LLOYD COLE City Recital Hall, Sydney, December 20 There are any number of reasons why Lloyd Cole opening his two-pronged show – solo, and then as a duo with Neil Clark - with Past Imperfect was beautifully apt. Not least among them was the presence in the audience of two former Go-Betweens, Lindy Morrison and Amanda Brown, for a song which is the most Go-Betweens-resonant in his catalogue, with its languorous melody that doesn’t seek to clutter matters, the suggestion of a rh

For reasons which will become obvious eventually, though not necessarily making complete sense, this conversation with Lloyd Cole begins and ends with clothes. And chest hair. Neither of these are standard topics with the pan-continental, American-based Englishman who formed The Commotions while studying in Scotland in 1982 and has been known to drop in a French pronunciation or two. But then Cole’s most recent album, Guesswork, was not your standard Lloyd Cole album, with it

LLOYD COLE Guesswork (earMUSIC/Sony) Settled isn’t the best word – it could suggest complacency or resignation, when the opposite is true – but there’s something to the line that Lloyd Cole has settled comfortably into middle age. Witty, frank, and sometimes brutal, but also compassionate and aware, for the past 15 or so years Cole, now 58, has chronicled marvellously the slippages and solipsisms of men of a certain age, of a “man on the edge of time”. Missed cues at bars, cr

Lloyd Cole City Recital Hall, January 15 Possibly the only thing drier than Lloyd Cole’s humour is a White Cliffs backyard at the moment. “I’m about to be nearer 60 than 50 and my hair is all I have left,” he said after asking the audience to tell him if the hair over his ears was sticking out embarrassingly each time he had to put glasses on to tune his guitar. “You’re not getting any younger either,” he said pre-emptively more than defensively, before playing his early hit