The New Cue #298 July 3: Lloyd Cole
"That’s a great thing about being old: we don’t give a fuck..."
Oh baby, I’m dreaming of Monday…
It’s here! This is Monday, right now, right this second. Let’s get into the week with a Lloyd Cole interview, beamed from his home in Massachusetts directly into your brain wherever you are sitting currently. Technology, eh. Amazing.
We’ll see you on Friday for our subscriber-only Recommender edition. It’s also the date of our TNC EGM in a central London pub, venue as yet to be agreed upon. We communicate many times a day, every day, but rarely meet in person as a trio anymore so it’s an exciting mark in our calendar. We’ll send you team photos.
Have a lovely week and enjoy this edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris.
Start the Week With…Lloyd Cole
Lloyd Cole And The Commotions hit the UK charts in October 1984 with their very first single, Perfect Skin, a jangly, wordy burst of glossy guitar-pop that located a sweet spot between Orange Juice and Lou Reed. The British record-buying public had been softened up by The Smiths emerging earlier that year and were now, suddenly, very at home to bookish, awkward-looking singers name-dropping literary influences and describing painful crushes over chiming Rickenbackers. The 24 year-old Cole and his band of friends - formed when the Englishman joined Glasgow University - delivered exactly what was required at that moment. Their debut album Rattlesnakes is a mid-80s masterpiece of textured, literate songwriting, marking Cole out as one of the most distinctive voices of the era. Speedboat (inspired by the Renata Adler book of the same name, of course), Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken, Charlotte Street, Forest Fire, the title track…all killers.
Cole probably thought it was easy, and for a while it was, commercially. The next two Commotions albums, Easy Pieces and Mainstream, were also chart successes but some of the creative spark was missing and the band was not always happy. They split in 1988 and Lloyd moved to New York, where he met his soon-to-be wife Elizabeth.
Cole then had a bit of early solo success, but he also had a couple of kids and a new life out in Massachusetts. The hits dried up and Lloyd Cole entered a long commercially fallow period where you sense stress and depression was never too far away from him. He kept making music however, as well as touring it, and recently has settled on an elegant electronic sound, constructed in his home studio, as evidenced by 2019’s Guesswork. His new album On Pain takes the soothing abstract electronics of that record and finesses it into more recognisable song shapes. It is a record of affecting precision and economy that seems to deal with the pressing emotional necessities of early old age.
Ted gave Lloyd a call on Zoom to hear how it was going.
Hello Lloyd.
Hello, let me put this bass guitar away. I’m practicing my bass between interviews.
How are you doing?
Trying to temper the optimism I feel ahead of every record before the inevitable failure.
Where are you?
I’m in my attic studio in Easthampton, Massachusetts.
What’s America like today, the morning after Trump’s latest arraignment?
Massachusetts is probably the sanest part of America. Nobody is driving around in a pick-up firing guns in the air. I think we’re becoming a bit numb to it and it’s beginning to feel kind of inevitable that he’s going to get away with it somehow. He just seems like a Batman character, which he is.
You’ve been there a very long time, in the US.
More than half my life. It wasn’t the plan. I got to New York in ’88. I met my wife, we got married and had two kids in New York, so we thought we’d better get out of the city. Because in the late 90s my career was not looking good and the thought of paying for private school was scary. So we came out here where the schools are good and somehow we’re still here. We live in this little town Easthampton which is now like the Brooklyn of Massachusetts, seemingly the place to be.
And no plans to return to Europe?
My wife knows I don’t want to die over here. She has gravitational family advantage. She has six siblings and I’ve got one. She doesn’t particularly want to live in Europe. But I will spend more time in Europe as I approach retirement, whatever that may mean for me. Not sure where. Before Covid, I had an Air B&B near Lisbon, with a mind to get a flat there. Covid meant I never got there but maybe that’s the way forward: I could just Air B&B for a couple of months. Just take my computer and guitar.
I’ve been enjoying On Pain. Tell me the process behind its creation, please.
Well, the idea was to follow on from the previous project, which was a bit of a jump for me. Can I make an album with songs that use the kind of techniques that I’ve been using to make instrumental music? It was a lot of work, but it came together eventually. So I didn’t have the fear factor. I wanted to take the musicality and make it more extreme. Make the minimalist more so, the complex more complex. I feel like to a large extent it was successful. I feel about halfway through a journey. I want to get working on the next one. I feel I can go further.
In terms of?
More minimalist. Sade’s fourth album sounded like it was just vocals and drums. It was amazing. Like the great noise that bands like PiL, Joy Division made – it was just three instruments and a voice. I’ve never made that music. We would use guitars and there was always a lot of interplay, creating an orchestra out of many simple things. I’d like to create a simple thing.
The song This Can’t Be Happening is very simple, but devastating for that.
Yeah it is, it just keeps hammering at you.
But there’s a great deal going on to make it go on for four and a half minutes like that. It took us about a month to get the vocals the way we wanted them. On the album, I was often starting not with a song, or even a melody, but a sound texture, cutting those up and creating a song from that. Like, on The Idiot, Blair [Cowan, former Commotion, frequent Cole-collaborator] provided about 60% of the music on the track he sent me and I cut it up and put it back together again in a shape I could sing over.
The emotion of the album is important, too. There’s a sense of resignation and nostalgia.
I started to feel that I wanted to capture something that was more of a performance than a recital for the vocal. I’ve found in my old age that I am more of a singer than I was in my youth. I’m not scared to make an idiot of myself. That’s a great thing about being old: we don’t give a fuck anymore. So instead of me going in a cubicle with a big microphone, I’ve been singing the songs with a hand-held mic as I’ve on stage, projecting as a troubadour in the way that I learnt to do when I was trying to make a living in the 2000s and 2010s, touring quite often on my own. But in terms of the emotion that’s there to be found, then that’s really up to you. A lot of people say This Can’t Be Happening is devastating and terrible, but it doesn’t have to be. I like to present flexible songs.
It just perhaps has a late-life melancholy that I too recognise…
Yes! Yeah. I am comfortable addressing age. I always have been. When I was 25 I was interested in what it would be like to be 40. I wrote Hey Rusty when I was 26.
With the song More Of What You Are, I had this very vague idea of wanting to present this feeling that as we get older we become this more extreme version of ourselves. We become more distilled versions. The way that if you have tendencies towards dark humour, by the time of old age that is all we’ve got. I’ve had that phrase in notebooks for more than twenty years and it took me all this time to finally find a scenario to present it.
Pete Paphides made an observation in his Uncut review of On Pain that More Of What You Are continues a theme started way back with My Bag.
I feel really bad that I obviously didn’t review that review properly. Ha! I mean, possibly. My Bag was a rewrite of Bright Lights Big City, putting that novel in a song. I was around so much cocaine in the 80s and not doing it like everybody else, around so much that it became inevitable that a song would have to come out of it. Maybe Pete’s pointing that out because the original idea of More Of What You Are is something I overheard in the Groucho Club when someone was talking about taking cocaine. “It’s awesome because it makes you more of what you are.” That’s hilarious, because it obviously makes you more of a dick. On the other hand, it clearly worked very well for Bowie for a while – almost all his best work involved quite a lot of cocaine.
Do you find making music therapeutic?
God, tough question. I do feel that if I’m not working on music then I’m kind of constipated. And I’m still in that period of my life – which I pray will end – when I constantly have a song going around my head. I was kind of trying to convey that on I Can Hear Everything, that having a superpower is akin to torture.
But you can’t stop.
Well, I still have the same ambitions that I had when I was 23. If the NME still existed, I’d still want to be on the cover. And if Top of The Pops still existed, I’d want to be booked to appear. I’m still trying to get out of the niche that I’ve been put in.
Rattlesnakes was a very big record at my school when it came out. Teenage me and my kid brothers loved it. What advice would you give the man who made it?
I wouldn’t give him any advice. He got almost everything accidentally right. Someone wrote about how incredibly nervous I looked on the first Top of The Pops because that proved how much it meant to me. That was spot on. Other than my kids being born, that was the happiest day of my life.
I grew up watching Bowie and Bolan on Top Of The Pops and here we are on it with our first single. That didn’t last very long but we had it for a little while where everything fell in our laps.
A few years, though, surely.
I had ten years of having more money than I ever expected. And I’ve had thirty years of being back to being a normal person. I lost the apartment in 1994 and almost went bankrupt that year. I have this Patreon page and have been building a multimedia memoir through it. It’s called the Notebook Project where I’m tracking all the writing of my songs through the notebooks that I kept. I’m up to [1995’s] Love Story right now and it’s quite upsetting. It was a terrible time for me. I went from feeling like I had economic and artistic freedom to feeling like I had neither.
I read that pandemic was bad for you.
I’ve taken it on the chin a few times. Brexit was terrible for me. I had this big retrospective tour as the box sets had come out that went up to 1996, so let’s just do songs from 1984 to ’96. The tour sold out and when the tickets were selling the pound was about a $1.65 and when I got paid it was $1.20. So just personally, Brexit was disastrous. And then we got shut down halfway through a tour so we didn’t get to the break-even point.
You’re putting a band together to go on tour now, right?
Yeah, but I have no desire to sound like The Commotions. Economics of it means that we’ll be a four-piece, I’ll play bass – which is why I’m practicing between interviews – and we’ll find a sound that’s something like the aesthetic of what I’ve been doing over the last decade. And I think it’ll be great. But there will be some people saying, ‘Well, that didn’t sound like Lost Weekend?!’ And that’s always going to be the case. Dylan fans got to used to him not doing Highway 61 the way it was recorded eventually though. I’m excited about the next project and excited by being able to present a band for the first time in the UK in a really long time. So, things are not shit.
Good luck with it. What have you planned for the rest of the day?
I need to mow the lawn. Then I want to do more work on the Love Story project. And, if the weather is still good, I have a Northampton Cycling Club ride at 5.30.
Perfect. Have a good day, Lloyd.
Lovely talking to you and nice to hear Rattlesnakes was a hit at your school, too.
TK