Lloyd Cole

1984
February - Commotions sign to Polydor UK.
April - Perfect Skin released, reaches #26, band appear on Top of The Pops.
October - album Rattlesnakes released to near universal praise, stays in the UK top 100 for 12 months. Band sign to Gefen in North America.

1985 - Rattlesnakes released in N. America. Band tour to generally packed rooms full of earnest hipsters. Continued chart success in Europe with Brand New Friend and Lost Weekend and the album Easy Pieces. Critics are less excited by these offerings, though.

1987 - LC and the Commotions release their final album Mainstream which is critically plauded but performs less well in the record shops.

1988 - LC moves to New York City. Mainstream released in N. America on Capitol. No tour to promote it, as there is no longer a band.

1989 - Lloyd Cole and the Commotions 1984-1989 is released worldwide and sells well.
LC records in New York with Fred Maher (Scritti Politti, Lou Reed), Robert Quine (Richard Hell, Lou Reed), Blair Cowan from the Commotions and the then unknown bass player Matthew Sweet. All the while his hair is growing longer. LC and Elizabeth Lewis are married two days before Christmas. Honeymoon in Paris and then..

1990 - ‘Lloyd Cole’ (the X album) released to huge record company marketing campaign and expectation. Life size scowling LC figures are found in record stores all around the world. The album is critically acclaimed and vaults LC to superstar status in France and Sweden, but elsewhere the absence of a radio hit keeps the success modest. On the sell out world tour LC shocks Commotions fans with dirty loud rock music. Not all are happy with LC’s reinvention.

1991 - LC and Blair Cowan co-write a group of songs which cry out for an Orchestra, at the same time LC is writing rock tunes. Decides to make deliberately schizophrenic album. Produced by the same ‘Lloyd Cole’ team with the addition of legendary string arranger Paul Buckmaster (Elton John, Rolling Stones) recorded in NYC and LA ‘Don’t Get Weird On Me, Babe’ received great reviews and a huge marketing campaign, but a hit cannot be bought and although sales are again healthy, Polydor and Capitol must be becoming frustrated. Indeed LC is transferred within Polygram from Polydor to Fontana and Cole finds himself with London music business legend David Bates as his A&R man. Calm seas ahead? Not likely.

1993 - Having bought a swanky NYC pad and installed a recording studio at huge expense LC sets about making a record that doesn’t sound like a Lloyd Cole record. Electro/Dance remixer Adam Peters is brought in as producer (LC having loved Peters’ mix of Butterfly from DGWOMB) and the early 90’s old guard is replaced by all manner of NYC session men. Does ‘Bad Vibes’ succeed in it’s goal of not sounding like a Lloyd record? Not really, but it did prove the final straw for Capitol who decided to pass on it. In the rest of the world things went a little better, but no hit and no tour and an album title that was meant to be funny but wasn’t and things and not looking great on the world domination front. Good news though - on October 4th - Elizabeth gives birth to to a healthy baby boy - William.

1995 - After almost a year in the studio with Adam Peters, Adam and Chris Hughes, Stephen Street, and eventually no producer, after seemingly endless back and forth with Bates, LC delivers ‘Love Story’ to Fontana and they like it. Hailed as ‘back to basics’, ‘return to form’, etc, there could be no avoiding the fact that it was absolutely a Lloyd Cole record, and thanks to UK morning DJ Chris Evans, LC finds himself back on Top of the Pops with his first solo hit ‘Like Lovers Do’, ten years after his previous appearance. In many ways it was an ironic year in the Cole house, LC was without a publishing deal for the fist time in twelve years after EMI dropped him and to make matters worse Polygram had negotiated their advance down. Bankruptcy was a real possibility. Yikes! The Coles sold the swanky pad and moved into rented accommodation.

1996 - Artistically, at least, things were looking up. After the struggle that was the making of ‘Love Story’ David Bates found that he actually had faith in LC to produce the next record himself, a supportive publisher had been found in Chrysalis, and so he set up shop in a Tribeca rehearsal studio and demoed his new material. A band was put together from the previous year’s touring band with the addition of Robert Quine on electric Guitar and Neil Clark on lap steel. The album was delivered at the end of the year and mixed early 1997. Bates and Chrysalis were both very happy with it...

1997 - Howard Berman, however, the managing director or Polygram, was less enthused and preferred the tactic of putting together a ‘best of’ compilation with a couple of new tunes to ‘build on’ the success of ‘Love Story’ and thus create a larger market for the next record of new material. The Collection eventually came out in January 1999, but by this point it was clear that it was not going to be promoted aggressively. The ‘single’ - ‘That Boy’ was pressed and then pulled and never officially released. Fortunately Berman was a decent man and LC had a history of candid dialogue with him, so when LC called and asked to be released from his contract Berman acceded. And that was the end of LC’s major label life.

1998 - The process of writing songs, with a hit in mind, had become a soul sapping chore. Given his success rate as a solo artist - one hit after maybe 12 tries it seemed a futile and frankly silly exercise. Polygram had encouraged him to work with other writers in search of the magic but this experience only intensified his ennui. It also occurred to him, that it didn’t stop there - after a decade of making records because he wrote songs, he was now writing songs so that he could make records. This seemed all wrong so he effectively gave up writing songs. But by this point he not only had an album in the can on a record company he was no longer with, they also had about half and album of songs that were possible singles recorded with the band he’d put together as an antidote to his relationship with Polygram - the Negatives.

The idea of the Negatives was born when LC saw Ron Sexsmith perform at Arlene Grocery on NYC’s lower East side. The venue was great and there was no entry fee - people could wander in off the street - if they liked the music they could stay and if they drank - the band got paid. This seemed like the opposite to what LC had been doing with his album, tour routine and he decided to form a band to play at Arlene’s.

After the Negatives (LC, Dave Derby, Jill Sobule, Michael Kotch, Rafa Maciejak) played every couple of months in NYC, LC found that there was an element to playing live music that had hitherto eluded him - Having Fun. the Negatives covered songs by Kraftwerk and Bruce Springsteen and with three guitars and no keyboards they could make quite a racket, and it was never a chore...

1999 - LC decides that he wants his next album to be the collected recordings of the Negatives and a few of the tunes from the 1996 album which the band were playing in their set. This was still not quite a whole album so the band went back into the studio on LC’s budget and recorded 3 final songs.

Towards the end of the year the Coles finally leave NYC. Frank was born in January and two kids in the city with LC’s uncertain job prospects wasn’t working anymore. They move to Western Massachusetts, 3 hours north of the city. With time on his hands while lawyers negotiate the future of his Polygram recorded material LC learns Macromedia Flash and builds lloydcole.com.

2000 - ‘The Negatives’ is released in Europe on the French label XIII Bis, and in the US on W.A.R? records. the Negatives embark upon their first and last US tour, and overseas playing student festivals in Portugal and major concerts in London, Paris and Rio de Janeiro.

2001 - XIII Bis release 2 more albums and a box set! ‘etc’ is what was left of the ill fated 1996 album after the songs which were taken for ‘The Negatives’, the album is filled out with acoustic instrumental sketches and demo recordings. ‘Plastic Wood’ is an album of LC’s instrumental synthesizer music. The box set ‘2001 Collected Recordings 1996 - 2000’ includes both of these albums along with ‘The Negatives’ and a bootleg album of the Negatives live shows in New York.
2002 - After 3 years away from the city live acoustic performances have become LC’s primary income source. He’s inadvertently become a folk singer. He’s also amassed about an album’s worth of songs with his new ‘I don’t write songs anymore’ method. The songs came slowly and some took years to evolve and many grew as he performed them over and over again around the world on his folk tours. He decides to make his idea of a folk record in his rented studio space with a few guitars and some synthesizers. Signs a licensing deal with Sanctuary Records for the world ex N. America.

2003 - ‘Music in a Foreign Language’ is released on Sanctuary Records and One Little Indian in N. America., who later that year add ‘etc’ and ‘Plastic Wood’ to their catalogue.

2004 - Although the world was not set ablaze with the success of ‘Music in a Foreign Language’, LC was very pleased with it and decides to try to take the template and build upon it, adding drums and strings, to make a fleshed out but still quiet music... He has a bunch of sketches and thinks he might work in into an album in a couple of months. But before starting this Lloyd Cole and the Commotions are reunited for a month to celebrate the release of ‘Rattlesnakes’ deluxe edition. Rehearsals are in Glasgow and the band play to packed houses at the famous Barrowlands, and then in Dublin, Manchester and London.

2006 - 18 months in the studio later ‘Antidepressant’ is released. The recording process was captured in LC’s weblog in his Studio Journal.

2007 - LC is released from his Sanctuary contract almost as they are bought by Universal (who now own Polygram).
The BBC/Universal release the collected Commotions and solo recordings at the BBC - studio sessions and live recordings from 1984 to 1995 in 3 volumes.

2008 - New songs are finally fermenting, but slowly, and a new record does not seem likely until next year. Still, LC finds himself busy. A Live Album was recorded in Dublin by Mick Glossop who will mix later in the year. A boxed set of b-sides and outtakes from all of LC’s solo career is also in the works. lloydcole.com is under construction with LC at the helm again - a new updated Music and Image area will be unveiled in the near future, and then a webshop to coincide with the Live album release, with distribution centres in N. America and Europe. LC continues to regularly update his weblog as fans from all over the globe pitch in with questions and comments.

-www.lloydcole.com