lloyd Cole
If Elvis had taken a philosophy degree, he might have emerged making music like Lloyd Cole’s. Underpinned by the brash voice of his Telecaster, Cole had a string of hits with The Commotions in the 80s and his thoughtful journey into songcraft has only deepened since then. We join him to talk about his new album, old guitars and lost weekends
When Lloyd Cole and his band, The Commotions, hit the British music scene in 1984 with their seminal album, Rattlesnakes, it was as if pop music’s IQ had suddenly jumped by several points. Cole looked like a young Elvis but wrote like Leonard Cohen and, despite a naive approach to recording, the band waxed some of the most memorable pop-guitar hooks of that decade on their debut album, blending the jangle of The Byrds with melancholic country lines that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Johnny Cash record.
Now three decades into a rich solo career, Cole is back with a new long-player, Guesswork, that touches on themes as diverse as drone strikes and the fault-lines of relationships. Despite its layers of synth, Cole says the album’s coolly meditative songs originated on Telecasters and acoustic guitars, familiar tools with which he has crafted a highly respected body of work. We joined him to talk about songwriting, how guitars have shaped his music and recall how classic Commotions tracks came together.
The new album feels quite a departure from some of your previous records, sonically. What were you aiming for? “I have to admit my working title for the project, for the first two years or so, was ‘Scott 3 meets The Idiot’. It didn’t really happen like that. I think because the idea was not specific enough, I wasn’t able to write anything. Maybe I just needed a break from writing. I only seem able to write songs, these days, if I have a very strong idea of what the record is going to be. I need to know what I’m writing for. The idea of just writing a song for the sake of writing a song does not remotely interest me.
“So, like I said, it started me thinking about The Idiot – the Bowie and Iggy record. Then I started listening to Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway recordings and realised a bunch of what I love about Scott Walker was coming from Broadway, as well as from experimental music. Maybe I could think about songwriting from a slightly different perspective if I listened to this type of music? It didn’t necessarily have to be ‘verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus’ type thing.
“So after literally years – like, five years – of mulling things over and not really getting anything done, I finally got to the point where I just thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to make another record I’m just going to have to dive in. Or I’m just going to have to retire and be an oldies artist and carry on doing these retrospective tours, which are perfectly enjoyable.’
“I think one of the reasons it took me so long is I kind of promised myself I would never make another record stuck up in a room on my own, because it’s so difficult and so tiring and so joyless. To find a way to get the sound, I basically had to be in the room on my own for several months. But I finally just did it. I had a break between touring. I recorded two ideas, one of which became The Over Under, the other of which became Moments And Whatnot. Then it seemed like it was possible, so I just worked really hard for a year and then started bringing other people in.
“My original idea was I was going to involve an awful lot of my synth-nerd friends from the Eurorack and modular synth world. In the end, I ended up doing exactly the opposite and having just a tiny group of people making the record. Basically, there are only four of us on the record. Fred Maher and I looked after the drums, Neil [Clark] and I looked after the guitars, Blair [Cowan] and I looked after the keyboards.” How did you divvy up guitar duties on the album? “Anything that sounds like it’s coming through an amp is probably Neil. Anything that sounds like it’s maybe sent through a direct signal, like the chimey guitars, that’s probably me.” Do you use software plug-ins for your guitar sounds? “I don’t use plug-ins for any direct recording. I think latency is bad and I think it’s a stupid idea. I’ve got, basically, two channels to record everything in analogue before it goes to digital. I’m very fortunate in that the compressor I have at the end of the chain has two outputs: a balanced output and an unbalanced output. The balanced output just goes into the [digital recording software]. The unbalanced output goes to my little Mackie mixer, which sits on the side. I just listen in parallel. I don’t have any latency
“To find a way to get the sound, I basically had to be in the room on my own for several months”
in my system at all, mainly for singing, because with singing you can hear the tiniest bit of latency.
“There are plenty of plug-ins used in post production, but not in actually recording my guitar… My guitar [outboard gear] is really boring to talk about, it’s literally an amp rack made about 20 years ago, called a PS100 or something like that. I’ve been using it since Music In A Foreign Language [2003].
“I’ve tried other things. I used the Kemper on Standards [2013] a little bit. But I love the sound of that old unit. It’s all-analogue, it’s got a very interesting distortion to it. It can sound very clean, but it’s got a very odd analogue distortion. It sounds more like the kind of thing you’d expect from an electric piano or a synth. That’s it for me; I just go through that. I’ve got an Empress [Effects] distortion before it and I play either a Telecaster or a Les Paul when I have a lead guitar part.” What role does the guitar play in your songwriting life today? “It actually plays a big role. The record doesn’t sound like it was written on guitar, but most of it was. Most of it was written on an acoustic – and I also spent quite a lot of the time making this record with the Telecaster tuned up to almost Nashville tuning. The bottom three strings – not the bottom four strings but the bottom three strings – were an octave up.
“That’s how I ended up finding quite a few of my parts on the record – accidentally, to be honest. I was playing the chords in open D or, actually, in some of the songs in open C. I ended up finding these shapes. So a lot of the songs were written on either acoustic or electric guitar. Then they were transferred over to the synthesisers.
“I think I got to a little point where I started panicking about the record and realising that when I go out on tour I’m not going to have a synthesiser band with me. I’m probably going to have a couple of guitars, maybe somebody else playing guitar. I did want to know that I could play the songs on the guitar. At least I’d have a starting point.” What guitars have played the most significant part in your musical life over the years? “Probably, for the earliest part of my career, the most important thing with guitars, for me, was if they looked good and who played them. I wanted a Telecaster because of Steve Cropper, I wanted a 330 or a 335 or some kind of semi-acoustic Gibson or Gretsch-looking thing probably because of The Byrds and that type of thing. The first semi-acoustic guitar I bought was a 330, which I bought on Denmark Street in 1984. They told me it was a ’62; I just found out it’s a ’63. I think I was probably excited about that because of Revolver. I know The Beatles used an Epiphone [Casino] on that, but it’s pretty much the same guitar.
“I didn’t really understand anything about how amps worked until about 1990. All the amps I bought in The Commotions, if they sounded good then it was just luck. The best guitar sounds I ever got in The Commotions was probably when I didn’t know what I was doing; I just plugged into this little amp that we had in the early days. Session was the name of the company. It was a little solid-state amp, my one had a single 12-inch speaker.
“I guess I didn’t figure out, for about five years after that, that any of the guitar amps I tried that I didn’t like, subsequently, might not have been because of the amp. It was because I don’t like the sound of twin 10-inch speakers. I like 12-inch speakers better and 15-inch speakers better. I didn’t know that until I moved to New York and started experimenting a little bit more with amps.
“The two most important guitars were probably the first Telecaster I bought, which Stephen [Irvine, drums] from The Commotions has got because we split everything up at the end of the band. I ended up with Lawrence [Donegan]’s bass somehow or other, I don’t know quite how. I gave it back to Lawrence last year. I said, ‘It’s just sitting around the house, you should have it.’ I kept the 330.
“To be honest, the development, for a long time, of my guitar interest was very dilettante. I got a Schecter guitar in 1987 or so because Lou Reed was using one on the New Sensations record and I liked that sound. I don’t know if I got that sound, but I liked that look of the white Stratocaster with a black scratchplate for a little while.
“I didn’t really settle on guitars I really liked until the mid-90s. I had a Paul Reed Smith; it was probably the best-sounding Les Paul-type guitar that I ever had. I used it on the recording of Love Story [1995]. But I hated the way it looked so much that I sold it, even though it was great. I finally bought a Les Paul and I got really, really, lucky. I still have the Les Paul I bought in ’95. It’s very heavy and very bright, much brighter than most Les Pauls. I think I kept the original pickups on because it just sounded great.
“Most of my guitar shopping was done with [Lou Reed guitarist] Robert Quine, my old friend in New York. He is sadly not
“The best guitar sounds I got in The Commotions was probably when I didn’t know what I was doing”
with us any more. He used to love to go guitar shopping. I’m pretty sure I bought the Les Paul with him. About a year later, I bought the 335 that I’ve now got. I think I bought it for the Love Story tour. It’s one with a trapeze tailpiece. It didn’t have great pickups, so I put [Seymour Duncan] Antiquity pickups on it. I didn’t use it on this record, because I didn’t want semiacoustic tones on this record. But it’s probably my best guitar, even though it’s not the most valuable one.
“I also have two 1966 Telecasters that I bought in New York. If I ever need to sell anything, they’re the ones that are probably worth the most money. I bought one in 1988 and one in 1997, maybe. It turns out the serial numbers are only a couple of hundred apart, so they were made the same month. One has a maple fingerboard, the other one has a rosewood one. The maple one, I grew to like more.” Some people think the maple neck imparts a bit more bite… “There is a little bit of a glassiness you can get, which I didn’t like in 1988, but I do quite like now. Especially when you couple it with pickups that aren’t overly bright in the first place.” Going back to The Commotions years, how did you work out the brilliant jangling main riff for Lost Weekend? It sounds like a two-guitar melody, interweaving… “There are a lot more than two guitars on that track. There’s the basic Passenger[style] rhythm part. That’ll be me, almost certainly, with the Telecaster. We did have these two guitars, when we were making Easy Pieces [1985]. Neil and I both got one. I think we might even have had three at one point. I think they might have been made by Gordon Smith…
“So the 12-string lead guitar melody that Neil played on that... that’s almost certainly played with a Gordon Smith. He was using a Mesa/Boogie amp on that record and I was probably still trying to record direct into the desk. Honestly, I knew so little about how guitar sounds worked in the early days. My Telecaster on Rattlesnakes, it’s all directly into an Amek desk. I didn’t use an amp at all on that record, even the 12-string lead lines that I played, that was just a Vox 12-string directly into that Amek desk.
“I suppose I was forgetting the Vox 12-string. I suppose that is pretty important. It enabled me to be able to play electric guitar – kind of like something in between an acoustic guitar and a banjo but still not have to have an acoustic guitar on stage. It enabled me to get a rhythm sound that is very difficult to get with a normal six-string or even Rickenbacker 12-string guitar, because that would just be too fat-sounding. The sound I got with the Vox 12-string was very hollow-sounding. It didn’t take up that much space in the band, but it enabled me to put quite a lot of energy in. I was a pretty frenetic player in those days. I think Stephen complained I was always ahead of the beat.
“Beyond that, the jangly sound that Neil plays on Lost Weekend is probably his 335. He had a walnut-finish one. I think he’s still got that guitar. So he usually got the ringing jangly sounds with the 335. His main guitars at the time were a Stratocaster and 335. We also got those Gordon Smith things, which lasted one tour. I did buy a really nice natural-finish Rickenbacker, though, after that album was finished for the tour.” It’s interesting that many Commotions tracks were achieved via a mix of classic gear and less conventional approaches, like running straight into the desk… “A lot that we perceive, with guitar tones, is by association. I don’t care that Jeff Beck is an amazing player, he’s never made a record I like. So anything that sounds like Jeff Beck I want nothing to do with. Certain types of sounds have got associations with certain types of records. I was trying to make something that sounded like The Velvet Underground meets Steve Cropper. I didn’t really get very close to either, but that’s what I was trying to do. At least I had a pretty good vision of what it was I was trying to do, and I was sufficiently green to not realise how far I was missing it by.” But that’s where all these wonderful happy accidents happen… “I think one of the reasons that record went so well is I was incredibly self-confident and incredibly naive at the same time. The band actually trusted me. As we became more democratic, as we evolved, things became more difficult because we knew more. When we were getting started, we were just like, ‘This is what we sound like.’”
“The sound I got with the Vox 12-string was very hollowsounding. It enabled me to put quite a lot of energy in”