Lloyd Cole

With his sulky Elvis face, quiff included, and the charm of a misunderstood man of letters, Lloyd Cole tiptoed through the 80s, scattering ideas and insights along the way. Like many masters of the melodic song, though, he ended up paying the price for his own superior class: too clean and easy listening for the indie purists hunting for dissonance, too refined for the mainstream audience, to whom he even dedicated the title of an album, crowning a controversial relationship marked by constant flirtation and friction. On one point, however, (almost) everyone agrees: "Rattlesnakes" is his masterpiece, as well as one of those records that managed to capture, for one fleeting moment, the spirit of an entire era. As the wave season faded to dusk and England set off down the paths of new pop and a new generation of artists, Cole magically froze that transition in a handful of choruses and enchanted arpeggios, blending acoustic folk, roaring Sixties guitars (Byrds, Velvet Underground) and decadent ballads (David Bowie, Marc Bolan).

Born in Buxton, England, young Lloyd studied Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, where he met the friends of a lifetime (an artistic lifetime, at least): Neil Clark (guitar), Lawrence Donegan (bass), Blair Cowan (keyboards) and Stephen Irvine (drums). They were the Commotions, destined to form with Cole one of those legendary names, like Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers or Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. It's hard to imagine one without the others, even though - just as in those two cases - the lure of a solo escape would eventually prove irresistible.

Two years passed between the band's formation and their debut LP. But when "Rattlesnakes" came out in 1984, it was immediately clear that the group had a clear vision, firmly steered by their bandleader. Cole's talent materializes in the sophisticated melodies, in the literary references scattered through the lyrics (from Simone de Beauvoir to Norman Mailer), but also in his dandyish manner, somewhere between Bryan Ferry and Morrissey, albeit with a touch of wholesome provincial rusticity. Not particularly gifted technically, Cole nonetheless proves to be a creative interpreter, with an anguished crooning style and a Reed-like nonchalance. His stories recount episodes of lived experience, romantic and more broadly human encounters, transposing them onto the plane of memory and rendering them with impressionistic brushstrokes to capture their most curious and picturesque aspects. All of this is in keeping with the traditional Anglo-Saxon literary stream of consciousness of Joyce or Woolf, but also with the witty "pop" imagination of the Beatles. The melancholy that surfaces in the lyrics doesn't hold back the amused, almost satirical irony of an author who seems to experience everything, love included, with the delighted curiosity of an explorer.

Opening the tracklist is the immortal arpeggio of the single "Perfect Skin" (No. 26 on the UK chart), a disguised sample of residual wave, awash in desolate, melancholy atmospheres. Despite its folk-rock foundation à la Byrds, the whole thing is pervaded by a glossy, decadent iciness that recalls the translucent surface of Bowie's "Be My Wife". Clark's jangle guitars execute fluid, fast chords, woven together with great agility, with a clean, chiming sound. Cole delivers a playful vocal performance, with that "Academia Blu-u-ues" closing the first verse sounding remarkably like David Sylvian. The lyrics too reveal a whiff of decadent aestheticism ("She's got cheekbones like geometry", "She's got perfect skin... At the age of ten she looked like Greta Garbo": perfect, diaphanous skin, indeed, just like that of the porcelain Bowie of "Be My Wife"), but also the autobiography of a promising academic overwhelmed by the disjointed experiences of young life ("I choose my friends only far too well, and I'm up on the pavement and they're all down in the cellar, with their government grants and my I.Q., they brought me down to size, academia blu-u-ues"). It's the academia of a student with lost prospects, who inevitably gives way to life and takes on the color of the blues.

The second single is every bit as good: the gorgeous "Forest Fire", whose soft soft-rock tones, gently heated up by Clark's fine closing electric guitar solo, frame one of the sublime melodies crafted by Cole's pen, whose touch proves both delicate and intense at once. A gem that still shines even in the stripped-down, acoustic guise in which Cole has presented it in his recent live shows.

The record's success is also owed to two other knockout blows, placed respectively third in the tracklist and at the close of side two. The first is the driving title track, one of the band's absolute masterpieces, co-written by Cole and Clark. It's hard to understand how it only reached No. 65 on the UK chart, unless one blames inadequate promotion. "Rattlesnakes" is one of rock history's great lost classics, a composition that should have become an emblem of quintessentially "British" songwriting, like Bowie's "Starman", with which it shares an orchestral arrangement. There isn't a single superfluous note; the melody is tight, the fruit of a sudden, happy, illuminating flash of inspiration. It's all wrapped in lush orchestration, blossoming in the brisk minuet of the instrumental break (a possible miniature preview of Sigur Ros's "Star√°lfur"?). The lyrics, inspired by Joan Didion's novel "Play It as It Lays", immortalize yet another female character turned universal archetype, alluding to the heroine of the film "On The Waterfront" ("She looks like Eve Marie Saint in On The Waterfront").

The other track mentioned above is "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?", a perfect title for a romantic slogan that will forever accompany Cole's career arc. The female backing vocals echo a Ferry-esque romanticism, and Cole's own delivery brushes up against the aching sighs of the former Roxy Music frontman. The acoustic guitars - the true protagonists of the whole album - are sublimated in a thrillingly accelerated chord progression. The song is soft, sweet, ethereal, yet the guitars race along at a frantic pace: the effect is disorienting and irresistible, until the track fades out on its final orchestral notes, drifting away with a class that recalls the Beatles' "Good Night" ("White Album").

Cole proves himself a master at hopping from one genre to another, all while maintaining a rigorous underlying coherence. Each song thus becomes a small study in musical metamorphosis. Take "Down On Mission Street", which opens with deep, grave tones and long low notes before opening up into the playful childishness of the chorus, while the insistent pizzicato and background strings allusively evoke Eastern atmospheres. Or "Speedboat", which starts out as a lean, jagged blues before unexpectedly melting into a sweet, dreamlike chorus that could have been lifted straight from the best work of the Smiths, another band that buried punk beneath a wash of sixties strumming. Jangle-pop remains the canvas, but the colors can take on French inflections (the crepuscular accordion waltz of "Charlotte Street", another melodic triumph and another memorable female figure), breezy folk'n'roll strides ("Four Flights Up", with its energetic rush of guitars set against delicate, background synthesizers), easy listening orchestrations (the pop vignette of "Patience", adorable even in its kitschy opening backing vocals and its glossy, era-appropriate orchestration), and bucolic, Beatles-esque atmospheres, as on "2cv", a sort of Cole-style "Blackbird", with an interplay of guitar chords that gives the impression of occasionally running "backwards", and lyrics that reckon with the disenchantment of a romantic expectation left unfulfilled, in the heart of a sweltering London summer.

In 1985, Polydor released a reissue of the album with some bonus tracks, among which we should mention the tender ballad "Sweetness", which has little to envy in "Charlotte Street" from the official tracklist, and "The Sea and the Sand", which showcases yet another of those delightful choruses that Cole was churning out with such nonchalance at the time.

The impact of "Rattlesnakes" cannot be measured by its modest showing on the British charts (it peaked at No. 13). Perhaps the times weren't ripe yet (the second album, just a year later, would enter the UK chart straight at No. 5). Nor was criticism particularly mature at the time, given that one of the era's gurus, Julie Burchill, dismissed it with a scornful "we don't need a country & western version of the Velvet Underground". Time, however, has been kind: NME would include it in its list of the 100 greatest albums of all time, and many would come to acknowledge that it was ahead of its time, distilling the entire jangle-pop scene of Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera, Deacon Blue and company. Tributes from other artists would follow too, including the Manic Street Preachers, who would count it among their ten all-time favorite records, and Tori Amos, who would record a cover of "Rattlesnakes".

The broken-hearted ballads of "Rattlesnakes" form the soundtrack to an eternal adolescence, one that only by generational coincidence intersected with the children of the Eighties, but which speaks to anyone who has ever, at least once, shut the door on the world and daydreamed in the dark of their own room. Bedroom indie-pop, perhaps, was born here too.

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26/10/2014