Cole seeks less of a commotion
Lloyd Cole is in the attic of his home on the north-east coast of the United States, where it’s a tad chilly now, ‘‘bloody hot’’ in summer, and the droll-voiced Brit is well over it.
‘‘I can’t wait to leave this climate,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t know where I’m moving to. My youngest son is about to go to university – once that’s done we’ll start thinking about options.’’
Given he’s touring Australasia over the next few months with what he calls his retrospective tour, has he considered moving over here?
Cole is polite, but not so sure. ‘‘Certainly playing golf would be fantastic, but I think I want to live somewhere where people don’t speak English for a while. I’m a little tired of hearing people talk.’’
This is a man for whom words have always been his calling card, with his literary references and witty bon mots as much as the dark brows and jangling guitars of his band The Commotions marking him out from the 1980s pop crowd. So to want nothing more to do with people speaking to him suggests a greater level of fatigue than even his premature world-weariness could have predicted 30 years ago.
‘‘Well,’’ Cole says with a sigh. ‘‘It’s the thing that one does so it’s very difficult to ignore when one sees or hears that elsewhere. It is very difficult to tune it out. I find if someone turns the television on in the room I find it very difficult not to look at it and that’s why I quite like to go to bars where they don’t have televisions. If I’m at lunch, eating, and I can hear the people at the next table talking, I can’t unhear them.’’
He considers his answer and cedes ground. ‘‘Yes, I probably have got to the point where my belief in humanity is lower than it used to be and I sometimes quite like the idea of silence.’’
It’s not long ago that Cole wrote an album almost wholly sung from the perspective of a middle-aged man in a bar watching passing trade, younger women and time slide by. If he could have silence, would he still want to be that observer?
‘‘I’m sort of torn,’’ he confesses. ‘‘For my work I need to be there, but I am weary of observing the world right now. I think I should be thankful that I have two-thirds of a lifetime of observations and notebooks to keep me going. I think I’ve got plenty.’’
Dialogue is not something that appears frequently in those notebooks or in his songs, but he will happily tell you that ‘‘the most common phrase that appears in my songs is ‘she says’.’’
Still, world weariness notwithstanding, that’s not yet turned into ‘‘she says I know what it’s like to be dead’’.
‘‘I have not gone there yet but there is still ground to be covered,’’ Cole says jovially. ‘‘That’s one of the things that makes spending a couple of years primarily as a retro artist feel like something I’m not uncomfortable with. I’m still working towards new material; I just don’t work anywhere near as quickly as I once did.‘‘
Does spending a few years touring his catalogue, being a ‘‘retro artist’’, have the same effect as a decade ago when he made his archive of unreleased material available online: effectively clearing away foliage to allow fresh shoots to emerge?
‘‘I think there is something liberating in that and I do feel that some time in the next five years I will probably be at that point [of renewal],’’ Cole says. ‘‘I think in the category that I call song ideas [in his sound files] there are maybe 500 ideas and probably half of them have been used in the 250 sketches.
‘‘Every now and again I listen and think ’I can do something with that’. And then I think maybe I’ll do something with that next year.’’
He sighs. ‘‘It would be quite nice to be done with them all. Maybe I will throw them all away at some point.’’ – Fairfax
Lloyd Cole’s New Zealand tour includes performances at Wellington’s Paramount Cinema (January 29) and Christchurch’s The Piano (February 3). For more information, see plus1.co.nz