Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

Glasgow

Lloyd Cole was born in Buxton, Derbyshire, in 1961 and grew up in Chapel-en-le-Frith. After a year of law at University College London he moved to the University of Glasgow to read philosophy and English, and there he met the musicians who became the Commotions. He and keyboard player Blair Cowan had a band called the Casuals, with Neil Clark on guitar, and within a few months Cole decided to give it a new name. The Commotions formed in 1982. Bassist Lawrence Donegan and drummer Stephen Irvine, both formerly of the Bluebells, joined later to complete the five-piece.

In 1983 the band recorded a self-made single, Down at the Mission, at Park Lane Studios on Glasgow's south side, with an early Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken? on the other side. Cole then wrote Perfect Skin and Forest Fire over one weekend, demoed them in his room at the Glasgow Golf Club, and within a month the band had signed to Polydor.

Rattlesnakes

Early in 1984 Polydor sent them to The Garden in Shoreditch with producer Paul Hardiman to cut Perfect Skin and Forest Fire. Perfect Skin came out that spring as their first single and reached 26 in the UK, and Cole said that afterwards they never played to an empty room again. That summer, lodged in a flat the label rented for them in Maida Vale, they recorded the rest of the album in about a month.

Rattlesnakes was released on 12 October 1984, reached 13 in the UK and went gold. Cole's lyrics leaned on books: the title came from Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays, and the songs name Renata Adler, Simone de Beauvoir and Norman Mailer. Sounds called it wonderful and NME placed it 21st among the albums of the year, while David Fricke in Rolling Stone found it derivative of Reed, Verlaine and Dylan. Spin ranked them the most interesting new band since Jonathan Richman's Modern Lovers. Cole later judged the record flawless for what it is.

Easy Pieces and Mainstream

For the second album Polydor took a firmer hand, dropping Hardiman after early sessions and bringing in Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley at Westside Studios in London. Cole said they never gave themselves time to step back and think, and that aiming for a Christmas release was the biggest mistake. Easy Pieces came out in November 1985 and reached 5 in the UK, their highest placing, and Lost Weekend went to 17, still Cole's highest-charting single. Reviews were cooler, and Donegan later dismissed most of the album.

Mainstream took far longer. The sessions passed from Chris Thomas to Stewart Copeland, who produced one track, and then to Ian Stanley; the album took five months and cost 300,000 pounds, about ten times as much as Rattlesnakes. Released on 26 October 1987, with Tracey Thorn and Jon Hassell among the guests, it reached 9 in the UK. Trouser Press thought it better than the debut. The band had already decided to split, but toured the record for a year.

After the band

The Commotions ended in 1989 with the compilation 1984-1989, which reached 14. Cole said he no longer wanted to be in a band, moved to New York and released his solo debut in 1990. Clark has played on most of his solo records and tours, and Cowan returned on several later albums. Donegan became a journalist, golf correspondent for the Guardian and an author, and Irvine worked as a session drummer.

The band reunited for about a month in October 2004 for the twentieth anniversary of Rattlesnakes and its deluxe reissue, playing the Barrowland in Glasgow, Dublin, Manchester and the Hammersmith Apollo in London, where the show was released as a live album. They played again at a Homecoming concert in Glasgow in 2009. The box set Collected Recordings 1983-1989 followed in 2015, with a history by Pete Paphides, and all three albums were reissued on vinyl in 2023. In January 2025 Cole, Cowan and Clark played Commotions songs together at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

NME placed Rattlesnakes among its hundred greatest albums, the Manic Street Preachers named it a favorite, Tori Amos covered its title track, and Camera Obscura answered Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken? with a song of their own. Mojo, reviewing the reissues, called them "a band undone by commerce".