JOY? PLUG ME IN! LLOYD COLE’S ELECTRIC DREAMS part 1

A man, six strings and a lot of thoughts.

Gather ‘round boys and girls for another round of the Reverse Kondo. What’s that you say? Not a Japanese martial art or Italian snack but a test of psychology and truth, the Reverse Kondo switches declutterer Marie Kondo and says, forget throwing shit out, what would you like to add to your life in each of these five categories - four chosen by me; one chosen by them - to bring joy?

This week, songwriter, droll raconteur, golfer and bike rider, and full-time Englishman from Scotland in the USA, Lloyd Cole – probably making a list as we speak for what he’ll bring to Australia for his Lloyd-is-solo-but-plays-electric guitar tour in March – takes up the challenge.

Bring me more!, he says, admitting that he can still find this interviewing palaver fun on occasion, or at least when people stop asking him about his influences*: “There should be a mandatory $25 fine for anybody that ever asks that question really,” says Mr Cole, oblivious to the fact I now have to scrub three pages of carefully typed questions as I’ve got no cash on me.

Even better, as well as this spin through the Kondo, today you get an upmarket addendum of another story as a couple of answers here led Cole and I down some too fascinating to leave side roads into rebuilding your life after a breakdown, depression to be managed not cured, and why alone time isn’t always great. (Read that story here.)

And here's something from his 2019 album, Guesswork, about some other string instruments.

But to start, we’re in Kondo corner. So what would Lloyd Cole like more of in his life?

(*His influences? They are, obviously, Nina Hagen and Perry Como, for those playing at home. And Tony Jacklin.)

A PLACE

This is an interesting one at this time in my life because I live in America but I don’t want to die here. On the other hand, I don’t want to abandon my wife who doesn’t really want to live anywhere else.

So he’ll have to outlive her?

Or kill her. Or she could kill me. Those two outcomes are probably more likely than it really going well.

I used to think a lot about where I would be happy, where would be the ideal place for me? It doesn’t really exist because I’ve got things that I want in my life that I know make me happy. For example, my wife, if I’m sitting around in a bad mood, quite often would just say fuck off and play golf because you are always in a bad mood when you’ve played golf. Golf has treated me very badly the last 10 years, and yet I still do it, which just goes to show you my relationship with the game.

Now the two reasons I decided to change my acoustic show to electric, even though it’s a solo show, is I didn’t really want ‘folksinger’ on my gravestone. Even though I’ve been playing the acoustic guitar for my solo show for almost 30 years, it still doesn’t feel like the defining instrument for me – not that there really is a defining instrument for me, other than my voice. And I just thought I like the idea of the electric guitar better. The acoustic guitar has got specific connotations of folksinger and protest singer etc that I don’t really want. And I know that I’ve been able to make the show my own. In fact I was just on stage in Paris a couple of weeks ago playing particularly well, thinking ‘what the fuck am I thinking? I’m really good at this’.

The other reason is I’ve been turning down good money for many, many years because you just can’t play an acoustic at a festival. If anybody does it, fair play to them, but the couple of times I’ve tried it’s been more than a major disaster. Worse than a major disaster. And I just got to thinking, well if I just had my amp next to me on stage, I don’t have to rely on anybody else to get my amp to sound good to me; that’s just something I do. The voice always sounds fine, the problem is the guitar, so I’m just going to do this electric show for a while and see how it goes at festivals [this year]. Now, most of the festivals would be in the UK or Western Europe and I’ve decided I’m going to live over there for four to six weeks instead of hopping back and forth over the Atlantic.

Leeds Castle golf course. Lloyd Cole not pictured. Yet.

So I’ve been looking for somewhere to live, an Air B&B, and it’s really hard because the places that have got the lovely remote golf are also massively depressing when you get past the golf. And the cities … I consider myself, even though I’ve lived in a small town the last 20 years, not a country person but an urban person. I just like to live on the outskirts of town so I can get out and ride my bike and play golf, but when I’m not riding my bike or playing golf I want to be in a proper city that’s got proper things like restaurants that aren’t shit and bars where bartenders actually know how to make certain drinks.

So, the best that I can come up with right now is Leeds. Leeds has got great golf, great pubs, great restaurants. Quite surprising. Leeds was one of the grimmest places in the world 30 years ago, but it’s quite a nice size. If it wasn’t for the golf I’d be living in Lisbon, but Lisbon makes the golf difficult. There’s golf there but not the kind I like: I like the rustic golf.

There is one option in a place called Cascais [coastal town near Lisbon]. I went to live in Cascais for two weeks [in 2024] but then I also had kind of a nervous breakdown while I was there, so [he laughs] my memory of it is not that good. That was when I realised I had to stop drinking for a while, which was a little scary. But it’s all good, I did stop drinking for a while and I don’t drink very much.

So, finding a place? I think there is a pretty good rule that Lisbon is the only example of a great city that also has great weather. Possibly Melbourne. Sydney is too hot. People who live in Melbourne say the weather isn’t that great but every time I’m there it seems to be great.

A SONG

There are certain performances of certain songs that I have leant on because they make me cry. Sometimes you really need to cry, and when you have cried things are better. Nina Simone singing Jimmy Webb’s Do What You Gotta Do always makes me cry. Without fail.

I think David Bowie singing Sound And Vision is just so beautiful, has got such a vibe, there is such a great vibe coming from the recording. You know it was a weird recording, what was going on, but it just feels like that was a great day in the studio. I think that’s the best Bowie vocal and I think a lot of people agree with me actually. It’s very strange that he would be able to make a vocal that good when a year later he didn’t remember the recording session. I read something the other day where he said oh my God, I looked so ill.

A PERSON

[Producer and collaborator] Chris Hughes. I wish I saw Chris every day. Chris and I, every time we talk, we are always laughing. We get along great and we are finally getting close to finally making a secret record together, which can’t really tell you any more about except that it’s a secret and we are hoping people won’t know it’s us when we’ve made it. We’ve been talking about it forever but we had a serious chat about it last week when we both were on exactly the same page about what it is.

Chris has been massively important, even though he’s only produced one of my albums as the actual producer, helping me figure out what on earth I was going to do after [1993 album] Bad Vibes with [1995 album] Love Story. He came to New York and oversaw, sat at the back of the room while Adam [Peters, co-producer] and I were working and basically, I don’t know, got us on the right track again. Or got us on the right track for the first time.

It’s always fun with Chris. Even when it’s really difficult, it’s still fun. I think, to be honest, it’s extreme intelligence. It’s really fun to work with people that you feel are brighter than oneself. I don’t mean to sound like a twat, saying it doesn’t happen very often, but, yeah … And it’s very difficult to work in the studio with people who you stop respecting because they say stupid things too often. Even though they might be brilliant musicians, you know you can trust their aesthetic.

And the thing that is great about Chris is that we don’t share, we don’t have a massive intersect with, our aesthetic but Chris really seems to understand what I do and sometimes when I’m getting ready to make a record and I have an idea for a song but I’m not sure if it’s really any good, one of his favourite things to say is, ‘yes, it’s extremely Lloyd, you’ve got to do it’.

I tell him about a friend of mine who I’ve known for 50 years and who, through no action or intent from him but purely my own insecurity and admiration for him, it took me decades before I felt I could credibly counter or disagree with on matters musical.

The way you were just talking about your friend made me realise, and this is something that might seem difficult to believe, I want more Bob Dylan in my life. And I want more Bob Dylan because of a couple of recent songs, especially I Contain Multitudes. That song is so fantastic that it’s made me want to go back and listen to all the Bob Dylan albums that I didn’t listen to and find all the gems that I didn’t know about, because I’m getting so much joy from old Dylan. I love old Dylan so much you get the feeling that he would be a great guy as well.

I’m kind of in love with Dylan. I wasn’t always in love with Dylan; I’ve been in and out of love with Dylan. I was in love with his work but I’m kind of in love with almost everything about him now. I adore the way he’s made his new music something that his old person’s voice is perfect for. He’s just got it dead right.

A PIECE OF OTHER ART

I get a fair number of people asking me to do this or that that is not music, and I more and more sure that music is the only thing that I’m any good at. I do some writing, I write some prose – I’ve got some prose that is okay – and if I am motivated to want to write something … like poetry, which very, very rarely happens, I’ll write it. But mostly I feel like I’ve got so much unfinished business that needs doing with music. I have that feeling at the same time as wishing I could retire, and they don’t feel contradictory in that I don’t think I will ever retire but if I could be semi-retired and music could really be a hobby instead of just being the thing I absolutely have to do to make a living, I think it might be even more fun.

I don’t know. I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I don’t believe that you really have any kind of freedom, especially artistic freedom, if you don’t have complete economic freedom. However much I try to make all of my decisions with my art based on trying to make the most beautiful thing, my economic position impacts me, so it impacts my work. I don’t know how, but I think I’d be foolish to think that it’s not there.

I do think that I would like to discipline myself a little better to get more simple reading in a quiet room in my life. But that is impacted by the economics in that I’m always planning something to do with music and I don’t read just for the sake of reading as much as I should, as much as I’d like to. That’s one of the things I’m working on. I do like books on tape, thank heavens. I do like listening to a good narration.

Can you believe I’ve never read this book? I just read this book called The Hearing Trumpet [by Leonora Carrington, a Mexico-based Englishwoman] and sent it to my travel agent, who is one of my bookclub buddies, and she said it kind of reminds me of Master And Margarita [by Soviet-era Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov] and there is a really good Audible narration of Master And Margarita that I’m listening to right now. The narration is key. Like the guy narrating the Martin Amis stuff for Audible is brilliant, he sounds like Peter Cook doing a narrator. If you can imagine Peter Cook reading Martin Amis, it would be as good as it could get.

But there is something about being in a quiet room doing the reading yourself that I want to be getting more of.

HIS CHOICE OF CATEGORY

I would like to be more social. I’ve become very antisocial. I don’t know [why]. Maybe it’s because I live in a small town and I have friends that are in certain environments that I meet at the bar or the restaurant or the golf club, but in terms of just wanting to invite anybody around to the house, not so much.

Is this markedly different to how he was 30 years ago?

Yes. Yes. We have [a major social gathering] this week and the house is going be absolutely full, and I know I’m going to spend at least half of the time up here, hiding. I don’t like it and I’d like to like it. I do like it when it’s two or three people or four people come to the house, but when 10 of them are in the house, I just don’t like it. But my wife is the opposite. She grew up in a house with nine people in the house and I grew up with four people in the house. Four feels empty to her and nine feels overly full to me. But I wish I could do better at that.

READ MORE

Lloyd Cole - Alone Again, Unnaturally: part two of this interview

Lloyd Cole – City Recital Hall Sydney, 2019: live review

Homeboy MJ Lenderman Talks Fireworks, Family And Joy: interview

SEE MORE

Lloyd Cole plays:

Melbourne Recital Centre, March 17

Factory Theatre, Marrickville, March 19

The Tivoli, Brisbane, March 22

The Gov, Adelaide, March 24

Astor Theatre, Perth, March 27

Odeon, Hobart, March 29