Sometime in 1984 Countdown was splitting it’s time between the New Romantics and the latest in pub rock. Then one Sunday night they dropped a clip from a new band from the UK, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions. The song was “Rattlesnakes” and the video shifted from images of sepia tinged America to the band playing in a small room. Polo neck sweaters, an album of the same name, with lyrics that tipped the hat to Truman Capote, Eva Marie Saint and Norman Mailer, and a swag of masterful songs sealed the deal. When the Commotions split in 1989, Lloyd Cole built a fine solo career. With a Commotion’s box-set retrospective already out and a solo, ‘early years’, box to follow, the timing seems right for a tour the artist has dubbed The Retrospective – playing the Lloyd Cole songbook 1983-1996. Cole recently spoke with Sean Sennett. 

We’re excited you’re coming back. This time when you come to Brisbane it’s the biggest room you played in since you played Festival Hall all those years ago. It’s great there’s so much interest. 

I hope so. The thinking is the tour has gone so well in the U.K. so far. There seems to be a bit more demand of me to be an oldies artist than there is for me to be a contemporary artist.

You were one of the early adopters of the whole web DIY presence for an artist. The whole motivation behind the website seemed to be moving forward doing new things. Did there come a time in your career where you needed to  compartmentalise and do a retrospective show? 

I spent so much of the last two years looking back because of these box sets that came out last year, The Commotions came out last year. It went well, so Universal came back and said could we do another box set of your early solo career. So I’ve been spending all this time looking at the old songs, and I figured if I was ever going to be an oldies singer, now makes sense, because my focus has been there, though I’m still working on new projects.

In fact, when I’m in Adelaide, I’m doing an electronic installation, which is kind of the diametric opposite of being an oldies singer. To be honest, I thought I would be a bit uncomfortable with it. But I’m not. The very first time I did it was in Atlanta, Georgia. I got up there and said it’s only old songs tonight. I’m just going to make it up and see how we get along. It was fine. It was quite natural. I think maybe at a certain point in life it is natural just to look back once in a while. The other thing is I’ve got too many songs to do a set which deals with the whole career. So compartmentalising it and focusing on a certain period almost makes it easier to make a balanced set.

Do you ever have a critical distance and feel you’re curating somebody else’s work, your younger self’s work, when you were doing the box sets and preparing for the tour?

Certainly, it’s clear that it’s a younger person. There are certainly some times when I wonder what on earth I was thinking. I certainly don’t remember all the time. I don’t really remember what it was like to be a 23-year-old. I remember some of the things I did, but I don’t really remember from the inside.

There’s a few songs over the years that I’ve dropped from my normal live set because I felt that they really are a young person’s song and that I’m not really sure if I’m equipped to really sing those songs anymore. One of the nice things about this set is I’m only revisiting a few of those songs, even though I know I’m not really that well equipped, because that’s the point of the show. We’re going to go back to a few of those songs. There’s obviously going to be one or two that are completely impossible, but there have been a few which have been really nice to go back to, actually. Songs that I didn’t think I really would be able to find a way to sing. And maybe it’s helped that I’ve got my son on stage for half of the show, and he is 24.

Physically you can do it and so forth; is it strange for you emotionally when you’re singing those songs? Are there some things where you feel this was quite a difficult song for me to write or that was my real heart in there? Or do you not really really take yourself back to any negative situations. 

I think it depends very much on how your mood is on a given night. If your mother-in-law is really sick or Prince just died, it’s very easy to see those aspects in the older songs and it’s easy for it to become more of an emotional thing. I think for me, the main emotional thing in the set is the fact there is this emotional tie between the audience and me, and that tie is the songs.

You’ve spoken a lot over the years about your admiration for Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and people like Marc Bolan and the influence they had over your work. Are they artists you revisit much? Or have you heard them so many times now that they are ever present? Do you still play their records?

I actually have to give myself a kick in the backside every now and again to actually go and listen to music at all. I’m quite fond of silence. I was just on Twitter today and saw that the Quietus has just released their list of best records of last year. I thought I should listen. So I started listening.

Do I go back and listen to things like Electric Warrior and The Slider? No, but I do love playing it. For example, my youngest son is only 17. I do love introducing him to things like that – four years ago, I sent William a copy of “I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man” and I suggested that his band do a cover version of it. He became a massive Prince fan. He was more devastated, if possible, than I was this year. It’s lovely to pass stuff like that on. But if I were to be honest, most of the music I listen to these days is probably what you would call modern classical experimental music, usually no singing.

Did you ever meet Prince?

No. I stood next to him at the LoveSexy after party, and I stood there for a long time pondering what on earth I could possibly say, and then ended up saying nothing. I would have probably blubbered “You’re awesome!”

I wanted to ask you about a couple of songs you wrote back in the day. A song like “Perfect Skin,” that has one of the best lines of all time: “Cheekbones like geometry”. It’s fantastic. Do you remember writing that song?

Do I remember the actual seconds and minutes writing it? No, but I do remember the weekend that I wrote because I wrote “Perfect Skin” and “Forest Fire” the same weekend. The Commotions had just signed the publishing deal so we had a tiny bit of money, and we bought a port-a-studio. Do you remember those things?

We had a four-track-cassette port-a-studio and a DX7 synthesizer. We took turns taking it home for the weekend. I took the DX7 and the port-a-studio, and I remember on “Forest Fire” my idea was what was eventually the baseline. I was so excited to have a synthesizer in the house.

The first time we’d ever written something where I thought ‘Oh, gosh, we’re really onto something’ was “Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken” and “Perfect Skin” was probably maybe two months later. I wrote these two songs and took them to the band. I said I think this is what we need to make the next step, and sure enough; we made a demo of those songs, and that was when we got signed.

“Rattlesnakes,” the song is obviously a masterpiece. I can say that. You don’t have to agree. Was that inspired by Joan Didion? Did a line jump out at you? 

There’s a line in Play It as It Lays where the father of the female character says, something like “Life is a crap game and there are rattlesnakes under every rock” or something like that. And that was where I got the idea for the title Rattlesnakes. Actually, I was a huge Joan Didion fan in those days. I tried to make the main character in my song feel like the character from A Book of Common Prayer, but I took the idea of the words from Play It as It Lays. Obviously, the song would have been absolutely nothing if Neil (Clark) hadn’t come up with the guitar riff.

The riff is fantastic. An album of yours Don’t Get Weird On Me Baby, I remember getting that record when it came out. I loved that record so much. Then I met you years later and you said to me ‘we just didn’t get it quite right;. I thought I can’t believe that; the record is so bloody good. When you listen to it now, do you still feel that way or feel there’s some things you could have done to get it more in line with your vision?

I think I was a bit upset after that album came, and it didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped, and the orchestral side really didn’t get heard, other than the people that bought the record. I don’t think people really knew what the record was, so I think for a while I thought I wished I’d just made a whole orchestral record, and then there would have been nothing else to play.

But no, in retrospect, I think Rattlesnakes and Music In A Foreign Language may be two albums that I can think of that I say maybe don’t have at least one or two things I would say are definitely wrong with them, flawed records. Almost all of the records are flawed. Yeah, there are some flaws on Don’t Get Weird On Me Baby but I’m happy with it. I think it’s one of those ones… like Easy Pieces, I think the good songs outnumber the bad considerably. I’m happy with it these days.

I think you once mentioned you would have preferred in hindsight to flip the sides over on Don’t Get Weird On Me Baby. Is that right? 

The American record company flipped the sides over because they wouldn’t have the orchestral side first. I think that was when I knew I was falling out with them.

I guess the fact you’ve done these retrospectives with them, you’ve fallen back in with them. Is that correct, or has the stuff been released back to you?

No, the Universal still own it all. They came to me just after Standards came out, it, did a lot better than most of my recent albums in the U.K. I think all of a sudden I was no longer dead to Universal and they said they’d like to do a box of the Commotions. It went better than I think any of us could have expected, and it was well received, and everybody seemed to enjoy it. They came back about a year later and said can we do another box of the early solo records. That has been finished for a little while, but I was really hoping it would be ready to be in the shops when we’re in Australia but it’s not going to be in the shops until March.

I know the Commotions got back together a few years ago and did a couple shows in Scotland. You did one in London as well maybe. Was that the end of the line for you guys?

It was well after the end of the line. It was 2004, so it was 16 years after we’d split up. It was nice, but there was an anniversary edition of Rattlesnakes that came out, 20th anniversary. I think we thought if we were ever going to do it, now was the time.

We all got together and said we’d a one-off like this. Lawrence (Donegan) was writing for The Guardian at the time and probably put it best by saying that we were together long enough to remember why we split up in the first place. It was enough.

I think there were a few songs I remember on stage feeling I’m not young enough to sing some of these songs. It’s not lyrically, it was just physically. The Commotions were only together for three albums, and we were young for those three albums. We didn’t have any middle age songs. We had only young persons’ songs. Never say never, maybe some insane sheik in the Middle East will want to give us all tons of money, but I doubt it very much. I think we’re done.

What are you reading at the moment? 

I’m reading a contemporary London crime series of novels by Mick Herron. I’m reading the first one. It’s based around a place called Slough House which I believe is fictional. The series is called Slow Horses and it’s where they send the spies and undercover people, the ones who fail, the ones who won’t quit. It’s all these people who think their career is over, and several of them are very belligerent about it and therefore they have more to prove that they need to be back with the dogs, as they’re called. They call the active spies the big dogs or something. It’s quite entertaining so far. I only just started.

Lloyd Cole’s Australia/NZ Tour Dates for 2017 are here http://www.lloydcole.com/live/