Overviews of the 1980s music scene tend to zone in on synth-based pop acts, glossy production techniques, and outré haircuts. Yet that much-maligned decade also found fantastic guitar-based bands gaining traction on the charts. Indeed, in 1984 guitars were very much back in vogue, with era-defining discs including The Smiths’ self-titled debut, Aztec Camera’s Knife, and Lloyd Cole & The Commotions’ Rattlesnakes.
An especially notable debut, the latter title was full of dashing songs such as “Perfect Skin,” “Charlotte Street,” “Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?” and the glorious, soul-imbued “Forest Fire”: fully-formed, chiming pop classics stuffed with poetic and filmic imagery exuding a maturity which should have been way beyond the grasp of 22-year-old Lloyd Cole. However, the young British singer-songwriter – who studied English and Philosophy at the University of Glasgow – was blessed with unusually bookish erudition.
Listen to the Lloyd Cole and the Commotions album Rattlesnakes now.
“The landscape for the album was my imagination,” he revealed in an interview with The Guardian in 2019. “I’d been to Europe once, but my romantic imagery was from books or films. I stumbled on a way of creating an image with very few words.”
He added “Everyone knows what a ‘Grace Kelly car’ [from the song “Four Flights Up”] looks like and it’s probably in the South of France. I sang “Read Norman Mailer, get a new tailor” (from “Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?”) because he represented masculinity, the hard man. Similarly, Simone de Beauvoir (namechecked in the song “Rattlesnakes”) represented modern feminist thinking.”
Cole’s lyrical dexterity really took flight when aligned with the melodic instincts of his band, The Commotions, comprising guitarist Neil Clark, keyboardist Blair Cowan, bassist Lawrence Donegan, and drummer Stephen Irvine. First forming in Glasgow, the group had developed into a well-drilled unit by the time they signed a record deal. They made Rattlesnakes with producer Paul Hardiman (fresh from helming another 80s classic, The The’s Soul Mining) and the sessions at London studio, The Garden, proved both creative and rewarding.
“Every day, we’d arrive at the studio, lay down a few backing tracks, nip along to Brick Lane for a curry and some pints,” Lawrence Donegan told the U.K.’s The Observer. “Then, we’d head back and record some more. The album was finished in a month. Happy days indeed.”
Brimming with confidence and proffering an array of sparkling tunes, Rattlesnakes was first released in October 1984 and quickly turned heads on both sides of the Atlantic. On the back of its first single “Perfect Skin” going Top 30, the album rose to No. 13 and earned a gold certification in the U.K. while in the U.S. it wowed the critics. It sold itself with reviews such as Spin’s, which claimed that “Lloyd Cole And The Commotions are the most interesting new band since Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers and Rattlesnakes is a brilliant album” and established the loyal fan base Lloyd Cole still enjoys to this day.
“It was all very exciting,” Cole said, reflecting on this heady early period in 2019. “We’d been playing gigs to 500 people in Glasgow, but empty rooms in England. Then ‘Perfect Skin’ came out, [BBC] Radio 1 played us, we did Top Of The Pops, and we never played an empty room again.”
Listen to the Lloyd Cole and the Commotions album Rattlesnakes now.
