The Collapse Board Interview: Lloyd Cole
Born in Buxton, Derbyshire in 1961, Lloyd Cole became one of the voices and faces of the 1980s as the frontman of the Commotions, the band he formed while studying at the University of Glasgow.
The band’s debut album, Rattlesnakes (1984), received critical acclaim for its witty, reference-filled songwriting and jangly guitar sound. Follow-up albums Easy Pieces (1985) and Mainstream (1987) further cemented his reputation before the band disbanded in 1989.
After moving to New York City, Cole launched a solo career with his self-titled album Lloyd Cole (1990). Over the course of the following decades he has continued to release a steady stream of solo work, exploring styles ranging from folk-rock to electronic minimalism.
Ahead of his 2026 Australian tour, we talked to Lloyd about working with his former Commotions band mates, touring with Robert Forster and Grant McLennan as your opening act, learning that you shouldn’t try to replicate the sound of your recorded songs when you play them live, and loving Bob Dylan’s old man voice.
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Hi Lloyd, looks like you’re at home today?
Yeah, this is my attic I’m in.
You’ve been in the US for a long time now, 35 years?
What is it? 37 years. I only did music professionally in the UK from ’83 to ’88, and then I moved over here. And there was never the plan to stay, just various forms of inertia.
Yeah, same with me in Brisbane. I only came for five years, and it’s been 20 years, somehow. Living there so long, does the last 12 months make any sense to you?
Oh, the last 12 months in America? Yeah, it makes total sense, because it’s not really just the last 12 months. It was the previous eight years before that, four years of basically the denial of the election.
The denial of the election was really the setup for the next election. We’re very sheltered in Massachusetts from it. It’s quite sane around here. There’s not a lot of people saying things like “Fake News” when you say anything, but nevertheless, we are in America. I admit, the first time that I had to cross the border, being a Green Card holder, I was a bit scared.
I mean, I’m not particularly scared of being sent back to have to be in the UK, but I’m quite scared of being sent to some, basically a prison, is what they’re doing to some people. Yeah, so it’s a mess, and it’s a disgrace, and all of those things. And what’s going to happen? I don’t know.
A long time ago, you went to UCL [University College London] and you studied law, and I was interested why you wanted to study law.
I didn’t. During my final year of what we call high school over here, I’m not even sure what we called it over there, school, there was a form you had to fill out to apply for universities, called the UCCA [Universities Central Council on Admissions] form. I got really sick with something, I can’t remember what it was, but I was off school for about three weeks, and during those three weeks, everything to do with the UCCA form happened. Then I came back, and then maybe another six weeks later, somebody said to me, “So where have you applied to?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” So I had to rush into deciding what it was that I might want to do. I really like the idea of trying to go to Oxford to study a thing called PPL, which is politics, philosophy, maybe law? [Google says it’s Linguistics]. But I would have had to take a year out and sat the exam.
I just was 18. I didn’t want to take a year out, so I allowed my father and my housemaster, and they persuaded me that if I went to study law, they said, “Well, you can do anything with a law degree.” That was the exact words of my housemaster. And so I let them talk me into it.
It only took me about 10 weeks into the course, maybe three months, about halfway through. I went to the dean and said, “I hate this, I want to leave”. And he said, “Well, there’s no point leaving right now because there’s no way you can go halfway through the year. Why don’t you just finish the year? And if you still want to leave, then you can leave.” So very, very luckily, he gave me a nice reference, and I did then take a year out. Then, because of the reference that I got from him, I was able to just walk into Glasgow University and study some liberal arts for two years. And then then I dropped out again.
You were in London originally for your studies but then I think your parents moved to Glasgow. Is that what made you move to Glasgow?
They moved to Glasgow at the same time that I moved down to go to UCL. Then when I dropped out of UCL, I went to live with them in Glasgow for a bit before I got one of those rail cards and bummed around Europe with my pal. Then I came back to Glasgow and I applied to just get what was called an ordinary arts degree. The way that the degrees work in in Scotland, I think still does, is that you can do an ordinary degree, which is three years and you don’t specialise particularly. You’ve just got to get this and this and this to call it an ordinary arts degree, but after two years you decide you might want to do a master’s degree and then you choose what you’re going to focus on. And that’s where I was at when I dropped out. I’d just been accepted to do English and Philosophy. Then it turned out that I had a job, so that was that.
I read that you were making music in London in the time you were there.
Very, very, very, very, very sort of amateurish. I did I did one performance with a borrowed synthesiser from the guy that lived downstairs from me at London School of Economics. Kind of, I guess, almost their equivalent of open mic. No recollection of whether it involved words. I can’t remember. All I can remember is it involved a mannequin.
Was making music a serious direction you were wanting to take at that time?
I didn’t really have an idea. I just had this idea that I wanted to do music, and I was very, very lucky, really, that I was never in a situation to really do music until I actually was a little bit older. And I did eventually have an idea of what I wanted to do. I mean, the first generation of the Commotions from late ‘82 to mid ‘83, early ’83, that’s pretty unfocused shit. I mean, we tried. We were basically trying to sound like Scritti Politti or the Style Council or something, trying to take my Isaac Hayes obsession too far.
We only really hit upon what the Commotions became with just a couple of the songs that we wrote that were not anything, like they just didn’t fit into the idea for the previous incarnation of the band. It just took us a little while to go, “Well, this is better and we can actually do this.” It was as late the autumn of ‘83 before we actually really had an idea of what we were doing.
I spoke to Jim Reed from the Jesus and Mary Chain last year and he forever bemoans being in a band in the 1980s because he hated the music. How do you look back at the ‘80s? He just hated the ‘80s music, I think he just really wanted to be in a band in the ‘60s.
There are all these great bands, but the ‘60s were shit as well. There’s always shit music. The thing is, if the Mary Chain had been at a different time, they would have been far less shocking, so the ‘80s were absolutely perfect for them because they seemed so unique. Listening back to them, they don’t seem that unique at all, but at the time, that sort of Phil-Spector-reverb-Wall-Of-Sound-guitar thing was quite shocking. I was entirely happy to be making music at the same time as ABC. I thought ABC were great.
It was the usual 20 minute Zoom interview and if I had longer, I think I would have argued with him, because growing up in the ‘80s and looking back at the ‘80s, it was such an exciting time because you could see you could turn on the radio or Top Of The Pops and there would be such a broad array of music. It was brilliant.
The great thing about the UK at that time was that there was no compartmentalisation because there were only certain outlets. There was only radio to play music for old people. There was only Radio One, an independent radio for pop music, and so it had to play everything. So you’d hear the Smiths or Aztec Camera, then you’d hear ABC and Soft Cell and then you’d hear Bucks Fizz or whatever was in the charts. Moving to America, seeing radio stations that only play one kind of music, just still depresses me. I love the idea that the radio stations would play every kind of music. Imagine just wanting to listen to a radio station that only plays music that you like. You never hear anything that surprises you.
The Commotions’ debut album, Rattlesnakes, is an undeniable 80’s classic. Your second album, Easy Pieces, was financially successful, but the band didn’t actually seem to like it.
I don’t know about the rest of the band, but the older I get, the less disappointed in that record I am. It doesn’t hold together as a whole album with a sound like Rattlesnakes, but the good stuff on it’s pretty good. The bad stuff is pretty shitty. But still, I don’t I don’t regret making it. I regret the record company putting such pressure on us to make it so quickly.
Presumably as the main songwriter, you felt most under pressure.
You know, I didn’t really feel that under pressure at the time. The songs on Rattlesnakes, none of the songs on the album were more than a year old when the album came out, so we just thought, “Well, we’ll just do it again. We’ll just write. We’ll write another 12, 13 songs and we’ll be away.” We were very lucky on Rattlesnakes that the only mediocre song that we had, we decided to leave off the album and so we had 10 good songs on the record. Making Easy Pieces, we just didn’t we didn’t get so lucky. There’s a couple of songs on the record that are not so good and the production is less focused. But still, it was very important to us that we didn’t just make another record that sounded like Rattlesnakes. We did want it to sound a bit more electric and a bit more expansive with brass and strings, there’s strings on Rattlesnakes, but we wanted to bring brass in, probably because I was obsessed by the brass on Exile on Main Street.
But, yeah, we didn’t love the record. I think when we made Mainstream, even though Mainstream took an awful lot of effort, it does have more of its own personality. I think we just got worse with every album. I think Mainstream is weaker than Easy Pieces, in retrospect. I think it’s more beautiful, but it’s weaker. And we made one really big mistake of letting the producer co-write a song with me, so it’s not really a Commotion’s song.
For Mainstream, you tried out Stewart Copeland as a producer. Why didn’t that work out?
Because he’s not really a producer. He’s just really just kind of a vibes guy. We needed quite a strong producer at that time, because, we, as a band, we were sort of falling apart, really. We needed somebody to say, “This is the direction,” because, you know, Neil would want to be sounding like the Gang of Four and I’d want to be sounding like the Rolling Stones or whatever. Or Neil would want to sound like Talking Heads and I’d want to sound like something else. So it was it was a difficult time.
If Stewart had been around when we were making a record that we knew exactly what we wanted to do, it could have been wonderful because he’s brilliant. But he’s more of an arranger, a vibe guy, you know. He’d been more the kind of guy that, in retrospect, you could bring in to just work with you on arrangements, he wouldn’t necessarily have needed to be there for the whole record.
The band broke up then, was that an easy decision to make?
It wasn’t that difficult because we didn’t have another record. We didn’t have an idea for another record. We’d pretty much taken all the energy we had to make that last record before we split up. If there’d been a great idea for a fourth record, I’m sure we would have all wanted to make it.
What impact did that have on you? At the time, did you think it was the end of everything?
Kind of. I certainly didn’t take it for granted that I could be a solo artist, because of all the musicians in the band, I was by far the weakest. So when I started making demos for my what became my first solo album, I was really surprised that I’d actually, I think almost like by osmosis, just absorbed a lot of stuff from Neil and Blair and Stephen. I could do stuff that I didn’t know I could do because it was never my job in the band to do that. I could program drums, I could arrange strings, I could play guitar a little better than I thought I could. And so making that first record was really exciting because it was just very much like starting again, like making Rattlesnakes.
You’ve worked with your former Commotions’ band mates Neil Clark and Blair Cowan quite a lot since the Commotions. How has that working relationship changed?
I mean, yeah, it was very different when it was a band because the band was pretty democratic in terms of what it wanted to do. Now, basically, Neil and Blair will occasionally submit song ideas to me, and if I want to do it, I do it, and if I don’t, I don’t. I mean, that was the same way in the band, but what was done with the songs was done by a band and now what is done to the songs is generally done with my supervision. So it’s different, but it’s still a very healthy relationship with both of them, especially with Blair, because Blair comes up with melodic stuff that I like, that I don’t come up with. And Neil, in the same way, maybe not as often, but Neil comes up with ideas that I just wouldn’t. And, you know, why would you want to work with a musician that just agrees with everything you do and comes up with the same things you do? There’s no point. It’s like, I know Prince thought it was great, but the Black Album sounds very much just like Prince and nobody else.
I don’t want to work with people that think the same way I think. I like if people where we can both appreciate certain types of beauty, like we might both listen to a particular Steely Dan song and agree that it’s beautiful, but on the other hand, I know Blair still loves ‘Babylon Sisters’, and I still hate it and yet we still work really well together. So there is definitely something to him bringing stuff to me that is out with my palate.
When you moved to New York, was that a spur of the moment decision?
It wasn’t a long-term plan to stay. I was in London, I split up with the band that I’d been in for all of my musical career, and I split up with the girlfriend that I’d been living with for several years. I was very close to buying a sad person’s apartment and I just got a wake up call. The surveyor came in and said, “This building that you’re thinking about buying the flat in is going to need all this work on the roof. I recommend that you don’t buy it.”
And I just went, “What the fuck am I doing? Why am I staying in London? I’ve got nothing in London. Why don’t I just go somewhere that I always thought was exciting.” And every time I’d ever been to New York, I always woke up really early in the morning and wanted to get out and do things, because I was just so excited to be in New York. So I went to New York. I took a sublet on an apartment for six months and the idea was maybe I’ll stay there long enough to make a record and then see what my plan is after that. I met my wife and we got married and we liked being in New York, so we stayed there.
Those first couple of solo albums, you got together a great band, and you got the legendary Robert Quine [Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and many more] in on guitar. What was it like working with him?
When I moved to New York, I had a list of guitar players I wanted to work with that was Robert Quine and Richard Thompson, and I met Robert Quine in like the first month I was in New York because he was close friends with Fred Maher, and we got on. We got along well. Quine could be quite imposing, quite intimidating to other people, but we had a shared sense of humour. We definitely liked black humor. We ended up enjoying eating together a lot.
And I just didn’t take any of this bullshit in the studio. I remember the first time that we were putting together a solo, I just said, “Just do four takes.” I remember Fred saying, “Just make sure you record the first one, because that’s always the best one,” and we did. Quine would never play two solos remotely similar to each other, so I would take these solos and I just listen through them all and treat them like a lead vocal and make a chart and just put ticks on the bits I liked and crosses on the bit I didn’t like. Then I comped them all together, bounced them down to one track, and Quine’s like, “I don’t do that. I just do one takes.” I was like, “Well, listen to it,” and we did it on whatever the song was, and he was just like, “That is better.” And we got on pretty like a house on fire after that. He absolutely trusted me to take whatever he did and not make it worse. If I was going to edit things, I made it better. So we got on great.
And the band was great. Fred was either playing the drums or programming the drums or taking my drum ideas and making them better. Matthew Sweet was around playing bass, a great, great bass player and a great musician to have around because he would literally learn the song before I’d finished writing it. You heard those stories about those guys that Dylan worked with in Nashville and how he used to love working with them because they were so fast, Matthew was like that.
When you were touring, Don’t Get Weird On Me, you got Robert Forster and Grant MacLennan as your opening act…
Yeah, I take full responsibility for the them reuniting.
What are your memories of that? It’s a pretty imposing opener to then have to follow.
I was pretty confident in those days [laughs]! Yeah, we traveled. We let them travel on the bus with us, so they were around the whole time. Robert was a joy. Grant was sneaking off quite a lot and didn’t seem like he was in a very good place. But the shows that they did were great. It was wonderful.
The press release for the tour you’ll bring to Australia says “And now I find myself approaching the end of my career,” which kind of makes me feel a bit sad. You’re approaching an actual end date for actual retirement? Do musicians ever retire?
No, but I don’t want to be touring when I’m seventy five. I hope I’m still making records when I’m 75. And you never know. If some turnaround in my career made it possible for me to tour as comfortably as somebody like Dylan tours, then maybe I would want to tour till I’m 85. The way I tour is tiring. I can’t travel first class flying to Australia, it’s just too fucking expensive. It’s tiring, and you feel it. I just got back from Belgium and France, and my son’s here for Thanksgiving, a great big family get together, in fact, and he said to me yesterday, “Oh, I signed us up to play at this benefit concert on Friday,” and I was like, “You fucking what? I’m exhausted, I just played just played two tours.” But I’m going to do it because he’s my son.
I saw Paul McCartney a couple of years ago and at the end of the show he said “Thanks for coming. We’ll see you all again next time,” and it’s like “You’re 81. How can you even be thinking of the next tour,” but I see still touring and he’s been playing in the States the last few months. I know he’s not going to be slumming it, he’s going to be doing all in luxury, but he plays for like three hours a night and if you pay for the fancy expensive tickets you get like three-quarters of an hour of a soundcheck show with more songs.
My friend just went to see him last week and said he didn’t even drink any water. He didn’t even take breaks between songs to drink water. It’s just like straight on to the next one. He’s amazing. So who knows? Who knows? But I don’t want it to be my day job when I’m 75. My goal right now is to is to pay all the debts that I have from before and then make sure that everything is in place. Then if I want to do it, I’ll do it, and if I don’t want to do it, I won’t. I should have had all that in place in about 1995 but that was when I had the financial disaster, so I basically went from a position of great strength to a position of very great weakness in a period of about a year and it took me about 20 years to recover from it.
You came out with the last two albums but the upcoming tour isn’t in support of an album. Are still writing for a new album?
I’m almost always writing for a new album, but the recovery period after finishing an album is different. Sometimes you’re so exhausted working on a project, that you don’t have to think about it, you just don’t write for a while because your brain needs a break from it.
After I got finished with On Pain, I actually did have a really strong idea of what I wanted to do with the next record and I think that might have been the problem. I think my idea might have been too focused and, therefore, not flexible enough for me to be able to write fluently, because I had this very specific idea. So I’m now trying to find a way to take that specific idea and not lose it, and find a way to make it work within something that is not so clearly bound.
In interviews around that time you were talking about Sade’s fourth album and the minimalism in the instrumentation , that was the idea that you were progressing?
No, no, the idea was actually a lyrical idea. But absolutely, the idea of what I was trying to do with On Pain was to go in the direction of minimalism and in the direction of, I guess, maximalism. I was trying to have a pretty large contrast between the spare and the dense. I would still I would like to take the spare a lot further. In fact, I was talking to [producer] Chris Hughes, and we’ve been talking about ways to try and make tracks with just drums and vocals. It sounds very Rip Rig + Panic doesn’t it.
This tour is just you and your electric guitar. Given the more electronic nature of the last couple of albums, is it easy to work all the songs out for you to play like that? Or are there songs you would have liked to play that just don’t translate?
Certain ones, certain ones. I found a way to make three of the On Pain songs work with the acoustic guitar. No, four. I found a way to make four of them work, so half. With the electric guitar, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure ‘The Idiot’ will work, I’m pretty sure ‘On Pain’ will still work. Not sure about ‘Wolves’. In fact, I’m pretty sure ‘Warm By The Fire won’t work on electric. It worked nicely on acoustic because it kind of turned itself into like a skiffle song on acoustic.
That’s the challenge every record is, it’s finding a way to make it work live. I wish in many ways that I’d been forced into this position maybe sometime in the early 90s or late 80s, because then we would never have gone out on tour trying to sound like the record because it’s a fucking waste of time. I don’t know why anybody would want to go and see a live concert that sounds just like the record. Why would anybody want that? You’ve got the record already. You can listen to that. Surely a live concert is in some way different, bringing a different aspect of the music out, focusing on different things and working with the obviously necessary limitations that you have live that you don’t have in the studio, those things can be fun and sometimes you end up going, ‘Oh, God, I wish I’d recorded it like that.”
I don’t wish I knew a lot of things when I was younger. I certainly have no desire to change the thought process that went into making the early records, but when it came to touring, I wish somebody had just said to me, “No point trying to get those string sounds live, there’s no fucking orchestra on stage. It looks stupid to have something sounding like really good strings on stage when there isn’t an orchestra. It looks wrong. Don’t do it.” My sound engineer for most of my touring in Europe, he won’t work with bands that have backing tracks. He’s just like, “No, not doing it,” and so many bands work with tracks these days.
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I kind of feel it’s gotten worse. Just going to see a gig is so expensive now and people expect it to sound exactly as they want, as they’re used to hearing it. I haven’t seen Bob Dylan for a while, probably about a dozen years, but I still love that he makes people so angry.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of my best friends was quite the opposite. My friend Dave texted me when he was watching a show recently and just said, “It’s the best show I’ve seen in decades. It was just fantastic.” I love the way that Dylan has made his music work with his old man voice.
I love his old man’s voice!
I love his old man’s voice nearly all the time. Sometimes when he tries to go to Fred Astaire at times, it’s like I can’t quite take that. There’s one song on Rough and Rowdy Ways where he’s crooning just a little bit beyond where I want to hear it. But the first song on that record, ‘I Contain Multitudes’, It’s just brilliant, I could listen to it every day.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I’m not a massive fan, or at least not an obsessive, I like some of his albums, but I’ve really liked his later period stuff.
I’m a massive fan and what he’s made me do recently is he’s made me want to go back and listen to all the records that I ignored because I knew they weren’t great records. I want to even go back into the mediocre records to find the little hidden gems in there, because I’m sure there are.
Before we wrap up, I realised there was a follow-up question to something we talked about earlier. When you got talked into initially studying Law, they told you about how you can do anything with a Law degree. Having switched to English and Philosophy, what were you planning on doing afterwards, before music came along?
Honestly, I think by that time, I think I already knew that I wanted to do this, but I also knew that I needed to be smarter, so I needed to expand my lexicon.
If I hadn’t have done that, if this hadn’t have worked out, I’d have found something that worked with enjoying literature and philosophy. I’m sure I’d have found some niche that kept me alive. It’s funny now, because looking back, I used to think if I if I wasn’t a musician, I would have been a teacher, but the only job outside of my job that excites me, that I think would have been a fun job to be, would have been an engineer working on roads and bridges. I do think that seems like a job that you would have massive satisfaction from, and it would be like puzzle solving the whole time. I love doing crosswords and puzzles, so it’d be like math puzzles and making the world better.
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Sunday 15 March 2026 – Metro Theatre, Sydney
Tuesday 17 March 2026 – Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne
Thursday 19 March 2026 – Factory Theatre, Sydney – SOLD OUT
Friday 20 March 2026 – Factory Theatre, Sydney – SOLD OUT
Sunday 22 March 2026 – The Tivoli, Brisbane
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – The Gov, Adelaide
Friday 27 March 2026 – Astor Theatre, Perth
Sunday 29 March 2026 – Odeon Theatre, Hobart
https://www.destroyalllines.com/tours/lloydcole
