The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Nights Out / Lloyd Cole (and Will)

Lloyd Cole (and Will)

by 27 Comments

Venue:

Town Hall Birmingham

Date: 24/03/2017

There are some gigs that speak for themselves. Cloud Nothings on Wednesday was pretty much: here are our songs, a bit louder and faster than on record. No chat. Is that OK? And then there’s gigs that demand to be dissected and discussed. And so it is with Lloyd Cole at Birmingham Town Hall on Friday Night.

So what happened? Lloyd was onstage at eight, just him and an acoustic guitar for 45 minutes. Late-entry punters caught out got ‘I’m supporting Lloyd Cole, then there’s an interval, then I’m coming back as Lloyd Cole the headliner’. Which he did, for the second half accompanied by his son Will on second acoustic. We got two hours, heavy on the Commotions songbook – this is billed as the ‘Oldies tour’ – with forays into the solo catalogue as far as The Negatives. Almost all of Rattlesnakes, and a good chunk of Easy Pieces and Mainstream. No More Love Songs the most recent, Perfect Skin the oldest. Lloyd’s between song chat was neither minimal nor expansive. He noted that the newest song was twenty years old, and the oldest approaching forty. Will, who doubled as roadie, was called out for having a hairdo that said he wanted to be in Echo and The Bunnymen, as Lloyd did. There’s musings on getting old, and how Mick Jagger is the only one that seems to be having fun doing it, and on the success of the Box Sets.

These songs are indestructible. There’s not much you can do to ruin Rattlesnakes or Lost Weekend, but…and here’s the start of the musings. Was Lloyd’s heart in it? He wasn’t sure, and he was happy to share this doubt with us. Having many times said he didn’t want to look back, and with an esoteric recent solo catalogue taking in ambient electronica, the Box Sets success have demanded that he goes on the road to give them another airing.

While never less than polite, or professional, one cannot escape the feeling that the faintest whiff of necessity hangs around this set-up. Do his songs gain from the stripped-down presentation? For me, not really. His guitar playing is perfectly fine, but hardly virtuoso. His voice doesn’t take flight with the extra room. Nor do his songs really need him to. Their reference points are country and western, the Byrds, even southern funk – and, for example, great though his performance of Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken was, it didn’t stop me mentally filling in the keyboard part and wishing it was there. Is this the Lloyd that’s financially viable, just me and junior with our acoustics, rather than the concert he’d like to do? Or is the whole business of finding, rehearsing and touring with 3 others just too complicated and tiresome.

I have to say that Will coming on livened up the second half immensely. His guitar playing was excellent, and the father/son rapport expressed in blank looks and half-smiles was great. Again, is the touch of awkwardness all part of the middle-aged Lloyd schtick, or something more genuine. What happens back at the hotel? Do they meet up with mum every night and survey the Pizza Express menu one more time together?

I could be over-thinking all this. But Lloyd’s demeanour and his songs invite it. Hearing twenty odd of them back to back makes one realise the narrow field he ploughs. In a Lloyd song the narrator is either leaving, or being left, or has been left, by the girl, who is dressed in a dress, or undressed,and in a darkened room or out the door. She or he has left a suitcase with some clothes (perhaps a dress) and thoughts turn to either how old we both are, how young the girl or the narrator are, and when Eastenders is on. He’s the poet of the awkward thoughts that crowd in when you start to doubt whether you love someone, whether they love you, or what you even saw in each other. In the first album these scenarios were dressed up with a slew of cultural references that my companion memorably termed ‘the postcards you put on your first year pinboard at uni’ but as the solo albums start there’s less of Norman Mailer and 2CV’s and just, well, the narrator and girls, dresses and suitcases.

All this might suggest I didn’t enjoy myself. It was great, but inevitably nostalgia breeds contemplation. To return to my doubts, Lloyd seemed to doubt that it was entirely healthy for him or us to spend Friday night revisiting these ghosts from the eighties and nineties one more time. Time is marching on for all of us – for Lloyd has stopped wearing his contact lenses and every few songs puts his glasses on to read the tuning thingummy at his feet. But here we were. And, perhaps despite himself, Hey Rusty broke through all of the thinking and framing – and was just startlingly good in the here and now. It’s one his few songs where he suggests they try again.

The audience:

At a guess everyone was at university between 1984 and 1990. It’s seems clear that Lloyd’s subsequent career has won him few new fans, apart from the few teenage sons and daughters accompanying their parents.

It made me think..

Where do you start? Lloyd is all about the thinking. But did he fit in 18 holes at The Belfry earlier on the in the day? No clues from the performance.

6

Comments

  1. Obligatory first comment. That these songs are bigger than Lloyd. They mean quite a bit to the audience, who sing along with gusto, helping Lloyd out on (for example) the doo-be-doos at the end of Jennifer She Said. Lloyd’s here to plug us all back into the songs we heard floating across the Halls of Residence in 1986.

  2. I was lucky to see him with the Negatives. They did one fine album together and then called it a day which is an enormous shame.

    However good he is solo, playing with a band would give him a new lease of life.

    Thanks for a fine, pensive review MM.

  4. Yep. Them’s words that make me feel sorry for the poor bast*rds that don’t visit this site.
    (Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to do something I enjoy less with every passing year because I have bills to pay…)

  5. Lovely review @Moseleymoles.

    It must be hard doing that same shtick every night – just like it must be hard playing Hamlet or Rosencrantz, but….
    “Is that what people want?”
    “It’s what we do.”
    (Like lovers…)

    For that first album, for that first song, for those first lines we(I) can forgive him everything (incl. electronica).

    I was at uni some years before the dates you cite but in my pre internet days Lloyd’s references opened up so much…a line like “looking like a friend of Truman Capote” made we want to be in his gang, and still does. Personally I forgive him a bit of post-modern ennui, being so far from home and that…Times being what they are…

  6. I realise my comment about fans of his solo career may read a bit harsh. I’m sure at the time there were many people whose first encounter with Lloyd was ‘X” or ‘Don’t Get Wierd’. But those there at £25 a pop on Friday were of a certain vintage – ie my vintage – where the three essential student albums were Eden, Rattlesnakes and The Smiths.

    • Johnny come lately’s! We saw LC and Will in October (as readers of review where may recall) and the wife got a little faint (like lovers do) and three people dashed in to hold her up before I even noticed. she was wobbling. Probably tells you more about LC fans than me..I hope. 🙁

  7. I’ve probably disparaged and groaned about much of the ’80’s output to excess on here. Of course there were a few diamonds that really grabbed me and Rattlesnkes was one.

    Fabulous review Mr Moles, superb writing.

    ‘SNAKES

  8. A word in Cole’s defence…

    I’m just back from seeing him (and Will) in Lowestoft and I was struck by just how good his voice was. I suspect it was a rather smaller venue than the Birmingham town hall, but nonetheless, his voice was much better than I’d remembered or was expecting. I would say that this time around at least, his voice did take flight.

    re. the acoustic set-up, I’m sure he has written in the past about the practical aspects of touring and that, much as he would like to tour with a full band, it just doesn’t stack-up, economically. I last saw him in solo acoustic mode four or five years ago and this time around he is playing a substantially different set to the extent that he has even changed the arrangements of some of the songs he is playing. Again, I was struck by just how strong those songs are. And continue to be – his last couple of albums have been among my favourite records of the past few years.

    Yes, the audience in Lowestoft was much as you described in Birmingham, and I fit pretty squarely in that category myself, but isn’t it true that most artists acquire a set of fans that grow-up with them once their appeal has become more selective? Cole has played that game with more dignity than most.

    In short, I think you may be over-thinking it!

  12. Yes fine , thoughtful piece. More long form less lists !

    Let’s face it virtually all solo or solo plus one performances from artists who have other musicians on their recordings , is due to cost. They dont pull the numbers and in Australia’s case the costs are multiplied ,so we get a lot of this stripped down stuff.

    Last time Cole was down here, he was lured by the local golf courses and I suspect that is what drives him these days, pun intended.

  13. Great review, somewhat naive to believe artists are in it only for the art. Lloyd, no doubt, has a mortgage, school fees etc to pay. I think 2 hrs of solo (or nearly solo) acoustic anybody can be hard going. I remember seeing him with The Commotions in 87 or 88 and already thinking their time had passed. Must be difficult to peak with your first (amazing) album and have to play those songs forever …

    • I’m fairly sure I remember reading an interview with him in Word, in which he said that he had resisted selling CDs at gigs for a long time, but was converted when he gave it a go and found the sales literally double his take home earnings for the night.

  14. A great thread is developing I think. I would direct everyone to read the entry on Lloyd’s website indicated by @stuartreeves – in it he discusses the reasons for not being able to afford a full band to tour. It is mostly financial, and also down to the spaces he prefers to play – he’s not up for House of Blues – style dine and listen venues, or appearing mid-way up the bill on a festival. Fair enough. It’s not just financial though, interacting with the band for the other 21 hours out of every day without a tour manager is clearly an emotional commitment he’s not sure he can make at the Ibis hotel/sleeping in the truck level. In the comments various passionate Lloyd fans even propose a fan-driven version of the Chuck Berry pickup band model.

    It’s interesting how our wishes and his co-incide or don’t with reality. We wish Lloyd could afford to tour with a band (though would we pay £50 instead of £25 to enable this? probably not). We both wish to do his desire to not look back justice, and wish to hear him play Forest Fire. It’s instructive to compare him with someone like David Byrne, who has a similarly stellar band back catalogue – but whose success and profile as another middle-aged solo songwriter enables him to collaborate with Eno and De La Soul, and not give a hoot about playing Take Me To The River ever again. His appeal is more selective in theatres these days too, but he’s evolved his career into theatre, writing and film.

    No-one worries about Mick. He may peg out on top of a Brazilian supermodel a quarter of his age, but surely that’s the way he’d wish to go.

    • Glad you found the piece interesting Moseley, Cole is clearly a man who puts a lot of thought into how and why he plays.

      The Byrne comparison is an interesting one. He does dip into his back catalogue, but with different arrangements depending on the setup he’s playing with; I saw him with a string section alongside the conventional band lineup, and the horn-driven versions of Heads classics he did on tour with St. Vincent are well worth checking-out on YouTube. I suspect Byrne’s initial success was an order of magnitude or so greater than Cole’s and he’s also maintained a higher profile since those days than Cole has, which may explain why he is able to tour, albeit occasionally, with such diverse lineups.

  16. The first time I saw Lloyd on Whistle Test or The Tube back in 1984, he struck me as someone who looked as if he’d really rather be doing something else. That was part of his appeal in those days of phoney enthusiasm (like the awful whooping in the TotP audience).

    Are we now saying that I wasn’t wrong when I was ten?

  17. I’ve interviewed him and he was a bit on the peevish side then. There was an edge to him, as though he felt slightly hard done by, not quite got his due. Long time ago, mind you. I think he’s doing a lot better now than he was then.

  18. I enjoyed the review @moseleymoles and the other posts by esteemed AWers. I`d prefer Mr Cole did more from his solo career when I and friends go to see him in Southport on Thursday. This is not because I discovered him through his solo albums. I was a fan from the start and `Rattlesnakes` is IMHO one of the great `80`s albums but I really love his solo output. That`s it, you guys have said it all, great thread.

Leave a Reply