"Patience" is my favourite, anyway. Really nice bit of Prefab-Sproutlike 80s swoon, with a charming attempt at falsetto that sounds, as Wingco (or Allan Jones, I forget) once said of Paul Weller's high-pitched vocal stylings, "like a fat man trying to climb over a wall."

Lloyd Cole & The Commotions were technically a Glasgow band, he wasn't from there but the band was I think and were based in and around the city.

I think it would be fair to say that they were not overly popular there, Glasgow has a great music tradition for more wayward and awkward music and Cole's pretentious lyrics were never going to endear him to the locals. I recall a lot more fuss around that time for the up and coming Jesus & Mary Chain despite their considerably smaller chart appeal.

Yeah, didn't he meet the band while he was in Glasgow studying or something like that? I think he came from Chapel-en-le-Frith. You'd think that would have cured him of thinking that anything that sounds French must be cool.

I've never knowingly heard owt by him/them. From what I read at the time, it just didn't appeal enough for me to bother following up on him/them...

Yes, they were all studying Quiffology at Glasgow University. I thought he was from Buxton myself which still doesn't explain the pretentiousness.

Buxton is quite arty, it has an Opera Festival.

On the other hand, it's the town DLT calls home.

Taylor wrote:
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.

What he said. I'm afraid all that stuff hardened my heart against LC early doors, and it's never really softened. Mark E Smith once suggested Cole ought to be "kicked to death", and, well, I can see why.

Enough people like enough of his songs for me to know I'm being unreasonable, mind you.

Never heard the man's music but if this isn't an example of Wiki vandalism then...

Ah, the rehabilitation is not complete after all.

You fuckers will be telling me I wasn't cool for smoking Gauloises and carrying around a copy of the Tao Te Ching when I was 15.
You're all wrong. And grotesquely ugly freaks to boot.

hobbes wrote:
You fuckers will be telling me I wasn't cool for smoking Gauloises and carrying around a copy of the Tao Te Ching when I was 15.
You're all wrong. And grotesquely ugly freaks to boot.

Hobbes, aged 15:

-

Carnivorous Vulgaris wrote:
Never heard the man's music but if this isn't an example of Wiki vandalism then...

The golf bit you mean? He's a very good golfer apparently, his auld man was a green-keeper or a golf club social club steward or summit....I think.
One of the Commotions is/was the golf correspondent of The Guardian or The Independent as well.

Admittedly the lad had his moments on that first album but it was his biggest seller and no doubt served its purpose in hooking a studenty audience.

You fuckers will be telling me I wasn't cool for smoking Gauloises and carrying around a copy of the Tao Te Ching when I was 15.
You're all wrong. And grotesquely ugly freaks to boot.

Yes hobbes, just go and read some Norman Mailer and then go and get yourself a new tailor. I've seen how you dress.

Lloyd Cole was pretty popular in Glasgow Dalliance, way more popular than the Mary Chain from memory. I saw him with the Commotions at the Barrowland about 1985 and it was sold out, I think Hipsway supported. I was one of only 2 casuals there in a sea of Byres Road types with docs and turned up jeans. I really enjoyed it all the same.
At that time Jesus and the Mary Chain would have been lucky to sell out Rooftops.

When I lost my virginity Rattlesnakes was playing quite loudly, track 1, about 30 seconds in remains memorable if not particularly accurate.

Lawrence Donegan was the drummer in the Commotions (and the Bluebells I think) and he's written for the Guardian and the Scotsman about golf as well as a book about being a pro caddy on the European tour which was quite insightful. He's also taken a powering from OTFs American posters for comments he's made about US football.

Afrikaams wrote:

When I lost my virginity Rattlesnakes was playing quite loudly, track 1, about 30 seconds in remains memorable if not particularly accurate.
Had it been playing long when you started?

It hadn't been playing long when I finished far less started.

Fucking hell. Hipsway. Somewhere in our mam's garage there'll be a C90 with their album with that song off that advert on that a lad I knew copied for me. I probably listened to it twice. I wonder what was on the other side?

If I'd been a year or two older or not detoured into thrash metal when I first forsook the charts I probably would have been a Lloyd Cole/Echo fan. Although I couldn't hum a tune by either of them, I always get the feeling that I was lucky. A friend ten years my junior has in the past asked me if I have anything my them, out of curiousity for the in-bands of yesterdecade, so I suspect they still have some kind of phantom clout.

The 20th Anniversary gig a few years ago was a joyous occasion.
A thoroughly great live experience all round.

Yes hobbes, just go and read some Norman Mailer and then go and get yourself a new tailor. I've seen how you dress.
You don't like the Turtleneck I borrowed off Jane?

Echo and in Bunnymen, sw2boro? I don't think of as being in the same category at all. The Bunnymen were kind of ludicrous too, in a way, but in a way I found much more likeable, with their c-c-c-cabbages and c-c-c-cauliflowers. They were part of that very geographically specific acid-inflected Scouse thing that was going on in 79-ish. Lloyd and his Commotions postdated them by half a decade, were from bloody miles away, and were ploughing a very different furrow.

But I may have missed your meaning.

Similar in the sense of being pseudo-poetic, though. And the Bunnymen's lyrics do make Clyod's sound far better than they are - at least he's sort of witty.

(This "Clyod" business... I still think of him as Clyod because of some old 80s Melody Maker in-joke, but I can't remember where that came from or what it was supposed to mean... anyone?)

I bloody hate Echo & the sodding Bunnymen. Their songs are just totally useless objects, and useless objects which aren't even beautiful tend to get me down. I could possibly take their appalling doggerel if that bloke wasn't so beerily messianic, full of that "amateur band" arrogance without substance (as if he considered arrogance an end in itself). I do like "The Killing Moon", because unlike their other stuff it's properly lovely, musically. But the rest just seems to be a load of sub-stadium rattle and rumble, with some self-important voice prattling on about nothing. Can't bear the histrionic edge to his singing, either, not when the actual words are gibberish - I mean the fact that they're gibberish doesn't necessarily matter, but what does matter is that they're gibberish without any kind of aesthetic appeal.

Their songs don't even seem to evoke anything. They just seem to be saying "this is BIG!" A real 1980s bore. Only difference between them and U2 is that EATB had some basic self-awareness.