Aching Just To Fall

 The first Lloyd Cole and the Commotions album I ever heard was Easy Pieces, their unloved middle-child. It's not as good as Rattlesnakes. That's a classic album, potentially one of the strongest debut albums ever. You don't get too many Perfect Skins in a career. Easy Pieces is not the best Lloyd Cole and the Commotions album, but it is my favourite. The band hate it. Isn't it always so disappointing when bands hate the things they've done that you love. I remember Kurt Ralske from Ultra Vivid Scene saying he regretted making the albums he made and that I loved, saying he wished he'd spent that part of his life making the tedious conceptual art he does now. No, Kurt, I prefer your Bataille meets Suicide pop records, frankly. I can't dance to conceptual art. 

Not with my hips. 

Commotions bass player, Lawrence Donegan, has called Easy Pieces "terrible". Lloyd Cole called the song Grace "terrible" and said of Minor Character it was "literally the worst lyric ever written". I don't think they had much fun making the record: the producer of Rattlesnakes, Paul Hardiman, was brought in to produce, but replaced by heavy-hitters Langer and Winstanley, who tried to get the vibrato off Lloyd's voice and made him very self-conscious in the vocal booth. They were a bit more strident and hands on than the cool and easy going Hardiman, and got the band's collective back up. The production is glossier than the debut, with more strings, synths and, charmingly, accordion than the debut. There is a surprising amount of squeeze-boxing all over this record. The reviews were pretty poor too. The band could reasonably have expected buckets of plaudits after Rattlesnakes rhapsodic reception. 

God. Alliteration. Lawrence Donegan would hate that.   

Well, I LOVE Easy Pieces. I'd have been 15 when I first heard it and it sounded like everything I wanted. A singer with a weird little voice. Chiming indie guitars. Unbelievably pretentious lyrics. Singalong choruses. But let's take a step back to unbelievably pretentious lyrics. You probably think that's a bad thing. I didn't. You forget how threadbare it was when you were a teenager in the 80's. There was no information. I had no older brothers. I was scrabbling around in the dirt. A passing mention of Egon Schiele by Jim Reid in Smash Hits dictated my painting style for two years. Robert Smith enthusing over Patrick White novels saw me fishing a copy of Voss out of a skip. Lloyd Cole boasted of being an early adaptor of boxer shorts over briefs in the same magazine, and I immediately changed my underpant game. I was a sponge, and an album like Easy Pieces was an Encyclopedia. 

How could I resist the headiness of a line like, "Wrapped up in needlecord and coincidence"? What could it possibly mean? Or "I've been Billy Name and filled my pockets with sand"? It was years before I found out that Billy Name was a real person with an unlikely name. The entire opening verse to Brand New Friend sounded intoxicatingly sophisticated to a pubescent boy in specs: "Walking in the pouring rain, walking with Jesus and Jane, Jane was in her turtleneck, I was much happier then". How impossibly romantic. In the future I would date only absolutely sopping wet women in turtlenecks. Even, "Double pneumonia in a single room" sounded magnificently cool: addiction, illness and foreign travel. It was all there. How was I to know the song was an amazingly cheeky knock off Iggy's The Passenger, positing Lloyd as a skin-crawling Ray Milland in shadowy black and white? But I know it now, and Easy Pieces started me on that journey. Handsome, Captain Scarlet-looking Lloyd, with his high waisted chinos and good boy good manners, was an unlikely Virgil guiding me through the nine circles of sleaze, rock and roll, fashion, cinema, cool, drinking, budget travel, American 20th Century literature and the mystery of women. And he wasn't that much help, to be honest. But at least it was a start. A prompt. Morrissey just told you to stay in your room. 

Oh, and Perfect Blue is a perfect song. Even the band can't hate that one.