Catching Up With Lloyd Cole: The Original
Neumu recently ran a news item I wrote about Lloyd Cole's "return" to North American shores, in the form of a trio of album reissues and a forthcoming solo tour. That piece, which was originally built around an interview I conducted with Lloyd last month, received some very heavy editing by me and neumu alike before it appeared.
My original draft was...well, I'm not quite sure what it was. It had elements of a news item, a feature story, and a bit of highly subjective "new journalism," for want of a better description. And while I was rather disappointed that the powers that be rejected it, I was obviously okay with it or I would've just withdrawn the piece altogether. Anyway, here's the original draft -- please excuse any typos, etc.
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Catching Up With Lloyd Cole
On a recent cold, gray March day in Chicago, a phone chat with Lloyd Cole brightened my mood considerably. Which was a bit surprising, because even though the English-born, Scottish-reared singer/songwriter was as friendly and accommodating as could be, we strayed into some fairly somber subjects befitting the tone of his recent music. Perhaps I was just thrilled to be talking to an artist I’ve admired for nearly 20 years, and discovering — in the tradition of Holden Caulfield— that he is in fact someone whose work makes me want to call him on the telephone.
In any case, the next few months offer a golden opportunity to catch up with Cole, especially for North American music fans. First up, three of his albums will finally be made available here through the One Little Indian U.S. label beginning with this week’s release of the exquisite Music in a Foreign Language, my absolute favorite album of 2003. April 20 will see the first North American appearance of Etc., 2002’s “lost album” that chronicles Cole’s recording activities between 1995’s Love Story and 2000’s The Negatives, followed by the May 11 reissue of Plastic Wood, 2002’s album of ambient instrumental pieces. In addition, Cole will be touring the U.S. and Canada in April and May.
I begin my conversation with Cole by lauding him for continuing on and making new music, in contrast to some of his contemporaries who seem to spend as much time compiling and re-releasing older tracks than working on new songs. “I was excited to make this last record [Music in a Foreign Language], and having finished that record I was led to other ideas, and I’m excited to try and follow those ideas. I don’t know where they’ll lead…as long as I’m excited to do it, I want to do it, so long as it doesn’t just become a vanity project where nobody is listening,” Cole offers, his soft voice carrying the slight accent of an Englishman who has spent more than a decade living in the States. “I think this last record has been good for me in that a lot of people who were possibly skeptical about the validity of people like me continuing have taken their hats off and said ‘He‘s quite good.’”
That’s not to say that Cole is so intent on the future that he’s running from his past. In fact, he will be reuniting with the other four members of his original band, The Commotions, for several concerts in the U.K. come October to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the release the band’s debut album, Rattlesnakes. Several ex-Commotions, guitarist Neil Clark and keyboardist Blair Cowan, have worked on and off with Cole throughout his solo career, and the full band (which also includes bassist Lawrence Donegan and drummer Stephen Irvine) will spend three weeks rehearsing in Glasgow to prepare for the shows. Since it sounds as if they all still get on, I inquire as to why the Commotions disbanded after just three albums.
“We just sort of ran out of steam, and I didn’t feel like being in a band that just kind of became an industry,” Cole says with remarkable candor. “I found it to be quite a big pressure to have other people’s livelihoods dependent on my fickle nature. I just felt like even though I didn’t want to go off and live in Jamaica for six months, I wanted to know that I could if I wanted to. And I couldn’t do this with a working band that depended on me for their income. It’s not that I didn’t want to be in that band; I didn’t want to be in any band. I was very glad to be in the band that I was in.”
While Cole seems excited about the Commotions’ reunion shows, he adamantly insists that he is very much a solo performer now. “It’ll be fun to play rock-pop with some old friends, but I can’t imagine putting a rock band together,” he says. “On the other hand, I can imagine recording with a rock band occasionally.” Cole hopes to do just that with the members of Bob Hund, a veteran Swedish act he enthusiastically describes as “the only rock band I’ve heard in the past five or six years who actually excite me.”
We discuss the difficulty of being a veteran artist in a field that craves young blood, even in the rather “adult” realm Cole works in. “I think that if I was just starting out I’d have lots of opportunities for placement,” he tells me. “A lot of it’s down to novelty. If David Gray and I were starting out at the same time, people wouldn’t talk about him. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way; I just don’t think that they would.”
“Once you’ve been around for a while, I think it’s hard for people — unless they know your work very well — to get excited about another Lloyd Cole record. And I think that’s okay. I mean, I used to listen to a lot more new music than I do now. But there was a point when I got a Morrissey record, [1994’s] Vauxhall and I, and I just listened to it and thought, ‘Well, that’s all right, but I don’t really want to listen to it.’ That doesn’t mean I dislike the old records, it just means that I’ve heard enough Morrissey, and he’s not developing, he’s not changing in the way that I [as a listener] am, he’s not growing with me, so I don’t have any need for his music any more. Around that time I heard [the late singer/songwriter] Tim Harden for the first time, and thought I should be listening to Tim Harden, he’s talking to me. So sadly, Morrissey says ‘nothing to me about my life,’” Cole wryly notes.
With nearly a year having passed since Music in a Foreign Language was released overseas, Cole and I talk about what he’s working on at present. “I have an idea for an album, and I’ve finished a couple of the songs for it, and I have a substantial amount of 60-percent-finished ideas. I’m planning to work on it in between all the other stuff this year…. It doesn’t sound like the last one, unfortunately — I was kind of hoping that I was just going to be quiet and maudlin the rest of my life,” he says, a grin audible in his voice.
“The new stuff requires a bit more of a beat, it’s slightly perkier than I wanted, but you can’t really dictate that kind of stuff,” Cole confesses. “I just take what I write and try to be a decent editor and try and live with it long enough to go ‘Is that really worth hearing or not?’ and if it is, I’ll try to do the best version I can do of that song.” Cole also reveals that he has recently finished working with producer Mick Glossop to improve the studio setup in the workspace he rents a few miles from the New England town he resides in with his wife and children.
Yet despite the jolly spirits of Cole’s current muse, the melancholy that runs throughout Music in a Foreign Language hovers over our conversation. Though he happily recalls his formative years in the late 1970s, when a wide assortment of heroes from T. Rex’s Marc Bolan to Isaac Hayes and Chic to the Clash and the Buzzcocks inspired him to pick up guitar and pen, he says that the contemporary music industry would prove an insurmountable barrier to him if he were just starting out today.
“The aspirations I had when I was deciding that I wanted to be in music were based on a completely different ballgame,” he begins. “When I started doing music, record stores were genuinely honored that an artist would want to go by and do [an in-store appearance]. Now the record company has to pay the stores. That just isn’t right.”
“In the same way, when you visit a radio station, you’re supposed to be thanking them for playing your music. When really, if there wasn’t any decent music around, there wouldn’t be any radio stations. So it’s a lot of give and take. Maybe thank us for making some nice music that you can play as well. It works both ways. I can say that I’m sure if I was 18 today, I wouldn’t be getting into music. I’m sure I’d be doing some kind of multimedia thing that might involve music, but it wouldn’t be the primary thing.”
We’re fortunate, then, that Cole is of the age that he is — not just that he did choose to make music back in a more artist-friendly era, but because his songwriting and voice continues to reach greater heights with each successive album. Yet he doesn’t envision continuing on making new music forever. “It’s not a given, but there’s a good chance that I’ll dry up in music,” he tells me. “People do. You’ve got to be realistic about it. There’s not a great market for my instrumental stuff, which is probably the kind of thing I could do forever. But that’s not going to feed the kids.”
Lest that be seen as some sort of retirement announcement, Cole reassures me that though his recording career may one day come to a voluntary end, he intends to continue playing shows indefinitely. “Over the past few years, I’ve come to actually enjoy performing, and I could be quite happy to just be a performer in 10 years time and just go out from time to time to pay the rent. I get quite a lot of job satisfaction from putting on a good show.”
Lloyd Cole will be performing solo shows on a series of U.S. and Canadian dates in April and May, including shows in Montreal, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Chicago,Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Further details are available on the One Little Indian Records U.S. website. — Steve Gozdecki
© 2004 Steve Gozdecki.
Last updated: 12/13/2008