quite like the short book style because it's something you can actually reread in a night. It's quick. Whereas if you're doing War and Peace it takes too long. Like I've always said, 'If you research a book over five years and publish it or if I knock one out over two months then your cover price isn't any better than mine. They're both $29.95.' I know exactly what I'm doing in every situation whereas a lot of time is spent with some people trying to find how to do what they're gonna do. What I do is I first of all run tape. Transcribe the tape, keep doing it, otherwise it becomes a mountain you'll never cross. So you keep doing that and what you do is you clean up something. You lead with who, what, where, why. Lock them into an angle, whatever that angle is.

 Everything needs editing. When it comes to writing, all of writing is a question of good editing. That's where it is. That's where I differ with the Beat poets. The people who took the Beat poets idea of spilling your guts and editing it like Bukouski and Hunter S. Thompson... When you write you can nearly always throw out the first paragraph. You're only doing it to get in the mood. That psyches you up and then 'bang', you say it in the second verse. Chuck out the first. It just cuts in so much quicker.

 I had a real eye-opener when I was doing 'The Edges of Seventh Day Adventism.' I laboured on a lot of the chapters and they came up good but I knocked one out viciously one morning, I did it in four hours. I looked at it and I thought 'Jesus, it's got a bit more energy. It's not as laboured.' I felt it's as good as anything. I thought 'write faster.' 5000 words a day is a good level for a professional writer.

 I said to Joel 'whatever you want to be in life, you do it every day. So draw every day if that's what you want to do.' You become what you earn your money off, eventually you do and all those dreams all die.