Category: Lloyd Cole

The next couple of days will see some short reflections on what proved to be a couple of outstanding gigs in Glasgow last week.

First up was a much-delayed appearance from Lloyd Cole on Monday 25 April at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall (GRCH)  It was originally scheduled for just over two years previously at the City Halls, a different location not all that often used for rock/pop events, but was an early victim of the widespread cancellations of events as a result of the COVID outbreak.  Indeed, Lloyd reflected on this while on stage, reminiscing that he’d come over from his home in Massachusetts at the beginning of March 2010 for what was meant to be a 31-date tour across Europe, only to have it halted just seven shows in.  There had been two subsequent attempts to reschedule, both of which were impacted from the fact that COVID showed no signs of diminishing, and indeed when the time and opportunity finally presented itself in 2022, the tour has had to be much-truncated and in some cases, such as Glasgow, the venue had to be shifted.

The one slight disappointment from a selfish point of view was that myself and Rachel’s tickets for the 2020 show had been bought within minutes of them going on sale, and we had snapped up two seats in the third row, slap bang in the centre.  Our tickets for the new venue were still very good, but slightly further back and slightly to one side of the auditorium, although to be fair, in a venue as grand and acoustically excellent as the GRCH, it was only a small gripe and didn’t detract from a hugely enjoyable evening.

The tour has been given the title ‘From Rattlesnakes to Guesswork’, with the sales pitch indicating there would be songs from all across his career, but with an emphasis on the debut album with the Commotions and his most recent solo release from 2019.  Lloyd took to the stage, at 8.45pm, going straight into Past Imperfect, the opening track from the much underappreciated album he released in 2000 with a new, and what proved to be short-lived backing band, The Negatives.  It’s long been one of my favourites and so, as far as I was concerned, it had got off to the perfect start.

mp3: Lloyd Cole – Past Imperfect

To just about everyone’s surprise, he aired Rattlesnakes very early on in the set, to the extent that a few stragglers, arriving for what I’m assuming they thought would be a 9pm start on the back of an appearance by a support act, were greeted from the stage with the words, “Good evening, welcome to the show…just to mention that I’m sorry, but you’ve missed Rattlesnakes’, an indication that Lloyd was in relaxed mood and enjoying the way the audience, which wasn’t quite a sell-out, was responding so enthusiastically.

Ten songs into the set, and he told us he was taking a short break of 20 minutes, after which he would return with someone who ‘would show up my guitar playing as being that of a well-meaning amateur’ for the second half of the show.

He was as good as his word, and to just about everyone’s expectation, his return saw him flanked by Neil Clark, long-time collaborator from the days of the Commotions and who also played on Guesswork, and they started things with this:-

mp3: Lloyd Cole & The Commotions – Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?

The next 80 minutes or so seemed to go by in a flash.  Lloyd and Neil were on blistering form, delivering a wonderful set in front of a home audience with, as they said on a couple of occasions, a few of their own friends, former colleagues and family sitting in the auditorium.  All told, they played a further twenty songs, taking the show right through to ten past eleven, which is almost unheard of at gigs in Glasgow, with most venues having curfews around 10.30/10.45…but then again GRCH isn’t in a residential area and so the council are a bit more relaxed when it comes to noise and disturbance. As I commented on Facebook in the immediate aftermath, it made for a good night for taxi drivers, as most of the last trains had left the stations and buses don’t go to all parts of the city and surrounding areas.

Lloyd Cole celebrated his 61st birthday a few months back. He doesn’t look anything like it, and his voice is as good as it’s ever been, capable of sustaining him night after night for sets that are about two hours in length.  OK, he doesn’t expend any energy rushing around the stage, never moving more than a few feet from his microphone, and the biggest effort comes when changing between his three acoustic guitars.  Neil Clark, now that he’s bald and wears glasses, looks more like a middle manager in some sort of office setting, but his guitar work remains a class above most of his peers and there is real dynamism and chemistry between him and his singer-songwriter buddy.  Together, they made it look effortless, when in fact the professionalism on show can really only be achieved thanks to many hours of preparation and rehearsal.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve now seen Lloyd Cole play on a stage somewhere, having taken in gigs in many towns in Scotland, as well as a show in Dublin in 2000. He’s never disappointed and to finish his main-set off with three great songs from the Commotions era – Hey Rusty, Perfect Skin and Lost Weekend – only to come back with a short encore which was rounded off by Forest Fire, meant that nobody was left feeling short-changed and firmly of the view that the two-year delay was worth waiting for.

Looking back over the set-list, it turned out there were ten songs from the Commotions era and two songs from the collaboration with the Negatives, with the other eighteen being spread, but not evenly, across various solo albums, with four taken from Standards (2013) and five from Guesswork (2019). These were among the highlights:-

mp3: Lloyd Cole – Period Piece
mp3: Lloyd Cole – The Afterlife

He’s still got it…..and hopefully he’ll be back on our shores again before too long.

JC

He’s been all over this  and the old blog from the very beginning.  Indeed, going back to the old blog, it was a Lloyd Cole song which provided the material for the second ever post, away back on 1 October 2006.  Butterfly (the Planet Ann Charlotte mix) in case you were wondering.

I’ve long wanted to do this particular ICA as the companion piece to the Lloyd Cole & The Commotions effort which was #11 in the series back in April 2015.  I’ve been hesitant as there’s been so many references to the solo career both by myself and a few of the guest contributors, and in particular there was an 11-part weekly series back in 2018 looking in some depth at the solo albums.  Indeed, I’m going to rely in part on what was written during that series as maybe I can’t find a better way of expressing my thoughts, allied to the fact that it will prevent me from contradicting myself!!

So, without any further ado, I am delighted to offer up, ‘Old Enough To Know Better – an ICA of Lloyd Cole’s finest solo recordings’

SIDE A

1. Old Enough To Know Better (Etc. 2001)

Back in 1996, Lloyd had spent much of the year in a New York studio, carving out an album full of acoustic-driven songs, with a number of old friends, including ex-Commotion Neil Clark, flying in to lend a hand.  He handed in the album to his direct contacts at his then record label and all seemed well.  Record company politics then took over as the upstairs bosses felt that the timing was perfect for another compilation album, this time taking the old favourites from the Commotions era and throwing in some songs from the four solo albums released between 1990 and 1995.  Things got really messy and complicated.  The proposed new album was shelved and indeed Collection, as the new compilation would end up being named, was delayed until 1998.

It wasn’t until 2001 when he had finally extracted himself from the major label he had been with all his days that he was able to finally get many of the songs from 1996 out there to his fans, albeit in a re-recorded fashion. Etc. was made up of fully realised songs, demos and covers, and Lloyd’s voice has rarely sounded more impressive, It’s a beautiful record, one which reflected the way he was now earning his living as a live musician, touring solo with just a couple of guitars, coming along with no support acts, splitting his sets into two halves, keeping the big hits from the band days till the second sets.

I reckon the title track of ICA 300 is the perfect scene setter for what follows.

2. Sweetheart (Lloyd Cole, 1990)

Lloyd has never hidden his love for Marc Bolan/T.Rex, covering a number of songs over the years as well as writing his own tributes, such as 4MB which was a b-side on one of his singles from 1993. He’s also suggested in a newspaper interview that Telegram Sam is his favourite single of all time.  It was therefore hardly a surprise that his debut solo album, which was a conscious effort to make a rock record that would be quite different from the Commotions material, would contain at least one number leaning heavily on those riffs from the glam era.

3. Weeping Wine (Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe, 1991)

Lloyd’s second solo album is something of a lost gem.  It’s a record of two very distinct sides.  In the UK, the first side is packed with rich, expansive songs on which an orchestra features, unlike anything we had heard from him before, while the flip side contains guitar-led songs along the lines of what we were used to.  In the USA, the record label was still desperate to make a rock star out of our hero, and so the record was flipped over there.

My preference is very much for the orchestral material but in terms of the flow of the ICA, I think it makes sense to offer the most Commotion-sounding of all his early solo material.  It was released as a single here in the UK, but it flopped, getting absolutely no air play as the sort of miserable, whining sounding lyric over a tasteful guitar tune was so out of sync with all the dance music that was dominating the charts….oh and grunge!

4. The Young Idealists (Antidepressant, 2006)

As anyone who has ever been entertained at any of the solo gigs can testify, Lloyd Cole never really has been the miserable sod that the lazy journalists have portrayed him as throughout his career.  In 2006, he released Antidepressant, an album in which self-deprecating humour is very much on display, none more so than on the song which opened the album.

I’nm convinced that all long time fans on hearing this for the first time will have afforded themselves a wry and knowing smile. At the time, we were in our mid 40s, fighting hard to keep the same beliefs and core values as we did in our mid 20s, but shaping them a bit from the life lessons we had learned along the way.  I’d like to think, as we edge towards, or get beyond, bus pass age, we still remain true to them.

5. Women’s Studies (Standards, 2013)

Roy Wilkinson, a veteran music journalist here in the UK (and also the brother of two members of British Sea Power), gave Standards a 4-star review in Mojo magazine, with the following opening:-

The track Women’s Studies includes references to ‘Penguin Classics’ and an unfinished witticism about Josef K and the city of Prague.  It would, wouldn’t it? This is archetypal Cole, harking back to the honeyed country rock of second Commotions album Easy Pieces.

He ends the review with a one-word sentence. ‘Captivating.’

Which I think is as good a word to describe Lloyd Cole’s impact on me over the past 37 years.

SIDE B

1. Half Of Everything (Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe, 1991)

More than seven minutes in length, this one has the kitchen sink thrown at it.  It was a toss-up between this and the other fantastic songs on the first side of this album, but this makes the cut for the ICA as, unlike Butterfly and Margo’s Waltz, it wasn’t released as a single.

2. Like Lovers Do (Stephen Street Mix) (b-side, 1996)

The third solo album, Bad Vibes, had sold poorly. It sort of forced Lloyd into a rethink and ultimately led to his next album, Love Story, having a song that took him back into the singles charts. The downside of the Top 30 success of Like Lovers Do was that it led to the label executives having that idea of a further best of, referred to in the narrative for the first track of this ICA and the subsequent problems which transpired.

Like Lovers Do was a deserved success, a radio-friendly, intelligent and upbeat piece of pop, just outside the mainstream but far from indie. A slightly different mix was made available as a b-side to Baby, the fourth single to be lifted from Love Story, and it’s that version which has been sneaked onto the ICA.

3. Music In A Foreign Language (Music In A Foreign Language, 2003)

The early part of the 21st Century had seen Lloyd get out on the road performing shows that were almost entirely acoustic with storytelling thrown in for good measure.  The old songs always got the loudest cheers and applause in the live setting, but there was enough of a devotion from the fans that the new material was well received, enough for Lloyd to have a go at a really stripped down record not far removed from a home recording. The result was Music In A Foreign Language, and it has a number of very fine moments, not least the title track.

4. Undressed (Lloyd Cole, 1990)

The debut album rocks in many places, but some of my favourite moments on the record come from this whimsical quieter number, where the guitar, combined with the harmonica, reminds me in places of some of Johnny Marr‘s stuff with The Smiths.   I’m sure it’s also one of Lloyd’s favourite of his songs as it’s been a constant part of his sets over the years.

5. What’s Wrong With This Picture (The Negatives, 2000)

If you recall, from the opening gambit, an album from 1996 was sitting unreleased in the record company vaults and Lloyd’s career was seemingly on hold.  He was living and working in NYC and had hooked up with a band of talented local musicians with whom he was determined to write and record.   Pulling in a few favours in terms of funding and studio time, some of 1999 was spent working up songs with his new group, now known as The Negatives.  Some of these songs were from the 1996 album, but others were new material.

It turned out that a French-based label, XIII Bis Records, had the stomach for the legal battle over publishing and recording rights and this enable The Negatives to be released in November 2000.  In this long-time fan’s view, the album proved to be one of the most unexpectedly high points of Lloyd’s entire career, sort of retrospective in many ways, but it was full of defiance to the critics who all too often had written him off, and of course those record company executives who had made recent years such a misery.

BONUS COVERS 7″

Chelsea Hotel #2 (originally by Leonard Cohen)
The Slider (originally by T.Rex)
People Ain’t No Good (originally by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds)

I really want to thank everyone who has contributed in any shape or form to the ICAs, either via the comments or as a guest contributor.  I never dreamed it would still be going strong after 300 editions, proving to be the most popular idea/feature I’ve managed to come up with.   #301 will, I’ve no doubt, be along shortly.

JC

I’ve long been baffled by The failure of Lloyd Cole to establish a commercially successful solo career.

His period when backed by The Commotions, between 1984 and 1987, saw three hit albums, all of which were fawned over, for the most part, by the music critics.  The live shows were also among the ‘must-see’ category, with no venue being too large or challenging for the band, as evidenced in June 1986 when they supported Simple Minds at an outdoor gig at Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow, seemingly being note-perfect throughout in front of more than 40,000 attendees.

I had always thought The Commotions had been ever-present in the singles charts, but it turns out that only five singles ever made the Top 40, and even then, the best performance wasn’t a huge hit as Lost Weekend reached only #17.  So, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t a racing certainty that Lloyd would be a huge star when he branched out on his own, with things made a lot tougher by the fact that he made a conscious decision to move away from the sound and look of his days with a band.

He moved to New York City to write the new material and to find the musicians he most wanted to make the record with.  There was also a two-year gap between the last Commotions album and the first of the new material to factor in, so all-in-all, it was something of a gamble, but one he and his record label were very confident of pulling off.

The first solo single, No Blue Skies, was released at the end of January 1990.   It stalled at #42 in the UK.

The self-titled debut album followed a month later, entering the charts at #11.  This was quite encouraging as that was a similar outcome as Mainstream, the final Commotions album which had come in at #9 on its first week of release.

The problem was that over the next four weeks before a second single was taken from the album, Lloyd Cole had dropped all the way to #66, and so badly needed a sales boost via a well-received 45.

Don’t Look Back, came out in April 1990.  It got no higher than #59.  The album continued to plummet, dropping out of the charts after just a six-week stay, never to be seen again.

The problem was that the songs weren’t poppy enough for daytime radio, nor were they different or unusual enough for the drive time or evening shows to be really interested.

The planned third single, Downtown, was released but with next to fanfare or promotion.  It didn’t chart in the UK but it did prove to be a minor hit in the USA, mainly as a result of it being included on the soundtrack to the film Bad Influence, which starred Rob Lowe and James Spader, with the promo video airing regularly on MTV, featuring clips from the movie.

mp3: Lloyd Cole – No Blue Skies
mp3: Lloyd Cole – Don’t Look Back
mp3: Lloyd Cole – Downtown

Years later, Lloyd acknowledged that he got it badly wrong. He wrote this song for an album released in 2000:-

mp3: Lloyd Cole and The Negatives – Tried To Rock

Maybe I was just too much of a fanboy back in the day to make a true judgement on things, but I really did like the singles and almost all of the debut album. I’ve given a fresh listen again in recent days – it’s a CD copy rather than a vinyl version I have – and I do think it’s aged fairly well. OK, there’s nothing as immediate as the Commotions material, but at no point does it ever get boring or unlistenable.

JC

I’ve written many words on many previous occasions, so this time round I’ll just go with some songs, covering what could have been six separate entries along with some background info.  As far as I can recall, none of the six songs have been on the blog before.

mp3 : Lloyd & Will Cole – Perfect Skin

From 2012 when Lloyd and his son Will, having played some shows together for which they had worked out some brand new arrangements (and some variations on some very old ones), decided to drop into a studio and do some live material of said arrangements.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?

In January 2010, Lloyd went into a studio with what he termed his Small Ensemble for a one-off recording of stripped-down acoustic takes on Commotions and solo material, which were then sold as a limited edition CD. The Small Ensemble consisted of Lloyd Cole and Matt Cullen on guitar and banjo, and Mark Schwaber on guitar and mandolin.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole & The Commotions – Andy’s Babies

B-side to Forest Fire (1985)

mp3 : Lloyd Cole & The Negatives – Impossible Girl

The Negatives consisted of Lloyd Cole (vocals, guitar and synthesizer), David Darby (bass guitar, vocals), Michael Kotch (guitar), Rafa Maciejak (drums) and Jill Sobule (guitar, vocals). They released an album, with eleven tracks, in 2000, a couple of which, including Impossible Girl, also had strings.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole & Jill Sobule  – For The Good Times

Recorded for a 2006 tribute album to Kris Kristofferson

mp3 : Lloyd Cole & Robert Quine – I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself

Recorded for a 1997 tribute album to Burt Bacharach.

Taken together, these six tracks would have made for a very fine EP.

JC

This is the final part of what I hope has been an enjoyable series for everyone these past few Sundays…going by the comments left behind it certainly seems to have filled a few gaps in some knowledge bases.

Much of what I’ve written up has been informed by Lloyd’s own wonderfully maintained website – http://www.lloydcole.com

It seems fitting to bring the story up to date with a heavy reliance on the timeline from the website:-

2011

Most of the year is taken up with touring the album Broken Record.

In 2002 legendary Austrian composer and krautrock pioneer Hans Joachim Roedelius heard LC’s Plastic Wood and liked it enough to make is own, unsolicited re-mix. Nine years later they finally come up with a plan for a record together – they will exchange ‘unfinished’ tracks, for the other to complete. LC holes up in his attic with his brand new modular synthesizer.

2012

By the end of January LC has finished his work on the Roedelius tracks and has sent his files to Austria. By the end of the year an album is complete.

LC tours with eldest son Will, as an acoustic duo. Later, LC and Will enter the studio to document the arrangements from the shows. The result – Lloyd & Will Cole Acoustic Sessions 2012 , a second white label CD.

Late September LC is back to the attic with notes and ideas for new songs. Fans and Tapete have again funded a new album. A start date in LA with old cohorts Fred Maher and Matthew Sweet is set. LC decides to make no demos, but hopes to have all songs completed before the LA sessions, and then to work ‘Blonde on Blonde’ style with Maher and Sweet. 2 months of solid writing yields an album’s worth of songs. Recording goes to schedule and overdubs begin in Massachusetts in December. Musicians include Will Cole, Mark Schwaber, Matt Cullen, Blair Cowan, Joan (as Policewoman) Wasser and Dave Derby.

2013

Selected Studies Vol. 1, the album from the collaboration with Hans Joachim Roedelius is released in February to great acclaim with Rolling Stone magazine declaring:-

“All instrumental, dreamier than one might expect from Cole and bouncier than one might expect from Roedelius, this is a worthy, surprisingly melodic set likely to surprise fans from both camps. Recommended.”

Work on the more standard album continues and in June 2013, is released with the title Standards is released in June. Everyone – fans and critics alike seem to love it.

2014

Lloyd Cole and the Leopards (made up of some of the very best stalwarts of the Scottihs music scene) perform four UK shows in LC’s first full electric band shows since the early 2000’s with The Negatives.  I caught one of these in Glasgow and it was an astoundingly good show, despite being played open-air in a torrential downpour!

The solo tour resumes and continues all year. In October 2014,  Standards is released in North America by Omnivore Recordings garnering a second wave of acclaim.

2015

April  – Universal/Spectrum release Don’t Look Back, a 20 track compilation of LC’s time at what was then Polygram.

June  – Universal release Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Collected Recordings 1983-1989, a six disc box set.

September  – LC makes his debut as a live electronic performer with two Berlin shows, the first with Hans Joachim Roedelius at a festival celebrating of his 80th birthday. The second was an intimate solo show at Basic Electricity. To coincide with these shows Bureau B released LC’s third full length electronic album – 1D.

These were the last pieces of music to be officially released, but Lloyd has been incredibly busy touring the past three years.  Indeed, in 2016, such was the media focus on his early recordings as a result of the acclaim heaped on the boxset that he decided to  devote the entire year to performances featuring material only from 1983 – 1996. Some shows were solo, others featured The Leopards, and more often that not, his son Will joined him on stage. The show at the Kelvingrove Bandstand in August 2016, with the Leopards and Will all on stage with him, was as fine a show as I’ve ever seen in all the years I’ve been watching him.

2017 and 2018, as one glance at http://www.lloydcole.com/live/ will testify, has been just as frantic and the acclaim all over the world just as high.

I’ve a nice wee postscript of my own to add.

I only ever got myself a download copy of the 11-track Standards – partly as I was wary following my disappointment with Broken Record but also as I was going through a short phase, thanks to constraints on space, of cutting back on vinyl and CDs.  (I’ve since simply taken up more floorspace, much to the chagrin of Mrs Villain). It’s an album that I do love and listen to a fair bit…..there’s just so many moments which feel like a throwback to all parts of his career from the Commotions days to the early solo years to the later stuff when it was just him and his guitars and the voice…..so you can imagine my delight when my trip to Toronto just a few weeks back yielded a second-hand vinyl copy of said album, in mint condition at a very reasonable price.

And given that the LP landed in my hands so unexpectedly while this series was being published, it really did have a sense of karma about it.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Period Piece
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – No Truck

Now……does anybody want to have a go at the solo ICA that I’ve found impossible to nail down????

JC

For the most part, the years immediately after the release of Antidepressant were spent on the road in Europe and the USA, mostly perfecting his solo shows where it was just the man on a stool, with a mic and a selection of guitars. I caught a number of shows in this period in a number of locations and, while they tended to follow a tried-and-tested formula, they were always enjoyable and entertaining.

The return to the limelight via the temporary reunion of the Commotions reunion, as well as the very positive reception afforded Antidepressant and the live shows, led to a plethora of releases in the later half of the noughties:-

August 2007 : Lloyd Cole & The Commotions Live at the BBC (Vol 1) : 19 tracks lifted from sessions and a live gig at the Hammersmith Palais , all dating from 1994

August 2007 : Lloyd Cole & The Commotions Live at the BBC (Vol 2) : 16 tracks lifted from sessions in 1985 and a live gig at Glastonbury in 1986

August 2007 : Lloyd Cole Live at the BBC : 25 tracks, most of which were from a 1995 gig at Hammersmith Odeon plus a radio session that same year

January 2009 : Cleaning Out The Ashtrays – 4xCD boxset of collected b-sides, rarities, previously unreleased or alternative mixes of songs (59 tracks in all covering 1989-2006)

January 2009 : Folksinger Series Vol1 : Radio Bremen – 15 tracks from a set recorded for German radio station in 2003

January 2009 : Folksinger Series Vol2 : The Whelan – 23 tracks lifted from a three-night residency in Dublin in 2008.

In 2010, new ground was broken as fans are asked to crowdfund a new album, the songs of which had been written and tested acoustically on the road with Mark Schwaber and Matt Cullen, two musicians from Massachusetts, with the collective calling itself The Small Ensemble. The response from fans, together with support from Tapete Records, enabled a full band to be recruited and for the first time in the best part of a decade, Lloyd’s brand new album was much more than a solo offering.

Broken Record was released in September 2010. It opens with quite possibly my favourite Lloyd Cole line of all time

“Not that I had that much dignity left anyway”

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Like A Broken Record

The opening track in some ways sets the tone for a very different sort of album, featuring banjos, mandolins, pedal guitars, violins and harmony vocals that make it very Americana in texture and feel.  Sadly, the songs feel sometimes a little bit too ‘Lloyd Cole by numbers’ and to this long-time fan, it jolted somwhat and felt like a damp squib after Antidepressant. Listening again to the album in full recently for the first time in a few years, while commuting to and from work, I jotted down some notes as each song came up…here’s a couple of my thoughts:

Writers Retreat – an intro which rips off Maggie May and has a lyric just too clever for its own good

Double Happiness – this would have mustered as a b-side in the Commotions days…disappointing ending to the album

It wasn’t all negativity mind you. There’s a wonderful ballad – Flipside – which is screaming to be given the full kitchen sink of the wall of sound treatment while Westchester County Jail, Rhinestones and Oh Genevieve ( the latter written with his old sparring partner Blair Cowan) are decent enough listens.

It does seem, however, that my views on Broken Record are not in tune with many others given the critical praise handed out on its release:-

“the most consistent upbeat record Cole’s released in a dog’s age”

“a welcome surprise and a return to peak form”

“Some artists go Nashville to try and cover up for the fact they’re washed-up. But Cole, recording in Manhattan and near his Massachusetts home, never hints at that kind of desperation.”

“There are songs here every bit the equal of those from his glory days”

The last sentence does seem a bit far-fetched given this is on the album

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – If I Were A Song

One I fear wouldn’t be out-of-place on a Coldplay album with a dreadful ‘la la la la’ refrain/chorus added in for good measure.

JC

2004 saw a renewed interest in the career of Lloyd Cole, thanks in part to a decision to briefly reform the Commotions for a select group of gigs to mark the 20th Anniversary of the release of Rattlesnakes as well as the album itself being re-released in a CD deluxe format with the second disc containing demos, concert and radio performances. There was also a cash-in 21-track compilation of singles from the band era and solo career.

As an aside, the gig at Glasgow Barrowlands in 2004 was as joyous and heart-warming a night as I’ve ever had at that particular venue, stretching back what is now 35 years.

The same year saw Lloyd begin the recording of his next solo record although it would take until August 2006 before Antidepressant was released, again on Sanctuary Records. It was a continuation of the successful formula followed on Music In A Foreign Language in that it was mostly one man and his guitar, albeit there’s a grander production and what feels like a larger budget enabling some strings to be superbly utilised, but where the last album had often been quite a dark and sad offering, there was a lot of fine self-deprecating humour on display across the latest offering, none more so than on album opener:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – The Young Idealists

There can’t have been anyone who heard when they this, either played live or when they bought the new record, who, wouldn’t have afforded themselves a wry and knowing smile. We might like to think that we still, in our mid 40s, hold the same beliefs and values as we did in our mid 20s, but you can’t ignore or discount the lessons you learn along the way.

It’s a relatively short album clocking in at around the 40 minute mark across 11 tracks, but around a quarter of the record is taken up by two lengthy and very wistful numbers, both of which display Lloyd’s ear for a tune and ability to come up with a lyric that Mr Cohen would have been proud of, especially this:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – How Wrong Can You Be?

There’s a very fine review on-line which sums up Antidepressant as “an album of songs about mid-life, its traps, compromises, disappointments, and the hidden delights found in aging. Desire is not absent in these songs, it’s merely channeled differently, and new ones pop up in the gaps where others have either been realized or forgotten.”

An absolute gem of a record and well worth picking up if you don’t already own it.

JC

Having finally cleared the decks by finally getting the old record from 1996 out to the public, not forgetting the sideways trip into electronic ambience, the next two years saw Lloyd Cole turn into something akin to a folk singer, increasingly reliant on his trusty acoustic and his voice.

In some ways it was inevitable as the live shows were nowadays almost entirely acoustic with storytelling thrown in for good measure, increasingly at ease with the aging process and acknowledging that, for the most part, his audience were doing likewise. The old songs always got the loudest cheers and applause in the live setting but there was enough of a devotion from the fans that the new material was well received, enough for Lloyd to have a go at a really stripped down record not far removed from a home recording.

Music In A Foreign Language was recorded in 2002 and released in the UK on Sanctuary Records in June 2003. It was an album I enjoyed a great deal at the time, but giving it a fresh listen again a few days ago for the purposes of this series, I found it a little bit one-dimensional and lacking in ambition somewhat. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy hearing the songs again but they have sounded better played live over the years and the ones which LC has gradually dropped from his sets can now be seen as some of his less-strong material across his career. Lyrically, it’s a fairly straight-forward and unambiguous offer, albeit there are a couple of toe-curling moments of sixth-form prose that he’d never have allowed himself to sing back in his heyday.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Music In A Foreign Language
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Late Night, Early Town

The two most enduring songs on the album are a cover, and a surprising one at that, along with a wonderfully loose and stripped back version of a song he’d recorded and released with The Negatives

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – People Ain’t No Good
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – No More Love Songs

Yup, Lloyd does a fine job on one of Nick Cave‘s brooding numbers from his break-up album The Boatman’s Song. It sounds as if Lloyd is dedicating it just about everyone who he’s ever encountered in the music industry.

JC

2001 rolled around and quite incredibly, Lloyd Cole released two CDs worth of music on XIII Bis Records, the label that had ensured The Negatives material got to see the light of day the previous year.

Both albums were released on the same day but they couldn’t have been any more diverse.

Etc. was, more or less, the lost album of 1996 which had been caught up in the record label wrangles I referred to a couple of weeks back. It’s an acoustic, at times folksy/country album, consisting of fully realised songs, demos and covers. Lloyd’s voice had rarely sounded more impressive, almost as if he was determined to make it as much of an instrument within the sounds he was creating, never straining for notes and delivering every word in a clear and concise manner. It’s a beautiful record, one which reflected the way he was now earning his living as live musician, touring solo with just a couple of guitars…no support acts, splitting his sets into two halves with an interval for the audience to enjoy a drink, loads of entertaining stories in between the music as he reminisced about his career and giving his audience the songs that most had come along to hear – the Commotions hits reinterpreted in an Unplugged fashion.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Old Enough To Know Better
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Memphis
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Fool You Are (demo)

The middle track is a cover of the song written by the actress Karen Black that she had performed in Nashville, the 1975 hit movie directed by Robert Altman. Lloyd’s version features Matt Johnston of The The on backing vocals.

The other CD was Plastic Wood, consisting of 19 tracks of ambient electonica across 45 minutes, with all keyboards played by Lloyd himself. It was totally unexpected and unsurprisingly it divided opinion.

I don’t listen to enough music of the genre to determine if it’s very good or an amateurish effort when compared to the acclaimed masters. It’s an album I’ve rarely returned to over the years and indeed I went as far as deleting it from the i-tunes library so as to prevent the tracks getting in the way of any occasion when I wanted a Lloyd Cole mixfest. It is worth, however, drawing your attention to this allmusic review of Plastic Wood with the writer very keen to offer praise.

I looked for but couldn’t find the CD where it should be on the shelf which means I’ve either filed it in the wrong place (and I’ve neither the time nor energy to search for it) or I’ve forgotten about loaning it out to someone at some point.  If it’s the latter and you’re reading this, then I’ll willingly take it back without the imposition of a fine.

JC

It seemed that everyone at the UK record label was happy with the direction Lloyd Cole was heading in. Love Songs had carved out a bit of a niche for him as a talented acoustic-driven singer-songwriter and he spent much of 1996 in a New York studio carving out a new album along such lines, with a number of old friends, including ex-Commotion Neil Clark, flying in to lend a hand.

The completed album was well received by his direct contacts at the label but was vetoed by the head of the company who instead had a plan to put it on ice for the time being and release it in due course on the back of a new compilation album which would feature Commotions and solo material. The request was also made that Lloyd specifically write some new songs which could be released as singles to promote the planned new ‘Best Of’ collection.

Lloyd tried to play the game but everything got bogged down in record company politics. In the meantime, he got himself in and out of studios to cut songs for compilation albums and pulled together a new band called The Negatives, made up of NYC musicians, with who he played with live as well as putting down some tracks in the studio in the hope of them being released.

It took an eternity to get round to issuing the best of record, during which time Lloyd’s recording career was in limbo. The decision was taken to work with producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley who had delivered Easy Pieces back in the days of the Commotions but it didn’t quite go fully to plan. Stephen Street, with whom Lloyd had worked on Love Songs, was brought into polish things off on two new potential hit singles.

The label bosses were still far from happy and declined to release either of the two new songs, leading to the farcical situation of The Collection (as it was entitled) to be issued without Lloyd being able to get out on the promotional trail. And to add insult to injury, the label further declined to allow the 1996 album to be released….and indeed came to a parting of the ways with the singer.

Messy doesn’t come close to describing the situation.

Here’s some of what was made available publicly available in this period of time:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole with Robert Quine – I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself

An ironic song to cover given the circumstances he was in at that time, this was recorded in 1997 for inclusion on a compilation album of Burt Bacharach covers. The other irony being that just a few years after releasing half an album of Bacharach inspired songs on Don’t Get Weird With Me Baby, this cover is just vocals and guitars.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Si Tu Dois Partir

Another contribution to a compilation entitled Pop Romantique : French Pop Classics, this time in 1998. The request had been for a French song but Lloyd felt he couldn’t pull that off and so he went for Bob Dylan‘s 1965 single If You’ve Gotta Go, Go Now but as interpreted and taken into the charts by Fairport Convention in 1969.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Romany Soup

The same folk behind the Burt Bacharach project, which had been part of a series of records under the title of Great Jewish Music, got in touch to ask Lloyd if he’d care to contribute to another album in the series, this time featuring songs by one of his heroes, Marc Bolan. The track selected was from 1969 and the Tyrannosaurus Rex days.

Finally, there were two new songs which made it onto The Collection, with one being a re-working of a song that had been recorded with The Negatives. it was also supposed to be the lead off single for the compilation but was shelved everywhere, except for some strange reason, in Germany:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – That Boy

Really can’t fathom why it wasn’t allowed to be released as a stand-alone 45.

The b-sides of that release included the English version of the track recorded for the French compilation album and a song which had been co-written with Stephen Lindsay of The Big Dish which had almost made it onto Love Songs:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – If You Gotta Go, Go Now
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Rain On The Parade

The other new song had been originally been recorded for the 1996 album that seemed as if it was ever unlikely to see the light of day; again, it would have made for a decent stand-alone 45:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Fool You Are

But, as you may have gathered from the way this series is unfolding, things would take another unusual turn in the coming years.

JC

The great solo career many had predicted for Lloyd Cole hadn’t quite worked out as planned. The fall-out from the poorly received and poor-selling Bad Vibes rumbled on into 1994 with no new material made available. It would later transpire that Lloyd was busy writing and demoing new songs but there was very little faith being shown in him by those who had backed him to this point in time.

There were a number of false starts on the next record which can be evidenced on the finished product with five different production credits listed across twelve songs. This would normally be a sign of a disastrous product with the record going through all sorts of gestation periods and being fiddled around with, but somehow Love Story manages to hang together very well and to be a very enjoyable and listenable album.

It is a record in which LC goes back to basics for the most part, uncomplicated tunes with clear vocal delivery and next to no studio trickery. There’s even a couple of radio-friendly numbers included, one of which actually delivered a Top 30 hit in the UK singles chart, a very impressive achievement at a time when Britpop was dominating. The overall tone, however, is one of melancholy and my initial instinct on first hearing it was that someone should try to somehow have LC hook up with Moz as he’d have been a perfect mid-90s foil and between them they could have given us something ridiculously special, albeit Moz would need to have bowed down and allowed Lloyd to pen some of the lyrics.

It had been just over a decade since Rattlesnakes had taken the listening public by storm and it was not long after Edwyn Collins had made marked his great comeback in the public eye with A Girl Like You. There was therefore something of a renewed interest in Lloyd and the first new single certainly lifted the spirits and offered hope that he would again be a major seller:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Like Lovers Do

It was A-listed on Radio 1 bringing loads of airplay and back on your television screens again after an extended absence, looking just as suave, handsome and debonair as last time around.

Sadly, the next equally strong single didn’t find as much favour with everyone, missing out on the important listing and bellyflopping at #73:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Sentimental Fool

Love Story sold a lot more than Bad Vibes, but not as many as it deserved. It was largely ignored by the music papers and had no chance in the mainstream media who were totally obsessed with the new kids and their electric guitars. It’s an album I reckon would have done incredibly well if social media back in the day had beem more advanced as it was an LP bloggers and the like would have warmed to, given the quality and diversity on display, such as these:

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Be There
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Unhappy Song

There were even some superb songs left off the album and made only available as b-sides:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – I Will Not Leave You Alone
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – The Steady Slowing Down Of The Heart

This surely all pointed to a bigger, brighter future……but the fickle world of pop music doesn’t work that way and instead things got quite messy.

JC

Really interesting that Friend of Rachel Worth, whose views and opinions over the years have more often than not been bang-on-the-money, feels that the solo career of Lloyd Cole actually went a bit weird after the release of Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe in 1991.

I certainly concur that the next few years were less than stellar but there would be a subsequent tremendous return to form a few years later as I will hopefully demonstrate in the fullness of time

The commercial failure of the sophomore solo album was a bit of a body low. As I said last week, it’s a tremendous and ambitious record, packed with some of the best songs he’s ever written, but it was very much a case of it being in the wrong place at the wrong time as popular music was going through one of its phases where some sort of new sounds and a movement associated with them was all that mattered. In short, grunge almost killed LC’s career stone dead.

There was no music at all in 1992 and it wasn’t until October 1993 that the new album was released. It was called Bad Vibes which perhaps was Lloyd suggesting he already knew what sort of critical reaction the record was going to provoke…..

I’m thinking back 25 years and recalling that I was bitterly disappointed with the new record, to the extent that I played it three times and put it on the shelf for what I thought would be eternity. I certainly thought that Lloyd’s recording career would soon be over, fully expecting him to be dropped by his companies. Bad Vibes was a million miles away from the Commotions but it was also just about as far again from the first two solo records. It seemed to be a record which was ridiculously over-produced and unplayable in any meaningful sense outside of the studio, with not much to offer in the way of memorable tunes. Sure, there were occasional glimpses of genius in the lyrics, but there were also some banal offerings to match the dullness and clichéd nature of the music emanating from the speakers. All in all, I considered it was a dud.

Nowadays, and with the benefit of having heard a number of the songs played live with much more basic and stripped-back arrangements, I think it’s fair to say that Bad Vibes does have some excellent songs which deserved a better fate than they received in the studio. It would be easy enough to point the finger at producer Adam Peters and mixer Bob Clearmountain but Lloyd has always been a hand-on type of guy in the studio and he would have had a big say in things. I’ve no doubt that the relative failure of the first two solo LPs had led him to again try something different but this was just so far from what I think was his comfort zone that it wasn’t delivered with any real confidence.

There were two singles lifted from the album and these are as good an example as the 1993 songs somehow managing to be instantly recognisable as Lloyd Cole, but not in a way in which you’d perhaps expect or indeed enjoy:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – So You’d Like To Save The World
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Morning Is Broken

Interesting that Lloyd himself has said of this album:-

To be honest, I really didn’t know what I wanted to make with Bad Vibes, but this didn’t worry me. I was simply trying to make a record which would surprise people. I thought that was written into my job description. To start with, both Adam and I were fairly gung-ho about this, but after months of work together I think we gave into the inevitable truth – my voice and my songs are pretty easily recongisable the moment the singing starts, no matter what.

I’m inclined to agree with those final few words, but it still was a shock to hear such plodding and ill-conceived arrangements at the time.

There were a number of b-sides recorded…one of which harked back to something more akin to previous straight forward pop sounds and thus probably left off the album for that very reason:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Radio City Music Hall

It was also interesting that, having sort of hit a wall with the recording and mixing process for Bad Vibes, Lloyd felt he’d be better recording some Marc Bolan and Lou Reed covers for the extra tracks on the singles. He’s since said this is what he wished Bad Vibes had sounded more :-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – The Slider
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Vicious

I’m not convinced that an album of songs akin to these would have impressed me any more than what had been issued on Bad Vibes.

JC

Having bamboozled a lot of fans with the change of image and shift in sound on the debut solo LP, Lloyd Cole displayed a wicked sense of humour by calling his next record Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe, which itself was a quote from author and poet Raymond Carver, thus further contributing to the prejudices of those who thought our singer/songwriter was a frustrated English Lit lecturer.

I have no doubt that this was the LP that Lloyd Cole had been desperate to make his entire career. He and Blair Cowan worked together and co-wrote many of its songs, specifically with the aim of having an orchestra play on them. At the same time, Lloyd wanted to further explore the rock side of things that had been captured on his debut record and so he also kept all of Robert Quine, Fred Maher and Matthew Sweet on board.  The album was recorded at great expense in New York and Los Angeles and it was given a substantial marketing budget. Here in the UK, side one of the record featured all the expansive songs while side two had all the guitar-led material; tellingly, the reverse was the case in the USA with Capitol Records determined to make him a rock’n’roll star.

It’s also worth recalling that 1991 was the year, as far as guitar music was concerned, that grunge and the heavier-end of things became highly fashionable. So it can come as no surprise that the album and the singles from it more or less disappeared without trace.

Which is a real shame, for it was an album that contained a lot of very fine songs, especially if you were prepared to accept that the jingly-jangly pop of the Commotions era was long gone, while the arrangements on the orchestral side brought comparisons with some of the finest work by Burt Bacharach…a man who whose work would become highly fashionable again later in the decade.

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Butterfly
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Margo’s Waltz
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Weeping Wine
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – The ‘L’ Word

The last of these is an earlier, and in my view, superior version of the song Tell Your Sister which appears on the album. It was snuck out on a b-side.

Lloyd has never been slow in recording cover versions of some of his favourite songs by some of his favourite singers. He was always a huge fan of Marc Bolan and this was also one of the 1991 b-sides:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Children of The Revolution

JC

The ICA World Cup is over and the result of the final will be revealed tomorrow.

One consequence of that is that I now have the time to return Sundays to their purpose of being the day for a regular and in-depth series, which for the most part has been all the 45s of a particular singer or band.  But for the next instalment, I’m going to do down a slightly different road….

I’ve always hankered after doing a Lloyd Cole solo ICA but I’ve had real problems getting such a work down to just ten songs, especially as he has released such a rich variety of different sounding material over the years. I’m therefore going to feature him, not on a single-by-single basis, but on a year-by-year basis (as best I can as there have been some quiet spells where there were no releases). I do hope you enjoy it and stick with it over the coming months.

It would be fair to say that Lloyd Cole is best known for his output with The Commotions – three very successful albums between 1984 and 1987, all of which earned gold discs for sales numbers, and nine singles, none of which, to my surprise, got any higher than #17 in the charts.

The band, after a hiatus when there were all sorts of rumours, announced their break up in 1989, with Polydor Records in the UK and Capitol Records in the USA signing the frontman to a solo contract. There really were high hopes that he would become a major star under his own steam.

The debut material was written and recorded in New York. The singer revealed, in late 1989, that the sound would be a radical departure from that of the Commotions, although he did let on that keyboardist Blair Cowan was someone he was still working alongside but that much of the newer rock-type guitar sound would be the work of Robert Quine, regarded by many as one of the unsung heroes of American guitar music in the 70s and 80s, working alongside Lou Reed, Brian Eno, Richard Hell and Tom Waits among many others.  The other main musicians were Fred Maher (who was another NYC musician who had worked with Lou Reed) and a highly thought of but relatively unknown bass player named Matthew Sweet.

The first Lloyd Cole solo song was a 45 released in January 1990:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – No Blue Skies

There was no mistaking who the vocalist was, but the slower almost AOR pace of the song was a bit of a shock to those of us who danced round the indie discos to the previous singles. It sold in reasonable numbers, reaching #42 but that was probably a disappointment to the label bosses who were putting a fair bit of money into promoting the artist as a solo performer.

The album, entitled Lloyd Cole, came out a month later. The sleeve, featuring a heavily bearded and long-haired frontman, was an instant giveaway that this was not going to be an indie-pop album. Reviews were decent, although just about everyone commented on how laid-back yet harder-edged it was compared to the band material; there were also references to the fact that he continued to be a very fine observational lyricist who would strike a chord with his audience, particularly those who had been with him since the early days and were now appreciating what life had to offer outside the student bubble. It reached #11 in the charts and did, like his band albums, get certified gold.

Its thirteen songs stretched out to over 53 minutes and while there were none that stood out as obvious chart singles, there were some that became instant favourites among fans and remain part of the live repertoire almost 30 years on:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Don’t Look Back
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Undressed

There were in fact three singles released from the album, all of which came with a variety of b-sides that never made it to the album, two of which were as close to Commotions numbers as anything from that period:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Wild Orphan
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Blame Mary Jane

The former, as so many of the great band songs had done, namechecks a celebrity, in this instance Jodie Foster, while the latter with its obvious drug references, could be a rock relation to My Bag.

JC

…..when this was ignored.

Lloyd Cole has been active in the music business for well over 30 years now. His live shows remain a real treat thanks to a deft combination of new material and the songs he’s most famous for from his days when backed by The Commotions.

It is a real shame that his solo career has never taken off in the way that it should have for he’s released a lot of cracking albums, particularly since the turn of the century when he began to increasingly concentrate on just his voice and his guitar rather than worry too much about the production and arrangements which in all truth occasionally marred his initial solo works after he split up the band.

One of his finest compositions dates from the late 90s. It first saw light of a day on a very underrated LP released in 2000:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole & The Negatives – No More Love Songs

The definitive version however, was released three years later and was the only single taken from the LP Music In A Foreign Language (a record in which Mr Cole did a more than passable cover of a Nick Cave classic).

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – No More Love Songs
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Claire Fontaine
mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Claire Fontaine (long)

The single is long deleted and hard to get hold of…indeed the b-sides today are actually courtesy of their inclusion on a later box set entitled Cleaning Out The Ashtrays.

Oh and that Nick Cave song I was referring to….

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – People Ain’t No Good

This post is dedicated to Rol Hurst. He’ll know why.

Enjoy

I wasn’t sure whether or not to include Lloyd Cole in this series.  He was born and raised for much of his life south of the border, but his most formative years, musically at least, were spent in and around Glasgow and certainly you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who wouldn’t describe Lloyd Cole & The Commotions as a Scottish band.

When that band surprisingly broke up at the end of the 80s, it was no real shock that Polydor  decided to keep on the frontman as a solo artist.  I’m not sure however, if they would have been all that happy with the change in direction that he undertook with his debut solo material – there was a very clear move away from indie/pop leanings into stuff that alienated many of his fans. This in turn led to poorer sales, albeit many critics welcomed him as a great addition  to the canon of serious (or po-faced if you want to be cruel) singer/songwriters. I think Lloyd himself was hoping to be embraced by America….but it just never really happened

He’s still going strong and remains a tremendous live act, more often than not just him, his guitar and his tales of life as a musician.  A number of his more recent LPs have had a lot to offer in quality now that he’s moved away from that raaaaawwwwk phase of the early solo stuff. Being honest, if it wasn’t that I was such a fan of his voice, I wouldn’t have all that much to offer positively about the debut solo single from 1990:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – No Blue Skies

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Shelly I Do

What I do highly recommend from the early era is this 12″ creepy and atmospheric remix of a single lifted from his 1992 LP Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe…it’s one that I have a second-hand promo copy of picked up very cheaply:-

mp3 : Lloyd Cole – Butterfly (The Planet Ann Charlotte Mix)

Enjoy.