Music / Lloyd Cole

The Commotions' Third Album

I was looking for a rhyme for the New York Times
When I sensed I was not alone
She said, "Do you know how to spell audaciously?"
I could tell I was in love.

"Charlotte Street"

Lloyd Cole (b. 31st January 1961) is an English rock/pop singer and songwriter, though he formed his first band in Scotland and is currently based in the USA. He first emerged as the lead singer of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, who formed in Glasgow in 1982 and had four top twenty albums in the UK between 1984 and 1989. The other members were Blair Cowan (keyboards), Lawrence Donegan (bass), Neil Clark (guitar), and Stephen Irvine (drums).

Cole then went solo, and has recorded a dozen albums as of 2023. The Commotions briefly reformed in 2004 to mark the 20th anniversary of their first album, Rattlesnakes, but this was never intended to be permanent.

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Lloyd Cole and the Commotions Albums

• Rattlesnakes (1984)
• Easy Pieces (1985)
• Mainstream (1987)
• 1984–1989, A "best of" album released to close out the band's career (1989)

Lloyd Cole Solo Albums

• Lloyd Cole (1990)
• Don't Get Weird on Me Babe (1991)
• Bad Vibes (1993)
• Love Story (1995)
• Plastic Wood (2001)
• Music in a Foreign Language (2003)
• Antidepressant (2006)
• Broken Record (2010)
• Standards (2013)
• 1D Electronics 2012–2014 (2015)
• Guesswork (2019)
• On Pain (2023)

Tropes in Lloyd Cole Songs:

• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: "Lost Weekend" has "It took a lost wee-KEND in a HO-tel in AM-sterdam".
• An Aesop: "Perfect Skin"
  Strikes me, the moral of this song must be: there never has been one.
• Answer Song: Camera Obscura recorded "Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken" as a response to the Commotions' "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?"
• The Casanova: The target/subject of "Down On Mission Street" is a cold-hearted seducer who has just hurt his latest girl — though apparently, she initially picked him up.
  God only knows how you can hurt her
  When you know that's what you do
  How does it feel to be so cruel?
  Will you never be contented with your life
  Will you always be the one who won't look back?
• Chained to a Railway: In "Brand New Friend", the dysfunctional pair "swore and lied that we'd tie ourself to the railway line", but they were all mouth.
• Drugs Are Bad:
  • Possibly the point of "I Hate To See You Doing That Stuff", though what "That Stuff" might be remains unstated.
  • "The Idiot" depicts the time spent by David Bowie and Iggy Pop in Berlin as an attempt to "Stop being drug addicts", and asks (from their point of view) "How are we still alive?"
• Granola Girl: "So You'd Like To Save The World" is about trying to woo one of these by being as cynical as possible.
  I suggest you start one person at a time
  And start with me
• Happily Failed Suicide: "Minor Character" depicts a very undecided girl — she threatens to throw herself from a bridge, but is laughed out of it. Cutting her wrists is also just an announcement.
• Lampshade Hanging: "Forest Fire" concludes that its own title "is just a simple metaphor for a burning love."
• Liar's Paradox: "Opposites Day" has the two-sentence variant ("The next line is the truth| The last line was a lie" and later "The next line is a lie|This one is the truth"), both being equivalent to the standard paradox.
• Ode to Intoxication: "My Bag" appeared to be such to a cocaine high, though Lawrence Donegan maintained that the guy in the song is an idiot when interviewed in 1987.
• Rhyming with Itself: In the form of a very clever homophone in "2CV":
  All we ever shared was a taste in clothes
  oh we were never close
• Shout-Out: Cole is very prone to shout-outs and specific cultural references. For example:
  • "Rattlesnakes" uses a little name-dropping to establish something about the woman it describes:
    She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront
    She reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance...
  • "Perfect Skin" uses references both descriptively and to establish character:
    She's got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin
    And she's sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan...
    ...
    At the age of ten she looked like Greta Garbo...
  • "Andy's Babies" is about the Velvet Underground.
  • "The Idiot" is clearly about David Bowie and Iggy Pop and their Berlin period.
    We'll move to Berlin
    Stop being drug addicts
    We'll cycle and swim
    Stop being drug addicts
    We'll rent an efficiency
    You'll take the serious guise
    I'll be The Idiot
• Silly Love Songs: A lot of Cole's songs are about love and romance, but he routinely subverts the trope by adding a wry twist. For example, "Undressed" admits that love may be tangled up with lust, and that the lover may not mind his beloved being sad if she looks good when she's depressed.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: The singer of "Are You Ready to be Heartbroken?" clearly thinks that the person being addressed is dangerously naive — hence the title question.

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