IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS LLOYD COLE WILL BE PLAYING FIVE SHOWS IN THE UK WITH GLASGOW OUTFIT THE LEOPARDS AS HIS BACKING MUSICIANS. THESE DAYS COLE MOST OFTEN PERFORMS AS WHAT HE SOMEWHAT ARCHLY DESCRIBES AS A SOLO “FOLK-SINGER”, AND THIS HANDFUL OF BAND SHOWS REPRESENTS THE FIRST TIME IN MANY YEARS THAT HIS EXTENSIVE BACK CATALOGUE HAS BEEN GIVEN ‘THE FULL TREATMENT’.

Last year an impressively curated box set collected together almost all of the work by erudite 1980s lit-poppers The Commotions. At the time of its release Cole and The Mouth Magazine podcasted at length about it (listen again, here). When we signed off, Cole described plans for a further box set, concentrating on the four albums which followed. His solo debut LLOYD COLE (sometimes referred to as X) was released in early 1990; a strong, confident and liberated rock record which was run through with a sense of geography. It was written and recorded in New York, the city Cole had moved to in 1989 to escape London and his recent past. Later came the songwriter / rock band hybrid DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE (1991), the experimental and misunderstood (though, to some, miscalculated) BAD VIBES (1993) and the ‘comeback’ of sorts LOVE STORY (in 1995). Here, in Part Two of a three part interview in which Cole discusses these first four solo albums and what came after, we focus on BAD VIBES and LOVE STORY…

Part One (focusing on X and DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE) here

THIRD SOLO ALBUM BAD VIBES WAS RELEASED IN OCTOBER 1993. THERE ARE REFERENCES TO THE BEATLES, TO T-REX… THERE’S THIS SORT OF CREEPING WEIRDNESS (ON WILD MUSHROOMS) AND THIS HARD EDGE (ON MORNING IS BROKEN), NEITHER OF WHICH WAS THE SORT OF THING THAT HAD BEEN HEARD FROM YOU BEFORE. I THINK YOU WERE REALLY PUSHING YOUR OWN ENVELOPE, AT THIS POINT. WE TALKED LAST YEAR ABOUT YOUR FEELING THAT YOU NEED A VERY CLEAR IDEA AND A STRONG CONCEPT WHEN YOU BEGIN AN ALBUM – SO, WHAT WAS GOING ON HERE?
Well that’s really the crux of the matter. There wasn’t a clear idea… I think that the only idea that we had for making BAD VIBES was to make an album which didn’t sound like ‘a Lloyd Cole record’. In retrospect that turned out to be a really very bad idea. Unfortunately I found possibly the only other person in the world who thought it was a good idea, to make it with… 

… PRODUCER ADAM PETERS…
Yeah. When Adam Peters and I started working together it was based on me loving the remix that he did of a single from DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE. It would have been a better plan, possibly, for me to create some music and then have somebody else mess with it – or mangle it – in the way that Adam had with the ‘Planet Anne Charlotte Mix’ of BUTTERFLY. That is undoubtedly fantastic – certainly the best thing we did together. 

IT WAS QUITE A PROGRESSIVE SORT OF SOUND FOR YOU, THAT REMIX… I WOULDN’T SAY IT WAS ANY KIND OF DANCE MUSIC BUT IT WAS… VIBEY… VERY MOODY. WAS THIS WHAT WAS IN THE AIR AROUND BAD VIBES? WERE YOU SET ON THE SOUND OF THIS SORT OF ELECTRONIC ‘HEAD MUSIC’…
Well, BAD VIBES coincided with me having just assembled a recording studio in the apartment we’d bought with the money Polydor gave us because they thought SHE’S A GIRL… was going to be a massive hit. When we got round to making the record I don’t think I’d finished writing any of the songs. I did have ideas for the songs – but I hadn’t actually finished writing them. I think that I was more bothered about the Prophet VS synth sound on MORNING IS BROKEN or something…

… SO YOU’D ACTUALLY LOST FOCUS…
Yeah, I was definitely distracted by the gadgetry. So in retrospect it was a really unfocused time. It’s a time that I can’t really be fond of at all. I basically wasted my one chance of having a comfortable life, ha ha… The one time I had a lot of money I threw it all away on a studio – and when BAD VIBES wasn’t successful I had to sell the studio and the apartment… It’s hard for me to think nice thoughts about BAD VIBES.

I CAN… I THINK IT’S A RECORD WHICH HOLDS UP BETTER THAN YOU MIGHT RECALL…
I know some people think that, and I know that there are some lovely tracks on it… Absolutely… But there’s also some of the weakest lyrics I’ve written, I think. Unfortunately they’re mixed in amongst some of the best. FALL TOGETHER has got some pretty great couplets – but there’s an unfortunate tinge of self-righteousness running through the whole song… And, gosh, I wish I’d never done that… It’s one of the things about other people’s music that makes me cringe. If I detect so much as a hint of self-righteousness I immediately have to just turn it off.

YOU SPOKE ABOUT THE FIRST SOLO ALBUM NOT DOING QUITE AS WELL AS THE LABEL EXPECTED, AND ABOUT THE FACT THAT SHE’S A GIRL AND I’M A MAN WASN’T THE BIG HIT THAT WAS EXPECTED. I WONDERED IF BAD VIBES WAS A REACTION TO THAT; A SORT OF TRUCULENT KICK AGAINST DIMINISHING RETURNS… OR PERHAPS IT WAS A REACTION TO THE FACT THAT MUSIC WAS SHIFTING ON ITS AXIS AGAIN AT THAT POINT?
Not really. No, it wasn’t. Even though the first two albums hadn’t set the world on fire I was still on the cover of magazines all over the place. It’s not like the albums weren’t getting into the charts. They were charting and doing quite nicely. I just wasn’t ‘on fire’… Places like France and Scandinavia were actually better on DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE than they’d ever been before. 

WAS BAD VIBES PERHAPS A SORT OF OVERCONFIDENCE, THEN?
Maybe. I suppose I was still blinkered or removed from reality a little bit, in that I’d never really lived anything other than a pop star’s life during the last five or six years. I’d been able to do that by making these records, and even though DON’T GET WEIRD ON ME BABE didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped it was the album that prompted Polydor to re-sign me for a lot of money… They gave me the money after I’d made it, DON’T GET WEIRD, but before it came out. My contract was up after that record. When I delivered it, that was almost the beginning of the end, really. David Munns was the Chairman at the label and he and I had had a… very interesting sort of relationship. We actually did end up becoming quite friendly later on, and he did eventually realise it was a waste of time trying to, but he’d tried to bully me for a long time. 

HE BULLIED YOU HOW? CREATIVELY?
No. More economically.  I remember that there was a time when they wanted me to sign with an American record label because it would have been better for cash-flow all round, but the American label wasn’t willing to do what I considered to be a decent agreement. They wanted to take some of the publishing money – which was standard for some American bands, but not all. Munns tried very hard to bully me into doing that. I just said “No. I’m not doing it. If it means the record comes out late then so be it”… The band all stood together and said “No”. By the way, this incident was round about when MAINSTREAM was coming out, so 1987 or so. By 1991 Munns and I had developed a pretty good working relationship and he heard SHE’S A GIRL… and, basically, went “That’s it. That’s the one we needed”… He offered me a deal to stay with Polydor. I took it. But then he left.

HOW WAS THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE NEW GUARD?
It was quite difficult. The person that took over from Munns was not somebody that I ended up being able to work with.  So BAD VIBES actually ended up coming out on Fontana, because I left Polydor. I basically asked Polygram to transfer me to a different label. Status Quo, apparently, were in a very similar situation. They didn’t want to be on Phonogram / Fontana anymore. So Status Quo went to Polydor and I went to Fontana…

… IN THE TRANSFER WINDOW… 
Ha ha, yes, yes… Exactly. 

WELL, AS I SAID EARLIER, I THINK BAD VIBES IS A BETTER RECORD THAN IT MIGHT APPEAR TO BE IF VIEWED ONLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF ‘LLOYD COLE’… BUT THERE WAS A MUCH MORE ‘TRADITIONALLY LLOYD COLE’ RECORD IN 1995: LOVE STORY… THE CONCEPT IS MUCH MORE COHERENT THAN ON BAD VIBES, IT’S A CLEANER SOUND… IT’S A CONSISTENTLY STRONG RECORD. IT’S MATURE…
Relatively mature, yeah. I was 33 or 34 when I was writing those songs. I think that after BAD VIBES I was perhaps a little bit lost for a while. The initial recording sessions after BAD VIBES and before LOVE STORY, I went into the studio with a band. I think Adam Peters was producing. There’s absolutely nothing remaining from these sessions, by the way, other than one rough mix of one song (which will be on the solo box set). Anyway, Chris Hughes came over from the UK to sort of supervise the start of things. After a few days he pulled me aside and said “No. This is not happening. You don’t really have any songs”. 

THAT MUST HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT TO HEAR.
Yeah, but Chris Hughes was the figure Dave Bates, my A&R person, trusted the most in music. He got Chris to sit down with me and say, in so many words, “You need to make a Lloyd Cole record”… And he said “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you and Adam to go to this small recording studio in the East Village (of New York) and I want you to play everything. If it needs piano, you need to play it. You don’t bring somebody else in to do that. If it needs guitar, you need to play guitar. Between the two of you, you have to come up with something”. That’s what we did. We made some demos and everyone was really excited about them.

SO YOU WERE ‘BACK ON TRACK’ AND LOVE STORY WAS EASY…
No. Unfortunately from the demo process to actually finishing the record was a fairly tortuous nine months. But, eventually – eventually – we made something like the record that the demos were suggesting. There were quite a few false starts. Stephen Street was brought in, and then he was fired by Dave Bates. Adam’s responsibility… became less… and that was… probably my doing. I ended up becoming the main producer on the record myself.

IT’S VERY INTERESTING THAT YOU DESCRIBE THE MAKING AS “TORTUOUS”… I DON’T THINK ANYONE OUTSIDE THE PROCESS WOULD BE ABLE TO GUESS THAT, AS LOVE STORY IS SUCH A COHERENT RECORD. THE SONGS HANG TOGETHER SO INCREDIBLY WELL. IT FEELS KIND OF BREEZY AND… EFFORTLESSLY ASSURED…
Well, yeah. I know for a lot of people it’s their favourite Lloyd Cole album. That’s funny. It’s good work, certainly. Absolutely. But it was difficult. Ultimately, we succeeded in doing what we wanted to do. We made a, relatively speaking, ‘small’ record. We weren’t trying to sound like we were going to be playing these songs in stadiums. We wanted to make the kind of record that draws the listener towards the speakers, as opposed to pushes them away from the speakers…

… YEAH. IT WAS INTIMATE…
Compared to most of the things that I’d done before it was intimate. So it was the most intimate, yeah.

LOVE STORY WAS THE LAST MAJOR LABEL ALBUM – OR, AT LEAST, IT WAS THE LAST FULL ALBUM (THERE WAS A NOTIONAL BEST OF IN ABOUT 1999)… SO WHAT HAPPENED THERE? WAS IT AN IGNOMINIOUS END, OR WAS IT A SORT OF ‘QUIET EXPIRATION’ OF THE CONTRACT?
No, no… It was a nightmare, really. What happened was, during the making of LOVE STORY my A&R man Dave Bates got… errrrrrr… very close to losing faith in my ability to make the kind of records he thought I should make, that he wanted me to make. He had me co-writing with quite a lot of people, and I really didn’t want to do it. I went along with it. We ended up getting one quite nice co-write out of it for LOVE STORY…

… LOVE RUINS EVERYTHING? 
Yeah, written with the Fairground Attraction guy (Mark Nevin)… So, LOVE STORY was finished and the first single LIKE LOVERS DO was a sort of minor hit around Europe. It was the only time, during those years, that my trajectory was definitely going upwards again – though it wasn’t necessarily going very steeply upwards! But, from the first solo record through to BAD VIBES, things had gradually been slowing down. I was less successful. I was less prominent.

YOU SPOKE EARLIER ABOUT BEING ‘A POP STAR’. MY FEELING IS THAT BAD VIBES WAS THE LAST ‘POP STAR’ RECORD YOU MADE, AND THAT LOVE STORY (DESPITE THE SUCCESS OF IT, THE PUBLICITY AND THE BRIEF TRAPPINGS) WAS THE START OF SOMETHING ELSE. THE TRAJECTORY OF LOVE STORY WAS ACTUALLY MORE OF A SHIFT TOWARDS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PERCEPTION OF YOU, FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE?
Yeah. I think so. But it was still basically a rock ‘n’ roll or pop record, wasn’t it? It was maybe a little… I don’t know… a little…

… YOU’RE TEMPTED TO SAY “RETRO”..?
No, I’m not tempted to say “retro” at all. I’m thinking it was just less rock ‘n’ roll… It was still a rock ‘n’ roll record but it was much less rock ‘n’ roll… And, to be honest, if there’s a weakness about the LOVE STORY record I think it’s that we didn’t go far enough in that direction. I think it could have been even less rock ‘n’ roll… I think LOVE STORY would probably have been stronger if it had been even less rock ‘n’ roll.

HOW DO YOU MEAN?
Well, it’s occasionally dull. The arrangement of SENTIMENTAL FOOL, for instance, is traditional and quite dull. It could have been more inventive… Anyway, the great irony was, when LOVE STORY was finished Dave Bates said to me “You ended up pretty much producing the end of the record yourself and it sounds great, we’re all happy with it, so why don’t you just produce the next one yourself?” – and I know my manager Derek (MacKillop) was not behind that idea… but we didn’t actually have a better idea…

BEARING IN MIND THE DIFFICULTIES IN THE MAKING OF LOVE STORY, THEN, WAS THAT A DAUNTING PROSPECT?
I had a good working situation because I had a band, from the LOVE STORY tour, that worked really well together. I also wanted to keep the budget realistic. I had this room that I worked in the Harold Dessau complex, which had a rehearsal studio, a recording studio and a few other rooms. It was in downtown Manhattan, not far from what is now called Ground Zero. Matt Johnson (The The) had a room down there. When LOVE STORY was happening was when I’d had to liquidate my own studio, which was all very depressing… but what was left of my studio I installed in this room and started making demos on my own. It went incredibly smoothly. I made a very specific album that went further than LOVE STORY had gone in terms of being further away from rock ‘n’ roll. It was a bit like a sort of JOHN WESLEY HARDING thing…

BOB DYLAN’S ‘STRIPPED BACK’ AND ROOTSY ALBUM FROM 1967…
… Yeah. It was very much a straighforward thing. I only played acoustic guitar on it, Neil Clark only played pedal steel, Quine only played electric, Amanda Kramer was on keyboards, Rafa (who ended up being in The Negatives) on drums and Chris Wilson (who’d been in the LOVE STORY touring band) on bass. That was it, that was the band. It was a proper band record…

… BUT IT WAS A RECORD WHICH NEVER CAME OUT…
We recorded it and we mixed it and I remember we had this lovely meeting with Mick Glossop, when we were mixing it in London. Dave Bates was there, my publisher from Chrysalis was there, and everybody was really happy. It was a ‘little’ record. I don’t think any of us expected it to be a huge hit but we all really liked it and we all thought people would like it a lot, too. But then Dave Bates was fired… or, I believe, sent on ‘indefinite gardening leave’…

SO THE ATTITUDE FROM THE LABEL TOWARDS YOU – AND THEREFORE TOWARDS THIS NEW RECORD – CHANGED… DAVE WASN’T THERE TO MEDIATE?
Yeah, because instead of me dealing with Dave Bates I had to deal with Howard Berman, the new Chairman of Polygram. He didn’t really want to release the album. Well, he wanted to release a compilation – a sort of ‘best of’ album – first. In his mind that would help reposition me commercially; and then, after that had happened was when he agreed this new album could come out… 

… THE BEST OF ALBUM WAS THE COLLECTION..?
It was. And it took so long to get something that we were remotely happy with for that… What happened was, they wanted to put some new songs on it (which, I think, is always a really stupid idea). It was agreed that one of the new songs was going to be put out as a single to help promote the compilation; so, that was the song THAT BOY. By the time the compilation was actually ready to come out things had changed and THAT BOY wasn’t even going to be released as a single. So it was all rather messy and difficult. I called Howard up and said “Look, I think this isn’t really happening. You should just let me go”… and he said “Yeah, I agree. That’s the best idea”… So that was that. That was how the major label stuff ended.

Part Three (focusing on the forthcoming box set and tour) here

LLOYD COLE AND THE LEOPARDS play Holmfirth Picturedrome on Thursday 18th August. Tickets here