Concerts

Consider catching Lloyd Cole at City Winery

The former Commotions leader and longtime Easthampton resident will survey his four-decade-spanning recording career at City Winery on Oct. 8.

Photo by Paul Shoul

2 minutes to read

In a recent piece that he penned for The Big Issue, singer, songwriter, and former bandleader Lloyd Cole wrote, “I spent my childhood studying to be a pop star … I learned to play bass from one of those tall thin instructional books … and playing along to ‘1969 Live’ by The Velvet Underground.”

Cole’s diligence paid off in the 1980s when the three studio albums by his band The Commotions – along with a 1989 compilation – each sold more than 100,000 copies in the UK.

His study of literature and philosophy at university also proved useful. Without such a keen lyricist with a voice to match, The Commotions may have been just another British band whose recipe included jangly chords, chiming arpeggios, plump basslines, and brooding vocals.

Cole’s solo career has been less commercially successful, but he did nab a silver record for 60,000 UK sales of his 1990 debut.

Stateside, however, none of the dozen releases that bear his name has been a significant seller. So why has this Buxton, England native who attended universities in London and Glasgow – where The Commotions formed – lived in Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley for more than 20 years?

A fan posed this very query in the Ask Lloyd section of Cole’s website on November 4, 2008, to which Cole answered, “We left NYC in 1999 with no real plan except to find somewhere with good schools, seasons, and hopefully decent golf … We lived in Northampton for a few years, decided to stay, and then we started to look to buy a house … [A]s we looked beyond the town limits we found this house … I’m at the local golf courses fairly regularly and I’m only ten minutes’ walk from Cottage Street.”

I know, this leaves “Why Massachusetts?” and “Why Northampton?” unanswered, but do people really need to explain why they would choose either one? (Here is a rare smiling photo of him that Robyn Hitchcock posted when the “Mature Indie Rockers” recently met for lunch in the area.)

The 61-year-old has dubbed his current tour “From Rattlesnakes to Guesswork.”

While that might sound like the type of literate if somewhat obscure phrase that Cole could conjure up at a moment’s notice, the truth is rather prosaic.

The Commotions’ 1984 debut was titled “Rattlesnakes.” Among its inclusions were the title track, which Tori Amos covered in 2001, and “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?,” which Glasgow’s Camera Obscura answered in their 2006 song “Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken.”

Cole’s most recent solo offering, as you may have sussed, bears the title “Guesswork.” It was recorded “(mostly) in his attic studio in Massachusetts” and features appearances by fellow Commotions Neil Clark and Blair Cowan.

In the aforementioned Big Issue article, Cole surmised, “My younger self would probably be appalled that I’m still performing with grey hair and an acoustic guitar.”

The hundreds of fans who will gather to hear him at City Winery on October 8, however, will surely be grateful that he is.