1984 Music: Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Rattlesnakes

Release date: 12 October 

Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Yes. In my collection of home-taped C90 cassettes, number one had Kilimanjaro by the Teardrop Explodes on one side, and Rattlesnakes on the other. (I owned both albums on vinyl: I just didn’t have a record player.) 

This was the most commercially successful among the albums I’ve looked at so far, and given that its success was arguably based on taking the Postcard Records aesthetic and smoothing off its rough edges, I expected the music press to take a dim view of its hit-friendly gloss. But for the most part this doesn’t seem to have been the case. In the NME, the review by Cath Carroll (last encountered slagging off The Pale Fountains) fortuitously sits next to the review of Spring Hill Fair by The Go-Betweens in the 6 October issue: 

There have been many albums lovingly created under the working title of ‘I’ll Be Lou’s Mirror’, from the Dream Syndicate to the Blue Orchids – and that’s only in the last couple of years. Lloyd Cole’s marvellous all-purpose reptilian drawl can rescue a struggling melody, can turn re-translations of ‘O’ level French essays into testaments of suffering and the cool … Is there anyone who doesn’t like Cole and his cronies, who have made the Velvets do a part C&W album and part deep-south blues-funk – gentle, self-mocking, inoffensive and superbly balanced. Every song is instantly memorable. … The record plays like a film, heavy on limpid atmospherics and post-coital maudlinity shot through with illogical bouts of teenage exhilaration. 

Admittedly Steve Sutherland in Melody Maker was rather more critical, and along the exact lines I was expecting, but my impression is that he was the outlier, not Carroll: 

Like Orange Juice’s “Texas Fever” and ABC’s “Lexicon of Love”, “Rattlesnakes” is an album of cynicism masquerading as romance. It’s about past pop’s legacy to the present rather than love or hate or any of the emotions it feigns. It’s about how modes of expression haven’t moved on one iota from early Bob Dylan, how a generation bereft of its own voice falls back on playing with the language of its peers. It pretends to comment on this situation, boasts its own cleverness, preens its wit and says nothing. 

This sounds more like a review of Scritti Politti than Lloyd Cole, but it’s more targeted here: 

Of course, he’s really a cardboard Edwyn Collins and it’s as if he burst from nowhere to steal Edwyn’s thunder. He’s like a swot graduate from some pop school … Edwyn, an acutely sensitive and self-conscious youth, makes self-deluding records to pretend he’s wasted and reckless. … Cole, on the other hand, keeps a cool business head and seldom strays far from a settled, scholarly perspective. 

But even Sutherland concludes: 

I’ve been too hard here on purpose because this record’s good enough to stand it. Compared to most else around, it’s a gem ...

It’s hard to deny how polished Rattlesnakes sounds, especially for a debut – by that I mean that every song is laden with lyrical and musical hooks: there’s not a dud among them. Whereas Ian Pye damns with faint praise by describing Pacific Street as ‘very much an album’, by contrast this sounds like a greatest hits compilation (and in fact nothing Cole has done subsequently has had anything like its impact: I can only imagine how frustrating that must be). Moreover, everything is in service of the song: the only instrumental solo on the entire album is the guitar one in ‘Forest Fire’. 

 

And whereas you have to work hard to figure out the relevance of whatever obscure allusion Paddy McAloon is making on Swoon, here the references are all wrapped up in pointed one-liners (or couplets). While this can certainly be shallow – quotations instead of emotions, or an appeal to the snobbery of those who ‘get’ the references – it’s also a lot of fun if you don’t take it too seriously (‘She’s sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan’). And there’s more specificity and deft characterisation in this quatrain than in the entirety of Pacific Street: 

Jody wears a hat 

Although it hasn’t rained for six days 

She says a girl need a gun these days 

On account of all the rattlesnakes

  

Many of these songs were written in a basement room at Glasgow Golf Club, where Cole’s father worked, and while Cole was as an undergraduate at Glasgow University. But the songs seemingly owe very little to that Glasgow connection. As I noted when discussing Julian Cope, this free-floating quality is shared by most of the albums I discuss. The Pale Fountains came from Liverpool and Prefab Sprout from Newcastle, as was very obvious when they spoke in interviews – but you wouldn’t know it from any of the songs on their first albums. The NME review of Rattlesnakes notes that ‘The contradiction of an English laddie groaning away in high Trans-Atlantic has become our firmest, unquestioned alternative tradition’. And most of Cole’s songs on this album also seem to be set in a fairly generic version of America (one with freeways and forest fires and the New York Times crossword). Only ‘2CV’ is explicitly set in London – and maybe ‘Charlotte Street’ since the road of that name in Fitzrovia is well-known, though that is also the song with the New York Times crossword, and a ‘union card’ (not necessarily American, but probably intended as such on an album that references On the Waterfront).* 

This kind of thing is often aspirational. It not only represents a desire to speak to American audiences and therefore be successful internationally, but more symbolically, it’s a rejection of provincialism: America is the great beyond, the place you escape to – the same place represented by the Western frontier, or by LA and Hollywood, in the American imagination. And in fact Cole later married and settled in America. 

The best thing I can say about this album is that it hasn’t dated at all: perhaps the fact that the allusions are all to 60s music, books and films helps in that respect. 

*There is also a Charlotte Street in Glasgow, though nothing in the song suggests it’s set there.