Rob Steen
Pretentious, moi? Anyone who bought – or was put off buying – Lloyd Cole & The Commotions’ opening submissions for the edification and delectation of a nation grooving to naughty Prince and the cold cod antics of the New Romantics, could scarcely fail to be reminded of one of Monty Python’s most durable catchphrases.
Rattlesnakes, a remarkably assured debut album, was recorded 40 summers ago. At the time Michel Platini and his fellow Bleus were basking in the glow of winning the European Championship, France’s first footballing crown: another reason for Francophile singer-songwriter Cole to flaunt his cultural education and linguistic evolution at Glasgow University.
Amid the high unemployment and low morale that had already scarred those who had been fearing a call-up to tackle Argentina’s hardest hatchet men, a posh-sounding chap name-dropping Greta Garbo pre-Madonna was risky enough; shamelessly crowbarring Eva Marie Saint and Simone De Beauvoir into the same verse bordered on the batty.
The cynical, lovelorn smart-arses Cole portrayed were up there with their counterparts in the Steely Dan canon. Here was the Bizarro Prince: sexless and unable to connect with women. Two of his fellow students, my then-girlfriend and her best pal, assured me he was fascinating and genuine, but early hearings suggested a poseur.
Not only was one track entitled 2CV, the singer undressed the acronym – deux chevaux – in immaculate French. The protagonist in Charlotte Street might have been having a torrid love affair in Soho, but the accordion suggested he’d far rather be in Paris. Or Greenwich Village, since he seemed most concerned about where he could get the New York Times. Not that that deterred rave reviews. The Record Mirror contended that the music was so good, such pretentiousness was forgivable. Indeed, the NME would rank Rattlesnakes as one of the 100 finest albums ever waxed.
George Orwell didn’t come remotely close to anticipating it, but 1984 was a musical mirabilis in the UK. The tap that began gushing in 1963 was turned back on by northerners, standard-bearers for what Bob Stanley, the St Etienne main man turned acclaimed author, would gratefully dub ‘new pop’. Dynamic debuts by innovative acts abounded. Glasgow’s Blue Nile submitted A Walk Across The Rooftops, a record aching with Linn-driven electro-ballads and rain; from Manchester came The Smiths’ eponymous first album; Tyneside and Durham supplied Pet Shop Boys (the first, house-trained incarnation of West End Girls) and Prefab Sprout their chorus-light maiden album Swoon.
Meanwhile, Buxton in the Peak District, hitherto best-known for its water and Dave Lee ‘Hairy Cornflake’ Travis, gave us Lloyd Cole and The Commotions’ Rattlesnakes and its astonishingly unhip lead single Perfect Skin. How many other popular songs have featured the word ‘geometry’ and someone gaining enlightenment from Cosmopolitan? But while it was never Paddy McAloon and Prefab Sprout, Paul Buchanan and The Blue Nile or Morrissey and The Smiths, Cole followed the footsteps of James Brown and Buddy Holly as well as the less auspicious ones of Billy J Kramer and Brian Poole, blatantly separating himself from his teammates.
In one key respect, Cole & Co resembled The Police, who had just divorced acrimoniously. Neil Clark’s crisp, versatile, stately guitar, Blair Cowan’s cinematic atmospherics on keyboards and the meticulous foundation dug by Lawrence Donegan’s bouncy bass and Stephen Irvine’s driving drums fleshed out the light-footed melodies and heavy-duty words. Clark, especially, was a considerable talent. His spare, slow-burning, minimalist solo brings Forest Fire, another hit, to a suitably blazing climax; he also co-penned the sobering closer on Rattlesnakes, the plaintive Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? Nobody, though, was left in any doubt as to whose show it was.
Until last month, the most fulfilling history of postwar popular music to cross my path had been The Story of Pop, an authoritatively written and exquisitely designed 40-issue mag published as a partwork as far back as 1973. Then Stanley’s award-winning Yeah Yeah Yeah barged in with its passion for invention and fashion, its refreshing absence of snobbery and erudite evaluation of what sells, what doesn’t and why/why not. Even he isn’t entirely sure why Cole & Co struck so many chords when they did. Neither is yours truly, other than to note that the frontman channelled Bob Dylan, Jimmy Webb and Scott Walker. Good taste has never been a handicap.
Perfect Skin beat Becker and Fagen’s Almost Gothic by two decades as a dissection of a helpless submissive. Kicked off by Clark’s rousing country-fried finger-picking, Donegan’s nimble plucking, Irvine’s beefy thumping and Cole’s cool woo-woohing, we swiftly discover the doomed nature of the singer’s relationship with the owner of said immaculate flesh. The numerous ‘ands’ amplify the breathless infatuation while accentuating the self-ridicule:
She’s inappropriate, but then she’s much more fun and
When she smiles my way
My eyes go out in vain
She’s got perfect skin
Predictably enough, ‘cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin’ make for a bitter ending:
Shame on you, you’ve got no sense of grace, shame on me
Ahh, just in case I might come to a conclusion
Other than that which is absolutely necessary
And that’s perfect skin
And, to cap all that, a self-referential, pluperfect pay-off:
Strikes me the moral of this song must be
There never has been one
Perfect Skin peaked at No26 in the UK in July before charting across Europe and Australia. Prepared at the Shoreditch studio owned by ex-Ultravox vox John Foxx, Rattlesnakes was consumed even more zealously, though one can only guess what the Swedes and Dutch made of Cole’s punny, Costello-esque flourishes.
Doubtless influenced by the band’s move to a major label, Polydor, rather than any of the DIY indies that were starting to proliferate, Cole’s ego briefly even outgrew Sting’s after Rattlesnakes, rendering The Commotions dispensable. A more charitable, and possibly accurate, way of viewing it would be to say that directional differences confined them to two further collective outings.
Produced by whizzkids Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley and blessed with Why I Love Country Music, a delicious downer, Easy Pieces (1985) proved as dismaying in its day as The Stones Roses’ chest-beating Second Coming would a decade on.
By contrast, the lusher textures of the unjustly neglected swansong, Mainstream (1987), was almost as consistently affecting as Rattlesnakes. The juiciest fruits include the searing Sean Penn Blues (wherein the troubled actor is referred to, sympathetically, as Mr Madonna and Nancy Sinatra pops up) and the chilling Big Snake, a swampy tale about ‘Daddy’s little girl’ getting down and dirty in what feels uncannily like Louisiana. All three LPs made the Top 10 but while the quality was seldom lacking (Jennifer She Said and From The Hip from Mainstream were both rippers), success at 45rpm rapidly petered out.
Many years later, an acclaimed book about Donegan’s season as a professional caddie, Four-Iron In The Soul, led to an illustrious tenure as golf correspondent of The Guardian. That made us colleagues. This led to me emailing Donegan, by then based in his native Scotland, saying how much I still adored Rattlesnakes, gently prodding him for reminiscences. The ensuing silence was neither golden nor diplomatic. As recently as 2019, on the other hand, Clark and Cowan both guested on their ex-boss’s Guesswork.
Cole relocated not to Paris but New York City. Stripping most if not quite all that reading off those capacious sleeves, he didn’t actually travel that great a distance topic-wise. Not only did he possess a lasting voice in the most literal sense, he’d found his cause and, boy, would he stick to it.
He carried on excavating (the heart, that is) into his seventh decade with a steady stream of moving recordings, taking enough devotees with him to embrace electronics, even attracting new disciples. Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe (1991) stands tallest for its naked insights into modern masculinity as well as sonic diversity. The titles of the key ingredients say it all: What He Doesn’t Know, There For Her, Half of Everything. During the last, ‘some kind of voodoo woman’ punches him repeatedly in the figurative gut:
I don’t need your lovin’
I don’t need your kissin’
I don’t need for you to tell me All that I’ve been missin’
Still more fitting, in name and text, is the centrepiece, Man Enough, self-lacerating and accordion-fuelled, at once a confession of fragility and a plea for forgiveness:
Now that the low life has no meaning
’Cause you’ve been there
Now you’re gone
But your heart won’t keep from cheating
It’s stringing you along
Well, what’s the lowdown?
Are you man enough to pray
For a better way of living?
I believe I’ve lost my way…
Wore my heart upon my sleeve
To court the wretched and the free
But if by chance I’d lost my way
Would you help me find it, babe?
Oh, May, could you please hold me?
Clark and Cowan were present last year when their erstwhile King Cole played three sold-out gigs at Islington’s intimate Union Chapel. When I saw the grey-flecked, black-clad, bedenimed Cole play a mostly acoustic set there in 2016, he revealed that those digs of Charlotte Street fame had actually been a squat in nearby Upper Street.
Rather sweetly, his son William was on guitar that night. One can only trust he has absorbed those paternal lessons wisely, if not too well.
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