Lloyd has a new solo album out called 'Broken Record'. Not got round to listening to it yet but it has reviewed well, so, in honour of the great man himself....

1. Rich
2. Rattlesnakes
3. Perfect Skin
4. Forest Fire
5. Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken

1. Andy's Babies
2. Sweetness
3. Why I Love Country Music
4. Patience
5. Charlotte Street

I like your 5 as well!

Bloody he'll. A top 5. Maybe a top 15 i could manage. Only Commotions or solo too?

Ok. I'll try...

From the hip
29
Are you ready to be heartbroken?
Forest fire
Perfect skin
Perfect blue
You will never be no good
Rattlesnakes
These days
My bag

Just booked tickets for the Nov 3rd gig at Union Chapel in Islington. Well done Dalliance for reminding me. I'd forgotten this was due out.

I'm delighted to note that the Lloyd Cole rehabilitation is complete.

i have only oe of his solo albums (the lovely Music In A Foreign Language), so I'll limit my fairly obvious five to Commotions stuff.

1. Jennifer, She Said
2. Forest Fire
3. Perfect Skin
4. From The Hip
5. Lost Weekend

5 Lost weekend
4 Forest fire
3 Rich
2 Ratlesnakes
1 Brand new friend

Did he need rehab, G.Man?
I've always thought that the Commotions burned brightly, disappeared before they got tiresome and the Cole's solo stuff has been quite understated but still popular amongst a core listenership.
I don't remember him or them ever really being slated.
And by golly am I thrown by finding a bit of an overlap between our tastes.

Forest Fire
Perfect Skin
Are you ready to be heartbroken
Rattlesnakes

I'm only familiar with the first album so can only get to four. It's a good four though. When it comes to the sensitive, intelligent, jingly jangly pop of this era, I much preferred Roddy Frame.

1. "Forest Fire"
2. "Patience"
3. "Down On Mission St"

I don't wanna water it down by going any further than that, even for "Perfect Skin", a song that seems like the greatest thing in the world when you're 17 and first discovering, you know, cult books and old films an' that, but bloody awful once you've grown up and lived a bit.

Oh, I remember Lloyd Cole being regarded as a pretentious cunt and his music as desperately lacking in cool. Certainly the British music press — I recall both Smash Hits and NME slating Cole — weren't big on him in the late '80s and '90s. I could never understand why, other than Cole obviously having pissed off a lot of hacks.

1. lost weekend
2. she's a girl and i'm a man
3. forest fire
4. are you ready to be heartbroken
5. my bag

Ahh, if we're including solo stuff...

No Blue Skies
So you'd Like to Save the World
Baby
I Hate To See You Baby Doing That Stuff
Negative attitude

I saw them many years ago supporting Simple Minds.

I didn't like them but they won me over that day. They were certainly better than Simple Minds.

I saw Shriekback many years ago supporting Simple Minds.

I didn't like them but they won me over that day. They were certainly better than Simple Minds.

Simple Minds were pretty good live when I saw them in 84. The Pretenders closed for them.

LC&TC:
1. Perfect Blue.
2. Forest Fire.
3. Down On Mission Street.
4. Are You ready To Be Heartbroken.
5. Patience.

LC:
1. Baby.
2. Ice Cream Girl.
3. I Hate To See You Baby Doing That Stuff.
4. Dont Look back.
5. Mercy Killing.

Did he ever release a version of the Cher hit "Do you believe in life after love?". I heard him play it as an encore at Shepherds Bush Empire way back when....late 90s???.

I don't wanna water it down by going any further than that, even for "Perfect Skin", a song that seems like the greatest thing in the world when you're 17 and first discovering, you know, cult books and old films an' that, but bloody awful once you've grown up and lived a bit.

Yeah, that. some of those lyrics were painful weren't they - "she's sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan", "She looked like Yves-Marie Santhe in On The Waterfront". I barely understood those references at the time, but I could tell even then they were pretty cringeworthy.

linus wrote:
Simple Minds were pretty good live when I saw them in 84. The Pretenders closed for them.

Simple Minds played a four-night stand at Massey Hall in '84, with China Crisis opening. People still talk about them being legendary '80s shows. God knows what happened when I saw them a year or so later.

E10 Rifle wrote:
some of those lyrics were painful weren't they

"She looks like Eve Marie Saint in 'On The Waterfront' / As she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance." Yeah man.

He really was a complete bell end when he first came out, old Clyod. I remember him in Smash Hits, a photoshoot with him next to a pile of BOOKS running a troubled hand through his beatnik hairdo. He wrote a nice tune or two, mind. I met him once, and he was - of course - a really nice chap. About 40 at this point, so probably quite embarrassed by his youthful name-dropping ways.

"You ride into town in a beat-up Grace Kelly car / Looking like a friend of Truman Capote"

Talk about pulling down your pants and bending over in front of the parodists. It wouldn't matter so much if he hadn't chosen those particular people. Even at 17, I found him totally hysterical. I mean I wasn't much better at that age, but at least I knew that singing "I feel like...<STUDENT FAVOURITE>" was the unmistakable behaviour of an absolute prize twat.

All the kids at my school who thought he was Mr Cool are now accountants and stuff like that, obviously. It was him and The Cure and Morrissey (the solo artist) - which is why I find it hard to take any of those people terribly seriously, despite the fact that they've all made the odd cracking record.