Singer-songwriter Lloyd Cole discusses Bowie, collaboration and the ambiguity of songwriting with Elliott Childs.
Lloyd Cole Photo: Supplied
“There seems to be a lot of people who have taken the decision to abandon logic,” says Lloyd Cole, former frontman of '80s band The Commotions from his home in western Massachusetts.
Despite his northern English accent, Cole has lived in the States since the 1990s, yet he still finds his adopted home’s political situation somewhat jarring. “It’s very strange over here.”
Cole is uncertain as to whether the American political scene influenced the songwriting on his latest album, the critically lauded On Pain. However, it seems that the demonstrations and riots from the political far right that the US has seen in recent years and the increasing alienation from generally accepted truth that seems to be affecting a large swath of the American population, has had an effect.
One particularly pointed song is the album’s lead single ‘Warm By The Fire’, which contains the lines “flames rising, the law hides in fear” and “behold the crystal night becomes the crystal day” a reference to the Nazi party’s Kristallnacht riot.
“There are lots of songs about people rioting. It’s not a very original idea,” says Cole. “It was only when I came to the idea that the narrator is not reliable…. Maybe he’s writing it or maybe he’s reading it or maybe he’s playing it in a video game. This idea of alternate realities plays somewhat on the record but I don’t think I’ve head-on addressed people saying ‘No, your reality is not true’.”
Ambiguity is something that Cole treasures, at least as far as his songs are concerned.
For example, his track “The Idiot” could be seen as a retelling of the story of David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s sojourn in Berlin during the late 1970s.
Even if you ignore the title, which mirrors Iggy’s monumental 1977 album, it’s hard to mistake lines like “We’ll move to Berlin, stop being drug addicts” and “We’ll cycle to the studio in our jeans and our leg warmers” as anything other than references to those particular artists during that period of time. Yet Cole is distrusting of such concrete assumptions.
“I don’t think it’s a helpful phrase to say ‘This song is about….’”.
“It’s like a painting or a sculpture and you don’t look at a painting and say ‘Oh that painting is about war’. Not very often anyway.”
He cites an Irish journalist he met recently who was unaware of the story of Bowie and Iggy in Berlin and liked the song because it was about “two people who love each other who managed to help each other escape something that was seemingly inevitable.”
As for many music fans born in the early '60s, David Bowie looms large for Cole and the subject comes up again later in our conversation.
Discussing his long-time collaboration with Neil Clark and Blair Cowan, who were part of The Commotions as well as his work with Joan Wasser of Joan as Policewoman fame, Cole opines that having the right collaborators is essential to any project’s success.
“Looking at Bowie's work, we all talk about what an amazing brain he had, what an amazing musician he was, what an amazing writer he was, but he didn’t make very many good records unless he had a great guitar player working with him…He made a lot of very average records.”
“I feel very blessed or very lucky that I’ve had great musicians that are willing to work with me. I’m not Prince. I can’t make records on my own.”
That being said, a large part of Cole’s recent catalogue has been recorded in his home studio, a move that he says was due in part to the freedom it affords him in experimentation, without feeling self-conscious but also by the modern economics of being an independent musician.
“Most of it’s just been adapting to the environment that I’ve been forced into by the changing panorama around myself to just try and make a living to look after my family.”
Those economics come into play again when it comes to touring. Bringing a four-piece band to New Zealand for his tour here in December is out of the question. This is not a new problem for Cole but it led him to figure out a way of performing his layered and primarily electronic music as a live solo artist.
“I found that if a song is strong enough, then there will always be a way to play it. It doesn’t have to sound like the record. It just has to sound like the song.”
Lloyd Cole's New Zealand tour dates:
Friday 1 December - Holy Trinity, Auckland
Saturday 2 December - The Piano, Christchurch
Sunday 3 December - Old St Paul's, Wellington
Tuesday 5 December - 4th Wall Theatre, New Plymouth
