(Credits: Far Out / Lloyd Cole / Peter Anderson / Jill Furmanovsky)
Thu 25 September 2025 8:00, UK
Between his mid-1980s work with his jangle-pop band the Commotions and his subsequent solo material, Lloyd Cole has notched nine top 50 UK singles and five top 20 albums. Thanks in part to a head-scratching failure to break the American market, though, he’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as some of his contemporary indie wordsmiths: Morrissey, Robert Smith, Billy Bragg, etc.
If international fame wasn’t in the cards for Cole, regional stardom certainly was, especially in his adopted home of Glasgow, Scotland. Following the release of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ 1984 debut album Rattlesnakes and the 1985 follow-up Easy Pieces, the frontman found himself simultaneously hailed by critics as a important new songwriting voice and gushed over by a specific portion of his audience as a new kind of college rock sex symbol: bookish, aloof, floppy-haired, and good looking in a clean-cut 1950s art school sort of way; without the usual hairspray and eyeliner of the MTV era.
In 1986, the Evening Times in Glasgow, where the Derbyshire-born Cole had settled during his University days, ran a story about screaming girls becoming a problem at the Commotions’ concerts. The band’s loyal fans, according to the paper, were unironically praising Lloyd Cole as “Glasgow’s Elvis Presley”.
Cole, who was 25 by this point, said he “really can’t be bothered” with that type of teen idol attention, and described how one female fan “attacked” him on the street, “wanting a birthday kiss”.
Okay, so maybe this wasn’t quite on the rabidity level of Elvis, but the fandom was dedicated enough that the Commotions’ publicist had to warn the Evening Times not to print the name of the golf course that Cole’s parents owned in Scotland, as the last mention of it in a story had led to dozens of girls showing up at the club looking for him.
Cole’s early lyrics, often rife with the sort of pop cultural character references you might rightly expect from a Philosophy-English double-major, Simone de Beauvoir, Truman Capote, Arthur Lee, Eva Marie Saint, etc, rarely went the route of Elvis-style proclamations of love. Instead, he wooed a particular kind of girl in the classic art-school-boy tradition by pushing them away.
“Why must you tell me all your secrets when it’s hard enough to love you knowing nothing?” he croon-shuns on Rattlesnakes’ ‘Four Flights Up’. Another track from the same album is literally titled ‘Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken’, and the answer among Cole devotees was certainly “yes”. 20 years later, the Glasgow band Camera Obscura even penned a direct response to the song by their childhood hero, called ‘Hey, Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken’.
Cole himself is now a 64-year-old man, long removed from the screaming girl segment of his career. He never bought into the hype in the first place, though, having adopted the Scots’ firm refusal to take oneself too seriously. It’s a sense of perspective he discussed in a 2019 interview with Record Collector, bemoaning the loss of self-deprecating sensibilities in the 21st century, especially in his new adopted homeland of America.
“Not only do many young people not get the notion of self-deprecation,” Cole said, “they really hate it! Yet for me, this idea of self-love is really damaging. It’s unhealthy. I think it’s one of the worst things that’s happened to the world. The writers of the song ‘The Greatest Love Of All’ have a great deal to answer for, because maybe that was the first piece of art which expressed this idea that you can’t love other people or things unless you love yourself. I don’t even want to think about loving myself!”
Concluding, “One of the joys of making music, for me, is that your reading of my songs is necessarily correct – whether it’s got anything to do with what I might have been thinking about when I wrote it or not. It’s correct because the music is for you, not me.”
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