LLOYD COLE – ALONE AGAIN, UNNATURALLY part 2
- Bernard Zuel
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
AND YOU THOUGHT Portugal was a magical place? Not necessarily. Or not always.
While discussing places he’d like to live in the accompanying Reverse Kondo story today (find it here) singer/songwriter and occasional barstool philosopher, Lloyd Cole, mentioned that a place he’d contemplated when spending some time there in 2024 was Lisbon, and a beautiful spot in particular was Cascais, up the coast a little.
The problem was he “had kind of a nervous breakdown while I was there”, which coloured the memory somewhat. The immediate issue then was drinking. Or, more to the point, stopping drinking. The bigger issue was something harder, more complex, more intractable.
How do you get out of a kind of nervous breakdown?
“I just had to commit to checking myself in somewhere. Just for a month,” says Cole. “It was pretty horrible but a month where everything was beyond my decision making. No drugs involved, nothing really scary, I just basically had six months of sobriety then and found that all the things I thought I wouldn’t be able to do [without drinking] I could actually do fine.”
Presumably alcohol wasn’t the reason the breakdown happened, it was a trigger maybe, or a contributor.
“You know, people who have not experienced depression are the outliers. We all deal with it. And the problem with alcohol is that we use it to celebrate and we also use it to commiserate, and that is not a good method of living,” he says. “The thing about being British is we just don’t want to talk about anything and not only do we not want to talk about it, we consider it gauche. But being forced to talk about it was good. And also good in respect is I don’t ever want to have to do that again.
“So I have pretty good motivation to keep things on an even keel, so to speak. But I do know that absolutely it’s still with me, it’s not gone, in the same way that the depression is only a couple of major mishaps away.”
And this is something that people who have not experienced major depressive episodes don’t always grasp, thinking that if you do this or that it will work and you look in control and you’ll be fixed. But we are well aware that if one or two things coincide, those trigger points or vulnerabilities recur or pile on each other, everything else can fall apart because we are held together by tenuous things.
“Absolutely. Fragile mechanisms,” says Cole. “And the thing is, we don’t confuse the two – depression and depressing are different – but things can be depressing, and when the twain actually do meet, as they did, then yeah, the Titanic goes down.”
The reason he’d been thinking about alternative places to live to his longtime home on the east coast of the USA, was that he would be spending a good portion of this year on the road, mostly in the UK and Europe after returning from his March Australian tour. He was looking for somewhere where a decent, links golf course could be found, maybe a route for his other obsession, road cycling, relative ease of access to the summer festivals on the continent, and it turns out, one more element related to his preference for avoiding big social gatherings. “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,” he says elsewhere.
“I’ve been looking at these ideas for over the next summer and I must admit, almost all my plans are for an entirely solitary life. If I meet people and become friendly along the way, great, but the plans don’t involve other people at all. It’s a bit weird,” Cole concedes. “And yet there are certain people, like Chris [Hughes, his frequent collaborator and producer], or my friend Dave in New York, and Michael Azerrad the writer, when we get together we always have a great time and we feel like we need to do it more often, but we’ve all got lives.”
It is a big leap to go from I don’t like big groups of people to what he describes as living a very solitary life for several months in the northeast city of Leeds. It feels extreme.
“I know, and is not that I want no one, it’s just can’t see a way to plan with other people in mind with the work and the travel. The only possible way I could do that is if I decided to base myself in Oxford and then I would have friends there,” he says. “But part of me really wants to be by the sea for the golf as well, and those two parts of me are fighting.
He could choose Oxford, but from this angle it also seems that Leeds was not chosen purely because of its access to golf and freedom of movement but because it doesn’t have anyone connected to his life there.
“No, not quite. No,” Cole says, growing firmer in the repetition. “Because Leeds I would inevitably meet people there. But some of my other options are quite wild places in the middle of nowhere, and my worry is that depression could be quite easy to fall into in those places.
Which makes this decision more interesting still because while sure, in Leeds he could meet other people and it is not as off-the-path as some other options, he is making a deliberate choice not to go somewhere that would definitely provide him with that social connection, preferring somewhere where it could happen if he chose and if him put himself in a position to, while allowing for the possibility that it might not happen at all.
“You know one of the things I’ve thought? With my work over the years I meet a lot of people every day when I’m touring and I think I got to a point where I had the feeling they just go in one ear and out the other because there are too many of them and I can’t remember them all, so why remember any.
“So there is that, but that’s very different to friendships. So I am considering Bath, which is near where Chris lives, so we’ll see.”
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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
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