My own coldness is at times embarrassing,” muses Lloyd Cole, who after around three decades living and raising a family in the US remains “not an American person. I’m not naturalised. I’m British.” He elaborates, illustrating the fact. “One word I really don’t like is ‘passion’. Obviously, I’m passionate about certain things – my family and maybe my work – but I just don’t like the word, the concept. I’d prefer to say I ‘care’ about these things. I’ve done interviews where people say, ‘Oh, I understand golf is your passion…’ No, it’s not! I’m not passionate about golf! I just play it.
“I’m not Christian, I’m not religious, but I don’t like the idea of ‘pride’, either,” he continues. “I do, however, like the idea that pride is some kind of a sin. Because there’s this Be The Most You Can Be idea which seems integral to anybody born after 1980, especially in the US. Not only do many young people not get the notion of self-deprecation, they really hate it! Yet for me, this idea of self-love is really damaging. It’s unhealthy. I think it’s one of the worst things that’s happened to the world. The writers of the song The Greatest Love Of All have a great deal to answer for, because maybe that was the first piece of art which expressed this idea that you can’t love other people or things unless you love yourself. I don’t even want to think about loving myself! One of the joys of making music, for me, is that your reading of my songs is necessarily correct – whether it’s got anything to do with what I might have been thinking about when I wrote it or not. It’s correct because the music is for you, not me.”
He pauses for a moment. “Sorry,” he chuckles, “that was a horrible rant, like old people complaining about young people. But I do feel we are a dying breed – the generation who find at least amusement in self-deprecation.”
There are several characteristically dry, almost-winking digs at himself on Cole’s new album, Guesswork, wherein he’s “always on the verge of something beautiful or terrible”, “no longer chasing certainty” or “a complicated motherfucker – you know that.” It’s his 14th album, if you include the three with The Commotions which introduced him, and his 2013 collaboration with Cluster/Harmonia co-founder Hans Joachim Roedelius. Most of it was recorded in his attic studio in Easthampton, Massachusetts, but it features former Commotions guitarist Neal Clark (who’ll be touring with him) and keyboardist Blair Cowan for the first time since the band’s 1987 swansong, Mainstream.
However, it’s anything but a throwback to that outfit’s old sound. It’s primarily an electronic album, Cole crooning his wry wordplay over washes and throbs which play on the legacy of Moroder and krautrock. Those who haven’t been following the interesting twists and turns of his latterday career might be surprised.
“I would hope so,” he says. “It’s nice when your record has at least a chance of shocking a few people. I’ve been a fan of electronic music pretty much my whole adult life. I remember when I was 13, buying, or swapping, No Pussyfooting by Fripp and Eno, around 1973. I’m not sure if I understood what it was: at 13 you’re still thinking about everything in terms of pop music. But I liked the sound of Frippertronics, and Eno with his two Revox machines. Something clicked. Probably the slightly risqué sleeve initially made me like it, with that nude glass woman. I remember thinking that was burlesque.
“Yet somehow or other when The Commotions became a band, we weren’t electronic,” he elaborates. “And one of the reasons my song-based stuff since has been less electronic than one might have expected is because [1993 album] Bad Vibes was my big attempt to join the two worlds, and was kind of a disaster, in my opinion. After that I imposed a demarcation on myself: electronic stuff had to be instrumental. This is the first attempt since then to fully merge the two sides of my musical interests.”
It’s strange, isn’t it, that we’re supposed to tribally align with either, say, the guitars of Lou Reed and Television (clear Cole influences) or the synths of Moroder and Kraftwerk, when in fact most of us of a certain generation like both?
“Yes, absolutely. Before I made [2013 album] Standards, I thought I was done with rock’n’roll. I didn’t think I had any left in me. Then I wrote that bunch of songs. And after I’d recovered, this idea of something electronic, perhaps also driven by classical, dance, even Broadway, excited me. It just took a long time to get all the ideas clear in my head. And so many aspects of the industry are difficult to think about, for somebody who started out in the early 80s, when things were as we’d thought they were going to be when we were growing up: singles, videos, albums. Obviously, it’s a completely new world since the 90s-00s. However, it’s quite liberating to think: I can do whatever the hell I want, it’s probably not going to hurt me!”
Anything goes?
“Well, one of the joys about growing up in the UK was that Radio 1 had to play anything, whatever genre, if it was a hit,” he says. “Pop music was anything that was successful. So they’d have Scott Walker or T.Rex after The Archies. This awful separation-of-genres thing was an American radio invention. I remember when we first went to the US with The Commotions, saying to the radio guy, ‘Forest Fire will be able to get on the R&B stations, right? With its sort of Steve Cropper-ish beat? [see panel].’ And he just laughed at me. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you’re either College Radio or Alternative Radio.’ That kind of broke my heart.”
We were all ready to be heartbroken when Cole and his band’s delicious debut Rattlesnakes swept onto the scene in 1984, a string-driven thing propelled by a subtly sinewy band and exquisite songwriting. With literary and cinematic references to Norman Mailer, Eva Marie Saint, Greta Garbo, Simone De Beauvoir and Truman Capote, it drew in the fey American-wannabe intellectuals among us while maintaining a sturdy pop heartbeat, timeless rather than “new” romantic. Cole was slackly aligned by the press with other adept contemporaneous wordsmiths like Paddy McAloon, Edwyn Collins, Roddy Frame, even Morrissey. I’d wondered whether Lloyd, now 58 and frequently mentioning his “old age” as if he’s 90, might flinch at talking about his youthful endeavours, but on acoustic tours in recent years he’s been embracing highlights from his catalogue, and indeed, the forthcoming tour is called From Guesswork To Rattlesnakes. So, in fact, he speaks of those breakthrough days with affection.
When The Commotions then split and he went solo in the 90s, the transition was challenging but rewarding.
“It wasn’t something which ‘developed’ or which I ‘felt’ a certain way – it was just a case of jumping into the unknown,”
he recalls. “I had no certainty that I’d be able to be a musician without the band. The first few months of trying to make a solo record was exciting, like making Rattlesnakes had been. Because my job in The Commotions was singing
and ideas and primarily rhythm guitar and a little bit of this and that, I didn’t fully know what else I could do. But by being around the band for years I guess I’d learned how to do things like program drums, and write string arrangements, and play guitar better than I’d realised I could. So I was able to be autonomous, which was what I’d hoped.”
The piece de resistance among Cole’s underrated solo albums, for RC, is 1991’s Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe (named after a Raymond Carver quotation). Paul Buckmaster’s strings are extraordinary, and set him up
as a kind of Nilsson-meets-Glen-Campbell. Released in another year, in another wave of trends, might that album have been more appreciated?
“Maybe,” he considers. “It’s difficult to say that about one’s own records. On the debut I was very much trying to be all the extremes that a band won’t let you be – more pop when I want to be, more rock when I want to be, etc. Then I thought: what do I want to do next? I know – work with an orchestra! You should know Blair [Cowan] wrote most of those orchestrations; at least 60-70 percent of them. Paul [Buckmaster] just made it work with the orchestra.
It’s great when people say they like that one. After it wasn’t successful, I doubted…”
There’s no doubt Cole thinks about his music a great deal. While this isn’t to denigrate its warmth and wallop, he has at times in conversation – delightfully for the interviewer – the thought processes of an academic, an analyst, a philosopher; born in Buxton, when he met The Commotions in Glasgow he was studying Philosophy and English.
Pondering his age again, second-guessing his writing decisions, he says, “I think certainty is something that only youth can have. It’s a very dangerous thing: certainty is what terrorists have. You cannot do extreme things without having certainty that you’re right. The more we live, the more we learn, and it’d take a pretty stupid person to be really sure about anything as you get close to 60. Black and white becomes grey. With so many aspects of life, maybe we should just toss a coin. It’s just not worth the metaphysics. Metaphysics is for kids. Pragmatism is for grown-ups.”
Not, perhaps, the tangent of discussion you get from your average pop star. He adds that none of his work is purely autobiographical, but “none of it is purely not, either. Songwriting isn’t a million miles away from method acting. You have to put yourself in there, to find a way to express things, if you want to present something that can seem authentic.” He catches himself. “Ha! ‘Seem authentic’! But it’s entertainment, theatre… it’s a kind of fiction. Since I’ve had an idea of what my function is in the world, I think it’s making beautiful things to make people’s lives more enjoyable.”
Even if some of your lyrics, albeit darkly humorous, seem almost tortured?
“Oh, but people write to me all the time saying my music helps get them through their lives,” he declares, proudly. “Music that doesn’t deal with the difficulties doesn’t help you with the difficulties.”
He feels liberated by his age. Apart from his body of work, he reasons, he’s “got nothing to worry about fucking-up.” So he enjoys that freedom? “Sometimes. But also, when you can do anything, it’s hard to decide what to do. So you can end up doing nothing.” He quotes a DEVO track from 1980. “‘Freedom of choice is what you got;/Freedom from choice is what you want.’ I love DEVO.” He also loves Prince (“as good as pop music can be”), Pet Shop Boys and Robyn (“fantastic”), and recently heard ABC’s The Look Of Love in the gym and “it was head and shoulders above”.
Yes, as well as playing golf, Lloyd Cole goes to the gym.
“The winters up here in Massachusetts are just awful,” he reasons. “When the snow comes down, it stays down. For months. There’s nothing you can do outside. You can’t even go walking because it’s so slippery and dangerous. It’s easy to get ‘winter-overweight’. So I started going to the gym. It’s really the only place I hear modern pop music.” He’s never fully felt at-home in Easthampton, despite living there all this century after some years in New York from ’88 to ’99.
“I’m here through inertia,” he confides. “Family, kids. But my wife knows I don’t want to die here. I couldn’t make the pledge of allegiance. There are good people here, but when capitalism is unchecked it gets pretty ugly. I’d like to return to… certainly to Europe, one day. The US is crippled by selfishness, self-interest. By a notion of freedom that most can’t afford to take advantage of, and is therefore meaningless.” On account of all the rattlesnakes.
Logically, we move from the crisis of capitalism to the subject of 70s soul combo – or rather union of two soul combos – Moments & Whatnauts, who enjoyed a 1975 hit with Girls. This we do because a track on Guesswork is called Moments And Whatnot, and I refuse to believe he’s not having niche, generation-specific pun-time. “Absolutely!” he agrees, happy to be found out. “Because I was writing a song which addresses the issue of ‘the moment’. And, of course, that came into my head, and honestly… I couldn’t resist. Others tried to talk me out of it. I said, ‘I know, but… I just really, really want to call it Moments And Whatnot!’”
There’s a Stephen Sondheim reference on another track, and he also mentions “the next day”, which his lyric sheet has capped up as “The Next Day”.
A tip of the hat to Bowie? “Well, somebody who isn’t in the moment is always living in the future, in the next day,” he replies. “So it was fortuitous. Once I’d written it, I thought: oh, that’s quite cute.”
With Neal Clark accompanying Cole on his October-November acoustic tour of the UK, it won’t be a repeat of his last, which saw him abetted by his son, William.
“Oh, William’s launching his own career now,” he tells RC. “He’s trying to be Prince, basically. You know what? Pride is acceptable when it’s applied to your own family and their achievements. He’s a great musician.”
His dad muses that “there are still lots of things I haven’t done” and reckons he’s jealous of the “real minimalism” he hears on records by “Drake, Robyn or Kraftwerk. I’ve never been that sparse, but I’m getting there. What is lovely is to still be excited by possibilities. It’s an interesting time.”
Lloyd Cole overestimates his coldness. He’s just cool.
Guesswork is released on 26 July.
